Michelangelo remained at the Medici Palace for four years and during that time ‘he showed the results of his labours to Lorenzo everyday’.3
Far less rich than his father or grandfather, Lorenzo did not commission nearly as many sculptures or paintings; and many of those for which he was responsible have been destroyed, like the frescoes at Spedaletto, or lost. Several others, until recently supposed to have been commissioned by Lorenzo – such as Botticelli’s two most famous works, Primavera4 and the Birth of Venus,5 are now known to have been painted for his namesake, his rich young cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and to have been hung on the walls of the villa of Castello which the younger branch of the Medici family bought in 1477.6 Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur was also hung at Castello and was probably commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, although it seems to celebrate the elder Lorenzo’s triumph over the Pazzi conspirators and the ending of the Florentine wars.7
But if Lorenzo did not himself commission much work from Botticelli, he went out of his way to ensure that he was well supplied with orders from other Florentine patrons and seems to have been responsible for his going to work in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Lorenzo was equally active on behalf of Filippino Lippi whom he also sent to Rome, Antonio Pollaiuolo whom he sent to Milan, and Giuliano da Maiano whom he recommended to the Duke of Calabria. For Ghirlandaio he obtained work in Santa Maria Novella and in Santa Trinità,8 and afterwards recommended him for employment in the Sistine Chapel. For Verrocchio, who, according to Vasari, ‘never gave himself a moment’s rest from painting or sculpture’, Lorenzo obtained work all over Tuscany. He also commissioned – though the sculptor’s brother claimed he never paid for – a bronze David9 and a terracotta Resurrection for his own villa of Careggi.10 And for the garden of his school he had Verrocchio restore and complete a badly broken red stone statue of the flayed body of Marsyas as a companion piece to a white marble Marsyas which Cosimo had bought in Rome. Verrocchio, so Vasari recorded,
made the missing legs, thighs and arms out of pieces of red marble so skilfully that Lorenzo was more than satisfied and was able to place it opposite the other statue, on the other side of the door. This antique torso, showing the flayed body of Marsyas, was made with such care and judgement that some slender white veins in the red stone were brought out by skilful carving in exactly the right places, appearing like the tiny sinews that are revealed when a human body is flayed.
When Verrocchio left Florence for Venice to work on his last masterpiece, the monument to the condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni, which stands in the Piazza di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Lorenzo let him go with his blessing. He was equally amiable when Leonardo da Vinci decided to move to Milan. It is possible that Leonardo, like Michelangelo, had lived in Lorenzo’s household for a time. It is certain that when, at the age of about twelve, this illegitimate boy from the Tuscan village of Vinci came to work in Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence, Lorenzo took the greatest interest in his precocious genius; and that when Leonardo decided to spread the wings of his astonishing versatility in Milan, where Duke Lodovico Sforza was looking for an artist to make an equestrian statue of his father, Lorenzo, always alive to the political advantages of such generosity, recommended him to Lodovico by sending the Duke a silver lyre, made in the shape of a horse’s head, which Leonardo had made.
Lorenzo certainly liked it to be known that he was a connoisseur of such things, just as he set great store by his reputation as an expert judge of architecture. It had, indeed, become common practice to consult him when important works were to be undertaken. His advice was sought, for instance, over a disputed design for the facade of Santo Spirito;11 and Filippo Strozzi consulted him about the proportions of the Palazzo Strozzi.12 Lorenzo was also asked to select the better of two models for the Forteguerri tomb at San Jacopo in Pistoia, the one submitted by Verrocchio, the other by Piero del Pollaiuolo, as he had ‘full understanding of such and all other things’. And when a new altar panel for the church of Santo Spirito was commissioned from Ghirlandaio, one of the conditions was that it should be done ‘according to the manner, standards and form’ as would please Lorenzo.
Lorenzo himself submitted a design for the facade of the Cathedral which, in 14.91, still remained without one. Since Verrocchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi also took part in the competition, together with several other masters, the judges were naturally somewhat embarrassed. To escape their dilemma they asked Lorenzo to choose the design himself. But, having praised all the designs, Lorenzo told them that he could not make up his mind and advised that the matter should be adjourned.13
If Lorenzo spent far less on paintings and sculpture than his grandfather and left unfinished various buildings which Cosimo had begun – such as the church of the Badia at Fiesole – he continued throughout his life to add to his magnificent collection of bronzes, medals, coins, ancient pottery, antique gems and Roman, Byzantine, Persian and Venetian vases, many of them carved in semi-precious stones and most of them inscribed with his name picked out in capitals: ‘LAUR. MED’. He would, in fact, pay far more for a fine engraved gem, no doubt believing it to be a sounder investment, than he was prepared to pay for a big picture. Many of the gems in his collection were valued at over a thousand florins, while a Botticelli or a Pollaiuolo did not cost more than a hundred.
Lorenzo also continued to lavish money upon the patronage of writers and scholars and upon the purchase of books and manuscripts for the continually expanding Medici library. His agents were instructed to be perpetually on the watch for likely sources. Giovanni Lascaris – who was twice dispatched to the East at Lorenzo’s expense to seek out manuscripts that might otherwise be lost – brought back to Florence from his second voyage over two hundred Greek works, the existence of almost half of which had not previously been known.
Although the art of printing from movable type had been invented in the middle of the century at Mainz, it had not at first made much headway in Italy where many scholars considered it a rather vulgar process, practised ‘among the Barbarians in some German city’, and many collectors refused to have printed books in their collections. Printing presses had been set up in Naples in 1465, in Rome in 1467, in Venice and Milan in 1469, in Verona, as well as in Paris and Nuremberg, in 1470. In 1476 William Caxton had set up his press at the Sign of the Red Pale in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. But it was not until 1477 that Bernardo Cennini had established his press in Florence. Before that – and, indeed for many years after, so strong was the tradition in the city – whole schools of scribes, illustrators and scriveners were employed by Lorenzo to make copies of his manuscripts so that their contents could be as widely diffused as possible and replicas presented to other libraries and institutions both within and beyond the frontiers of Tuscany, in particular to the libraries of Pisa.