Lorenzo de' Medici

• 1. Introduction

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  On Sunday, the 26th of April 1478, Lorenzo de' Medici stood in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore when a group of assassins turned on him and his brother. Giuliano was stabbed to death. Lorenzo escaped with a wound to the neck, defended by the poet Poliziano and the banker Francesco Nori, who died saving him. The men who held the knives had the blessing of a pope. This was the cost of running Florence. Lorenzo, born on the 1st of January 1449 and known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic and the most powerful patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. He never held a crown, never won an election, and was described by even his close friend Niccolo Valori as homely. Yet he balanced the power of warring Italian states for decades. How did a banker's grandson, plain of face and short of leg, come to shelter Michelangelo at his dinner table and outmaneuver a hostile pope? And why did the peace he built collapse the moment he died?

• 2. A Banker's Inheritance

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  Cosimo de' Medici, Lorenzo's grandfather, was the first of the family to lead the Republic of Florence and run the Medici Bank at the same time. As one of the wealthiest men in Europe, he poured a very large part of his fortune into government and philanthropy, funding the arts and public works. That double life, ruler and financier, became the family blueprint. Lorenzo's father, Piero di Cosimo de' Medici, kept the family at the centre of Florentine civic life as an art patron and collector. His uncle Giovanni managed the business. Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo's mother, wrote sonnets and counted poets and philosophers of the Medici Academy among her friends. After the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law, she became her son's advisor. Lorenzo was judged the most promising of Piero and Lucrezia's five children. He was tutored by the diplomat and bishop Gentile de' Becchi and the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and trained in Greek by the scholar John Argyropoulos. Piero trusted him early, sending him as a youth on diplomatic missions to Rome to meet the pope and other powerful figures. The bank he would inherit was already strained by Cosimo's building projects, and its assets would shrink seriously across Lorenzo's own lifetime.

• 3. The Joust And The Man

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  In 1469, aged 20, Lorenzo won first prize in a jousting tournament that the Medici themselves sponsored. He carried a banner painted by Verrocchio and rode a horse named Morello di Vento. The poet Luigi Pulci turned the event into verse, and Niccolo Machiavelli later wrote that Lorenzo won it "not by way of favour, but by his own valour and skill in arms". With his brother Giuliano he kept up jousting, hawking, hunting, and breeding horses for the Palio, the horse race in Siena. The man behind the victory was no golden boy. Lorenzo was rather plain, of average height, with a broad frame and short legs, dark hair and eyes, a squashed nose, short-sighted eyes, and a harsh voice. His brother Giuliano was the handsome one, used by Botticelli as the model for his painting of Mars and Venus. Niccolo Valori captured the contradiction plainly. "Nature had been a stepmother to him in regards to his personal appearance, although she had acted as a loving mother in all things concocted with the mind," he wrote. "His complexion was dark, and although his face was not handsome it was so full of dignity as to compel respect." That dignity would soon be tested by men who wanted him dead.

• 4. Ruling Through Shadows

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  Upon his father's death in 1469, Lorenzo at 20 took a leading role in the state. He ruled Florence the way his grandfather and father had, indirectly, through surrogates in the city councils, using payoffs and strategic marriages, a method he kept up until 1490. Power held this way breeds enemies. Rival Florentine families resented Medici dominance, and the most dangerous of them was the Pazzi. Their conspiracy of 1478, headed by Girolamo Riario, Francesco de' Pazzi, and Francesco Salviati, the archbishop of Pisa, nearly ended his reign in the cathedral. When the plot failed, the people of Florence answered with their own violence, lynching the archbishop of Pisa and the Pazzi members involved. The Holy See struck back at the survivors. Pope Sixtus IV seized every Medici asset he could find, excommunicated Lorenzo and the whole Florentine government, and placed the city-state under interdict. When that failed to break Florence, Sixtus allied with King Ferdinand I of Naples, whose son Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, led an invasion. With little help from the old Medici allies in Bologna and Milan, the war dragged on. Lorenzo ended it by traveling to Naples in person and becoming the king's prisoner for several months. That gamble resolved the crisis and let him push through constitutional changes that deepened his own grip on the republic.

• 5. The Architecture Of Peace

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  Lorenzo held the balance of power within the Italic League, the alliance that kept the Italian Peninsula stable for decades. Like his grandfather Cosimo, he worked to maintain peace by balancing the northern Italian states and keeping France and the Holy Roman Empire out of Italy. His foreign policy had a clear aim: to stem the territorial ambitions of Pope Sixtus IV, in the name of the balance set by the Italic League of 1454. Trade underwrote the strategy. Lorenzo kept good relations with Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire, because Florentine maritime trade with the Ottomans was a major source of Medici wealth. Not every venture flattered him. Efforts to profit from mining alum in Tuscany, a key commodity for glassmaking, tanning, and textiles, left a dark stain on his record. Alum was discovered by citizens of Volterra, who sought Florentine backing to exploit it. Once they saw its value, they wanted the revenue for their own municipal funds rather than for their Florentine backers, and they rose in revolt and seceded, putting several opposing citizens to death. Lorenzo sent mercenaries to crush the rising, and they sacked the city. He hurried to Volterra afterward to make amends, but the damage to his name was done.

• 6. The Sculpture Garden

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  Michelangelo Buonarroti lived with Lorenzo and his family for three years, dining at the family table and joining discussions led by Marsilio Ficino. He was one of many. Lorenzo's court drew Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio, the artists who carried the 15th-century Renaissance forward. Lorenzo rarely commissioned works himself. Instead he helped these artists win commissions from other patrons. From 1479 he sat permanently on the committee overseeing the rebuild of the signoria, and he created a court of artists in his sculpture garden at San Marco, giving him enormous influence over who was chosen for public projects. He even turned art into diplomacy. He sent Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, and Cosimo Rosselli to Rome to paint murals in the Sistine Chapel, a gesture read as sealing his alliance with Pope Sixtus IV. Books mattered as much as paint. Cosimo had begun the collection that became the Medici Library, also called the Laurentian Library, and Lorenzo expanded it. His agents retrieved large numbers of classical works from the East, and a large workshop copied his books to spread their contents across Europe. Around him gathered Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who studied the Greek philosophers and tried to merge the ideas of Plato with Christianity. Lorenzo was an artist himself, writing poetry in his native Tuscan that celebrated love, feasts, and light, while turning melancholy in his later years toward the fragility of the human condition. In 1471 he calculated that since 1434 his family had spent some 663,000 florins on charity, buildings, and taxes. "I do not regret this," he wrote, "for though many would consider it better to have a part of that sum in their purse, I consider it to have been a great honour to our state, and I think the money was well-expended and I am well-pleased."

• 7. Marriages And Popes

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  Lorenzo married Clarice Orsini on the 7th of February 1469, with the marriage in person taking place in Florence on the 4th of June 1469. She was a daughter of Giacomo Orsini, Lord of Monterotondo and Bracciano. Their children became a dynasty that reached far beyond Florence. Their son Piero, born in 1472 and called "the Unfortunate", ruled after his father and was grandfather of Catherine de' Medici, queen of France. Their son Giovanni, born in 1475, ascended to the papacy as Leo X in 1513. Their daughter Lucrezia married Jacopo Salviati and had ten children, among them the mother of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Lorenzo's reach extended through adoption as well. He raised his nephew Giulio di Giuliano, the illegitimate son of his slain brother, as his own. In 1523, after four years ruling Florence, Giulio became Pope Clement VII. Two of the men shaped at Lorenzo's table would one day wear the papal tiara.

• 8. Deathbed And Afterlife

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  Lorenzo died during the late night of the 8th of April 1492, at the longtime family villa of Careggi. In his final years several branches of the family bank had collapsed because of bad loans, and he had resorted to misappropriating trust and state funds. Girolamo Savonarola, the preacher who believed Christians had strayed too far into Greco-Roman culture, visited him on his deathbed. Lorenzo had played a role in bringing Savonarola to Florence. The rumour that Savonarola damned him at the end was later refuted in Roberto Ridolfi's book Vita di Girolamo Savonarola. Witnesses wrote that Lorenzo died peacefully after listening to the Gospel of the day. Florence claimed his death came with portents: the dome of the cathedral struck by lightning, ghosts appearing, and the lions kept at Via Leone fighting one another. The Signoria and councils issued a decree honouring "the foremost man of all this city," so that virtue might not go unhonoured among Florentines and other citizens might be incited to serve the commonwealth. He was buried with his brother Giuliano in the Basilica di San Lorenzo, in a red porphyry sarcophagus originally designed for Piero and Giovanni de' Medici. In 1559 the two brothers were moved to the New Sacristy, beneath Michelangelo's statue of the Madonna, in an unmarked tomb. The Peace of Lodi of 1454, which Lorenzo had supported among the Italian states, collapsed with his death. His heir Piero squandered the patrimony and in 1494 brought down the Medici dynasty in Florence, leaving his brother Giovanni to retake the city in 1512 with the aid of a Spanish army.