While defending his family from their rivals within the city walls and the city itself from her enemies outside them, Piero continued the family tradition of munificence. He paid for a splendid tabernacle for the miraculous crucifix in the church of San Miniato al Monte,2 and commissioned an even more magnificent tabernacle for the church of Santissima Annunziata which bore on its base the vainglorious inscription: ‘Costò fior. 4 mila el marmo solo The marble alone cost 4,000 florins’.3 At the same time he added numerous ancient coins to the collection assembled by his father, bought great numbers of rare manuscript books for the Medici Library, and had many volumes copied out for him and brilliantly illuminated. Antonio Averlino Filarete was told that Piero spent hours looking at these books, turning over the pages ‘as if they were a pile of gold’:
One day he may simply want for his pleasure to let his eye pass along these volumes to while away the time and give recreation to the eye. The next day, then, so I am told, he will take out some of the effigies and images of all the Emperors and Worthies of the past, some made of gold, some of silver, some of bronze, of precious stones or of marble and other materials which are wonderful to behold… The next day he would look at his jewels and precious stones of which he had a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved, others not. He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at these and in discussing their various excellencies. The next day, perhaps, he will inspect his vases of gold and silver and other precious material and praise their noble worth and the skill of the masters who wrought them. All in all when it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects he does not look at the price.
Like his father, Piero was anxious to be considered the friend as well as the patron of artists. And just as Cosimo, so Antonio Benavieni wrote, ‘bestowed both honours and countless rewards’ on Donatello during his active life, so Piero continued to honour and reward the sculptor in his old age and at his death. It had been one of Donatello’s last requests that he should be buried near Cosimo in the church of San Lorenzo. Piero ensured that this request was fulfilled and undertook to bear the cost of his interment in the crypt next to Cosimo’s tomb. When the coffin was carried there, it was followed by the Medici and thousands of the mourning citizens of Florence.
Many of the artists in this long procession were already at work, or were shortly to embark upon work, for Piero de’ Medici. One of these was Luca della Robbia, soon to be elected president of the sculptors’ guild. Born in Florence in 1400 he had achieved lasting fame with the beautiful singing-gallery in the cathedral which he finished in 1428.4 Then, having been commissioned by the Signoria to complete the series of reliefs begun by Giotto and Andrea Pisano on the northern side of the campanile,5 he had been asked to make some oval terracotta reliefs for the walls of Piero’s study in the Medici Palace and some tiles for the floor, ‘a new thing and most excellent for summer’.6
Another old artist in the funeral procession to San Lorenzo was Paolo di Doni, then aged sixty-nine. He, too, was a Florentine, a shy, withdrawn man with a passion for animals, particularly for birds, pictures of which filled his house and which earned him his nickname – Uccello. Several of his pictures of birds and of other animals, painted in tempera on canvas, were bought by the Medici to hang on the walls of their palace; and, some years before Donatello’s death, Piero asked Uccello to paint a picture in three panels of the rout of San Romano, to commemorate Florence’s victory over the Sienese in 1432 in the days of the Albizzi. This picture, in which the horses seem to dominate the action, was hung in Lorenzo’s bedroom next to two other Uccellos, a scene from the legend of Paris and a picture of lions fighting dragons.7
Soon after the Rout of San Romano was finished, Piero bestowed his patronage on yet another Florentine artist who was asked to paint three large pictures for the Medici Palace. This was Antonio di Jacobo Benci, known as Pollaiuolo because his father was a poulterer. A sculptor, engraver, jeweller and enameller as well as a painter, he recommended himself to Piero by his skill in portraying the naked figure, a skill which he had perfected by spending hours in the most meticulous dissection of corpses. Piero ordered from him two of the twelve Labours of Hercules – the slaying of the Nemean lion and the destruction of the Hydra of Lernae – and a portrayal of Hercules’s subsequent conquest of the Libyan giant, Antaeus.8 In them Hercules, a symbol of courage on the official seal of the Signoria, was to be shown ‘larger than life’, as a Greek god rather than, in the manner of earlier times, a medieval warrior in shining armour.
In adapting classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and of her rulers, no artist was more in sympathy with Piero’s ideas than Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli. At the time of Donatello’s death, he was twenty-two years old. The sickly son of a Florentine tanner in a poor way of business in the Via Nuova Borg’ Ognissanti, Botticelli had probably derived his nickname (which means Little Barrel) from an elder brother, a batiloro – a beater of gold leaf used for picture frames – who agreed to relieve their father of responsibility for him. On leaving school Botticelli had been apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; but soon afterwards had been invited to live at the Medici Palace where Piero and Lucrezia Tornabuoni treated him as one of their own family. In the Madonna of the Magnificat, which he painted soon after Donatello’s death, he appears to have introduced both sons of the house as angels kneeling before the Madonna, Giuliano with seraphic features and thick, curly hair shaped so that an appealing curl fell down across his brow, the more swarthy Lorenzo, who was only five years younger than the artist, with his idealized features in profile and in shadow.9
In the Adoration of the Magi, however, which Botticelli painted as one of those family group pictures with a religious theme so favoured by Renaissance artists, Lorenzo – if the traditional identification can be accepted – appears in a stronger light and more exposed position. This picture was commissioned by Piero’s friend Guaspare di Zanobi del Lama, for the church of Santa Maria Novella, perhaps as a votive offering after the Medici’s escape from the danger of assassination and the threat of exile by the conspirators of 1466.10 Although other members of his family occupy more prominent positions, the picture certainly seems to have been intended as a tribute to Lorenzo, just as Fortitude, which Botticelli afterwards painted for the Council of the Arte della Mercanzia, appears to have been painted as a tribute to Piero.
Fortitude was one of six panels representing the virtues of Charity, Justice, Faith, Temperance and Fortitude which the commercial tribunal, the Mercanzia, had commissioned for their hall. It was originally intended that all the panels should be done by Antonio Pollaiuolo’s younger brother, Piero, but Piero de’ Medici induced Tommaso Soderini to persuade his colleagues on the Council to give the commission for at least one of the panels to Botticelli. Botticelli responded by producing a Fortitude which was taken to be an allegorical representation of the steadfast character of his friend and patron.11
Shortly before Botticelli completed this painting, another artist began work at the Medici Palace on a series of frescoes for the chapel on the first floor. This was Benozzo Gozzoli, also a native of Florence, who had worked on the Baptistery’s bronze doors under the direction of Ghiberti and who had later acted as assistant to Fra Angelico. In the Medici chapel for months on end Gozzoli worked by lamplight, gradually producing round the walls of the chancel, above an ornamented border of the Medici device of a diamond ring and the motto ‘semper’, two huge pictures depicting groups of angels rejoicing in the birth of Christ and gazing upon Filippo Lippi’s painting of The Virgin Adoring the Child which was placed above the altar.12