Supremely eclectic, Ficino’s humanism annihilated all divisions — this in stark contrast to the Christianity of the previous centuries, which had followed a single tradition, concentrated on an established canon of authors, yet managed to divide the world very sharply, perhaps depressingly, into good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, heaven and hell. This was why, for the humanists, the recent past had to be not so much argued with as surpassed, forgotten. It would not permit the thrill of the exotic, or a more personal selection of what to read and think. From now on instead, any argument would take place within a new zona franca where ancient met modern, East met West, and the excited mind was free to try out what it liked. Humanism, in short, unlocked the door to that supermarket of ideas we live in today.
There were aspects of Ficino’s thought that were extremely attractive to Lorenzo. One of his conflations was the fairly common one of the authoritative father figure with the prince or political leader. Following the birth of his daughter Maddalena in 1473, Lorenzo was now a father three times over. Father is a more positive word than tyrant. Never one to leave anything out of an equation, Ficino brought in God and artists too, as analogous to fathers and princes: “The son is the work of the father, and there is nothing that man loves more than his own work. And this is why God loves human nature and authors their books, and painters the people they have painted.” By the same mental process, Lorenzo would eventually be able to think of Florence as becoming — through his government, his marriage-arranging, his manipulation of available patronage to painters, poets, sculptors, and architects — his own personal work of art. He loved it because he was making it what it was. At which point, whether money flowed out of Lorenzo’s purse toward the town or, more likely, with the bank’s now-rapid decline, out of state coffers and into the Palazzo Medici, was unimportant. Father and son keep their money in common.
Nor was Ficino’s eclecticism alien to elitism. The world had always been as he described it — the soul of man yearning for the divine light — yet it was not given to everybody to understand that. Most people would remain in ignorance. And this was how it should be. Ficino translated into Latin, after all, not into the vernacular. Only the best educated could read Latin. “Religious mysteries,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, another disciple of Ficino’s, “would not be mysteries if they did not remain occult.” A fair point. The deeper truths could thus only be written about “under enigmatic veilings and poetic dissimulations.” This explained the complex, often ambiguous nature of myth, and indeed many of the somewhat puzzling paintings of nymphs and satyrs that were beginning to flow from Sandro Botticelli’s workshop. Only those already in the know, those who could afford to commission a painting, were to understand.
Certainly, after drawing close to Ficino, Lorenzo’s sonnets to Lucrezia had changed. They became densely enigmatic. Old and obvious sensual urges (once they had been called sins) must now be conflated with mysticism’s ancient ecstasies and the yearning for truth and beauty. This wasn’t always easy. And as Lorenzo’s rule over Florence progressed, the habit of political secrecy intensified too; “the secret things” grew more secret. The regime’s leaders, it seems, had begun to think of themselves as initiates in a cult, of philosopher kings perhaps. A cult of power.
The longer Lorenzo ruled Florence, the less documentation we have of the deliberations of the various government committees. Only a few fragments of the bank’s accounts remain from this period. What we do have instead, in refreshing contrast to the by-now-arcane love sonnets, are all the bawdy songs Lorenzo composed for the town’s popular Carnival celebrations. Here the only conflation, as interminable as it is scabrous, was that of the double entendre. “Oh pretty women,” ends his “Song of the Bakers,” “such is our art: if you’d like something to pop in your mouths, try this for a start.” The working men of the town must have loved it. Quite probably the women, too. One of the tenets of Ficino’s Platonism was that you draw other souls to your position through song, as Orpheus drew Eurydice from the darkness with his lyre. You don’t try to convince with reasoned argument. Here is Lorenzo’s “Song of the Peasants”:
Cucumbers we’ve got, and big ones,
Though to look at bumpy and odd
You might almost think they had spots on
But they open passages blocked
Use both hands to pluck ’em
Peel the skin from off the top
Mouths wide open and suck ’em
Soon you won’t want to stop.
Ascending the Platonic categories of the spirit in his esoteric love sonnets, Lorenzo seduced his less-educated Florentine subjects with rhyming obscenities. Everyone agreed he was a genius. Who, one wonders, was using Cosimo’s prayer cell in San Marco?
LORENZO HAS LEFT his infantile “games”—meaning his profane poems — to concentrate on “the Supreme Good.” Thus Ficino, rather optimistically, in a letter to a friend in 1474. Lorenzo had now started a long and solemn work called The Supreme Good, which paraphrased Ficino’s views. At the same time, the argument with the pope over the appointment of Francesco Salviati had begun. Ficino was a good friend of Salviati’s. This was embarrassing. And though the would-be archbishop was no Platonist, the Church as a whole was not hostile to the new humanist eclecticism. At one party thrown by Cardinal Pietro Riario — another friend of Salviati’s and another of the nephews whom Pope Sixtus had elevated to high office — a poem was read out about how the gods of Olympus had refused to answer Jupiter’s summons because they were busy serving the cardinal and his guests with, among other things, cakes designed to represent scenes from classical mythology. It’s curious how this vertiginous mixing of traditions and upsetting of hierarchies (a god serving a cardinal!) always seemed to go hand in hand with the feeling that all the traditional codes of behavior could be broken. No pope had ever appointed so many members of his family to positions of power, whether spiritual or secular, as did Sixtus. Later, knowing full well that the plan was to kill Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, the Holy Father would nevertheless give his blessing to the Pazzi conspiracy to oust the Medici, “so long as death doesn’t come into it.”
But the codes you broke depended on who you were and which of the classics you were reading. While Lorenzo and Ficino and friends were spending pleasant afternoons in Medici country villas playing Socrates and Alcibiades, while Giovanni Tornabuoni and Tommaso Portinari were having their images superimposed on various biblical scenes, a young man called Girolamo Logiati was reading Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 B.C. In December 1476, imitating antique role models, Logiati and two fellow conspirators assassinated Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, at high mass on St. Stephen’s Day. Perhaps one becomes aware that one has entered the modern world when even the most courageous of actions seem wrapped in a sticky film of parody, of inappropriate repetition. Sforza was a loathsome man, he had raped and tortured. But this was not republican Rome. The common people had not been reading Sallust. They did not rise up to celebrate their freedom. Instead they went after the conspirators. All three were executed.
When the grand virtues risk appearing as charade, or as borrowed from a different drama, the one sure value that remains is money. You can count it. You can weigh it. You can check it with your teeth. In Rome, Francesco Pazzi, head of the family’s bank there, took note of how easy it was to see off a political leader. Republican values might have more pull in a town like Florence, which already enjoyed the collective illusion that it was the modern manifestation of antique glory. So small in stature that he was generally known as Franceschino, this particular Pazzi was renowned for his bad temper and good luck. The Medici had already alienated their main client, the pope. They had alienated the king of Naples. They had alienated all those republican Florentines who believed in the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune. Most of all, Lorenzo de’ Medici would never let the Pazzi family back into public life in Florence. If Lorenzo and his brother were killed, the Pazzi bank — which, like so many others, was going through hard times — would be in a position to take over a large part of the Medici’s business. Money would bring power.