Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

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.