Michelozzo was also a Florentine by birth, the son of a tailor whose family originally came from Burgundy. Formerly a pupil of Donatello, Michelozzo had already made a name for himself as a sculptor of exceptional promise, notably as the executor of the tomb for John XXIII in the Baptistery. His designs were less grand than those of Brunelleschi, much more in tune with Cosimo’s taste for spacious simplicity and restraint of colour. Envy, Cosimo used often to say, was a weed that should not be watered; and he was anxious to ensure that the Palazzo Medici should give no offence to any of his critics. Since it was to contain offices and counting-houses for the family’s business interests as well as private apartments it could not, of course, be too small. Cosimo’s enemies, naturally, vastly exaggerating his intentions, condemned the palazzo as a monument to his greed. ‘He has begun a palace which throws even the Colosseum at Rome into the shade,’ wrote one of them. ‘Who would not build magnificently if he could do so with other people’s money?’ Yet when compared with other palaces which were to be built within the next two decades, such as the Palazzo Rucellai and the formidable Palazzo Pitti, the Medici Palace was far from grandiose. In the middle of the fifteenth century it was considered to be worth about 5,000 florins. Certainly, as time passed and it was altered and enlarged by both Cosimo’s descendants and the Riccardi family into whose hands it eventually passed, the palace took on a more imposing appearance; but in the beginning it was remarkable less for its grandeur than for its originality. The days had passed when town houses had also to be fortresses with towers at the corners and machicolated battlements overhanging the street; but not until Michelozzo set to work on the Palazzo Medici had a house appeared in Florence which combined the delicacy of early Italian Gothic with the calm, considered stateliness of the classic taste.17
The walls of the ground floor were faced with those massive rough-hewn stones which give the effect known as rustica and which Michelozzo used so as ‘to unite an appearance of solidity and strength, with the light and shadow so essential to beauty under the glare of an Italian sun’. Originally, there were no windows at ground level on the Via Larga front, the fortress-like appearance being broken only by a huge arched gateway. But above the gateway, where the family were to live, the sombre effect was softened by rows of arched windows, flanked by columns Doric on the first floor, Corinthian on the second, the whole being overhung by a cornice eight feet high, the top of which towered, like the cornices of classical Rome, in a powerful line over the Via Larga. Facing the Via de’ Gori there was an open loggia, the arches of which were later filled in by those curved, barred windows known as ‘kneeling windows’ which were designed by Michelangelo. On the corner of the loggia was one of those beautiful iron lamps made by Niccolò Grosso, who was known as ‘il Caparra’,18 and above it the Medici arms carved in stone, with Cosimo’s personal device of three peacocks’ feathers, signifying the three virtues he most admired – temperance, prudence and fortitude – sprouting from the shield.
Before the Palazzo Medici was finished, Michelozzo began work on another house for Cosimo, a new villa in the Mugello. Cosimo never tired of country life. Whenever possible he left Florence to spend as long as he could at I1 Trebbio or at his beloved villa of Careggi where he was able to read in peace, go out and perform those country tasks from which he derived such solace, pruning his vines and tending his olives, planting mulberry and almond trees, and talking to the country people from whom he acquired those peasant proverbs and fables with which, on his return to the city, he enlivened his own conversation. Here at Careggi he could talk to his friends without the irritation of constant interruption; he could summon his young protégé, the little, clever, ugly Marsilio Ficino, to come over from the villa of Montevecchio to keep him company, to have a meal with him, or perhaps to play chess, the only game Cosimo ever did play. He wrote to Ficino in one characteristic letter in 1462,
Yesterday I arrived at Careggi not so much for the purpose of improving my fields as myself. Let me see you, Marsilio, as soon as possible. Bring with you the book of our favourite Plato, which I presume you have now translated into Latin according to your promise; for there is no employment to which I so ardently devote myself as to discover the true road to happiness. Do come then, and do not forget to bring with you the Orphean lyre.
Cosimo had no intention of leaving Careggi; but he wanted another villa, more remote, one which would serve as a place of retreat in times of trouble or plague and which would help to bind the country people of the Mugello more closely to his family. He chose a site at Cafaggiolo where the Medici had owned land for generations; and here, to Michelozzo’s designs, a new villa began to take shape in 1451.19
A few years later Michelozzo began work on yet another Medici villa. This was at Fiesole where Cosimo’s son, Giovanni, chose to reconstruct the castle-like villa known as Belcanto.20 The land around it was steep and stony, useless for farming, as Cosimo disapprovingly observed, cross with his son for spending so much money merely to enjoy a view. But, as Giovanni protested, that was the whole point of Fiesole. His villa there would be built for pleasure alone: on summer evenings he and his family and friends would be able to sit upon the shaded terrace looking down upon the roofs of Florence.
But this was not Cosimo’s idea of a pleasant outlook. As he told Giovanni, he far preferred looking out from the windows at Cafaggiolo where all the surrounding land belonged to him. Besides, he was growing old, too old to think about new houses. When work on the Villa Medici at Fiesole was finished in 1463 he was seventy-four. For thirty difficult years he had been controlling the foreign policy of the Republic and the strain had weighed heavily upon him.
VI
WAR AND PEACE
‘Rencine? Rencine? Where is Rencine?’
COSIMO’S SUPREME importance as arbiter of Florence’s foreign policy had never been in doubt. Official correspondence was conducted through the Signoria; but no important decision was ever reached without reference to the Medici Palace. Foreign ambassadors were frequently to be seen passing through the gateway; Florentine ambassadors invariably called upon Cosimo before taking up their appointments.
For years his main preoccupation had been Milan. Patiently, doggedly, he had done all he could to persuade the Florentines that their standard policy of hostility to the Duchy was misguided and inexpedient, that they would be far better off with the Milanese as their friends even at the cost of antagonizing their traditional allies, the Venetians. At the beginning of the century Venice had enormously increased her possessions by conquering Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Belluno and Feltre, and, after defeating the Turkish fleet, had extended the frontiers of the Most Serene Republic far down the Dalmatian coast. In those years Florence had been thankful to have so powerful and rich an ally in her festering quarrel with Milan whose Duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, had been encouraged to make war on Florence by friends of the exiled Albizzi.