Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The war with the King of Naples which followed had no such successful conclusion, and might well have ended in a catastrophic defeat had not Florence been saved by the death of the young and energetic Neapolitan King as she had been saved twelve years before by the death of the Duke of Milan. But now as one enemy died, another, in the person of the fat and ugly, dirty and almost blind heir to the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, rose to take his place.

  Filippo Maria, younger son of Gian Galeazzo, succeeded to the dukedom after the assassination of his foolish and insanely cruel brother. He himself was eccentric to the verge of madness, stripping the rich clothes from his fat and dirty body on summer days and rolling naked among the flowers in his garden, or suddenly producing a snake from his sleeve when talking to an unsuspecting courtier. Suspicious, secretive and suggestible, he was terrified of death and was known to scream in alarm at the sight of a sword removed from its scabbard. He was frightened of lightning, too, and hid under his bedclothes during thunderstorms, moving to another bed as soon as the storm was over, moving, indeed, at least three times every night from one bedchamber to another for fear of assassination, calling for a page since his legs were so weak that he could not walk on his deformed feet without support. But he was cunning and very clever.

  On their own the Florentines could make little headway against the Duke of Milan's mercenaries, led as they were by one of the most skilful condottieri of the day, the stumpy Niccolò Piccinino, a butcher's son who had been a weaver. He had begun his military career in the company of the Perugian soldier of fortune, Braccio da Montone, whose daughter he married and whose soldiers he took with him, after Braccio's death, into the service of the Milanese. Another talented and forceful condottiere was also at this time in the Duke of Milan's service. This was Francesco Sforza, the illegitimate son of a mercenary. He had fought with his father for the King of Naples and, when his father was drowned in battle, had come north to try his fortunes in Lombardy, where he was to marry Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, and to become Duke of Milan himself, thus founding a dynasty which was to rule in Lombardy for almost a hundred years.

  To combat these formidable enemies, Florence entered into alliance with her fellow republic Venice; and to meet the extraordinary costs of equipping and maintaining an army strong enough to defeat the Milanese, the Flor-entine Signoria introduced a tax to supplement the gabella, the tax known as the catasto, a direct tax based on a citizen's estimated wealth and, therefore, strongly opposed by those rich merchants who would necessarily have to find the largest part of it.

  The year after this tax was imposed, Duke Filippo Maria was at last induced to make peace with Venice and Florence, to allow Venice to extend her territories almost as far west as Lake Como and to confirm Florence in possession of the various fortresses which she had lost in six years of intermittent warfare. Yet no sooner had peace with Milan been concluded than Florence, in continuing pursuit of her dominion over Tuscany, was at war again, intent upon acquiring Lucca. It was a war of undisguised aggression and aroused opposition in Florence itself and anger in Siena, where the people and government alike were well aware that, once the Florentines had taken Lucca, it would not be long before they marched upon their own city, the one free city left in Tuscany. To forestall a Florentine attack, the Sienese turned to the Duke of Milan, who immediately sent an army to Lucca's defence, an army which soon overwhelmed the incompetently led mercenary forces which Florence's committee of war had dispatched to Lucca, in the sanguine belief that that small town would not be able to offer them much resistance.

  Having successfully thwarted Florence's bid to extend her dominion, the Duke of Milan now renewed his efforts to expand his own; and in 1440 he paid the crafty Piccinino to lead a powerful army south into Tuscany. On 29 June 1440 Piccinino came upon the Florentine army in the valley of the upper Arno at Anghiari, where, in the subsequent battle, the Milanese army was utterly defeated.

  Some years earlier, according to a cynical contemporary chronicler, the advisability of declaring war had been discussed in one of those councils to which the priori turned in times of crisis. As the members of the council discussed the problem in detail, elaborating first the possible advantages, then the dangers and expense of further conflict, it was noticed that one man, who had appeared to be taking no notice whatsoever of the opposing arguments, fell asleep. Woken by the man sitting next to him when his opinion was called for, he roused himself to speak a word or two in favour of war. Without further ado the other councillors all agreed that war was the answer; and this was the advice they offered.

  The councillor whose words had been decisive was Niccolò da Uzzano; and nothing better illustrates the hold which men such as he had now established over the government of Florence than this anecdote about him.

  Niccolò da Uzzano, whose marvellously human bust by Donatello is in the Bargello, was an immensely rich patrician merchant who lived in a palace, now the Palazzo Capponi, in the Via de' Bardi.3 He was regarded in Florence as one of the main upholders of the by now accepted doctrine that no merchant, however rich and munificent he might be and however ancient the family into which he might have married, could gain the greatest esteem in the city unless there were a tradition of family service to the republic. Indeed, a family whose name did not appear on the parchment lists of former priori, which had been meticulously preserved since 1282, was almost beyond the pale. Niccolò da Uzzano kept a copy of these lists

  Bust by Donatello of Niccolò da Uzzano, the rich and highly respected early-fifteenth-century Florentine statesman.

  hanging on the wall of his study so that, if asked to support the candidature of someone unknown to him, he could satisfy himself that the man was not a parvenu.

  For many years Niccolò was at the centre of Florentine affairs. Priori might come and go, Gonfalonieri take office for two months before returning to their counting-houses; but all the time the most influential citizens of Florence would meet in the palaces of Niccolò and his friends, and there take the decisions which would govern the home and foreign policies of the state. Among these friends were Gino Capponi, head of a family whose members were to play important parts in the later history of Florence, and Maso degli Albizzi, whose family, having settled in the Borgo di Por San Pietro, now the Borgo degli Albizzi, in the thirteenth century, were to produce nearly a hundred priori and thirteen Gonfalonieri.4

  In the early years of the fifteenth century it was this family, the Albizzi, advised when necessary by Gino Capponi and Niccolò da Uzzano, who exercised control of the government of Florence through their friends and nominees in the Signoria and by the manipulation of the advisory commissions, the pratiche. It was during their ascendancy that the Florentines had opened up their passage to the sea by capturing Pisa and Porto Pisano, and had launched the first Florentine armed galley; it was in their time that they had gained possession of Arezzo and had bought Livorno from the Genoese. Theirs was also an age of prosperity so that, although the Albizzi's rule was a harsh one, in which opposition was ruthlessly crushed, it was not an unpopular one; and when the capable Maso degli Albizzi died it was accepted that his son, Rinaldo, although an arrogant, impulsive and vengeful man, should be recognized as the leader of the faction which effectively ruled Florence.

  Under Rinaldo degli Albizzi, however, the rule of the oligarchy was neither so successful nor so widely tolerated as it had been under that of his more moderate father. The people began to grumble about the government's conduct of the wars against Milan and Lucca, and about Rinaldo's reported determination to maintain it in power if necessary by halving the number of the lesser guilds and thus hamstringing most of the troublemakers. And the more the people grumbled about the Albizzi the more often the name of a rival family was mentioned, a family which had produced the Gonfaloniere who had shown his sympathy towards the popolo minuto at the time of the ciompi riots. This was the family of a banker, discreet and modest, a tall, thin man with a ho
oked nose and sallow skin, who could be seen walking about the city, never with more than one servant in attendance and always quietly dressed, careful to give the wall to older citizens – the family of Cosimo de' Medici.

  7

  THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF MEDICI 1420–39

  ‘Always keep out of the public eye.’

  GIOVANNI DI BICCI DE' MEDICI

  Cosimo de' Medici was born on 27 September 1389, the day upon which are commemorated the early Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of physicians. By appropriate extension, they also became patron saints of the Medici family and as such appear in several works of art commissioned by Cosimo or created in his honour, in Fra Angelico's Dream of the Deacon Justinian in San Marco, for example, and in Donatello's arched reliefs over the doors of the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo.

  Cosimo's father was Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici whose shrewd, attractive face, with its kindly, hooded eyes, and thin, expressive mouth above a determined chin stares out apprehensively from his posthumous portrait by Bronzino. Giovanni had not been born to great riches. From his own father, Averardo detto Bicci, whose money had had to be divided among a widow and five sons, he had inherited little. He started work in the Roman branch of a company largely owned by a relative, soon being appointed manager of the company's office. Then he formed a company of his own. In 1397 he returned to Florence to open a bank, and over the years he astutely developed the family business until his two wool workshops and the bank in Via Porta Rossa were among the most successful enterprises in the city. He was a leading member of the Arte della Lana and, as a banker, of the Arte del Cambio; and he had accepted office three times as priore and once as Gonfaloniere; but he had done so reluctantly and only because, as one of his grandsons was to say, merchants did not prosper in Florence without taking their share in the city's government.

  He was believed to share the sympathetic feelings towards the popolo minuto which Salvestro de' Medici, a member of another branch of the family, had displayed at the time of the ciompi revolt. Certainly, Giovanni was well regarded by the ordinary people of Florence, who responded

  Posthumous portrait by Bronzino of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici (1360–1429), father of Cosimo de' Medici, Pater Patriae.

  warmly to his humanity and honesty, his quiet humour enhanced by the solemnity of his manner. But he was careful never to offend the ruling oligarchy either by playing upon his popularity with the labouring classes or by the least ostentation in his style of life. He had lived in a quite modest house in Via Larga before moving to a slightly larger but still unpretentious house in the Piazza del Duomo, a far less imposing place than his large income, and the generous dowry which his father-in-law had provided for his wife, would have allowed him to buy. ‘If you wish to live in safety,’ he advised his two sons, ‘take no more from the state than man and the law allow.’

  Giovanni also told his sons that, while it behoved them to remain rich, and if possible to become richer, they must remember that a leading Florentine merchant in a respectable way of business was not worthy of honour only because of his riches. He also had a duty to honour the city of his birth. Giovanni himself was one of the donors of the North Doors of the Baptistery which were commissioned as a votive offering in 1402, a year of plague, as a plea to God not to repeat the dreadful visitation of the Black Death.

  An open competition was held for these bronze doors, which were to complement those completed by Andrea Pisano sixty-five years earlier. Seven of Italy's leading artists were invited to submit designs for a bronze panel representing Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. When all the designs were handed in, a panel of judges – of whom Giovanni seems to have been one – were asked to consider the works of three of the artists: Jacopo della Quercia, a young native of Siena, who was later to work on the Baptistery there and on the reliefs on the portal of San Petronio, Bologna; Filippo Brunelleschi, a Florentine, then a goldsmith and sculptor in his early twenties, of whom much was to be later heard; and Lorenzo Ghiberti, also a Florentine who had been trained as a goldsmith and sculptor. He was twenty-three, a few months younger than Brunelleschi, and was then working, not yet a member of a guild, in his stepfather's shop.

  Much impressed by the designs of the two Florentines and unable to decide which they preferred, the judges suggested that they collaborate on the work, a proposition which apparently so exasperated the short-tempered Brunelleschi that he stormed out of Florence and seems to have gone off to study architecture in Rome, giving the bronze he had done to the Medici.

  Left to work on the doors by himself, Ghiberti set to work with a will in a large room he had rented opposite Santa Maria Novella, building a huge furnace there, and casting and recasting panel after panel until he was satisfied that he had succeeded in his determination to ‘imitate nature to the utmost’. It was not for twenty-two years, not until he had moved to a larger foundry in Via Bufalini opposite the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, that the work was finished at last. The completion of Ghiberti's masterpiece was celebrated by a suitably splendid ceremony in which the priori, permitted for once to leave the confines of the Palazzo della Signoria, marched in process to congratulate the artist upon his work.1

  By then it had been decided to commission new doors for the east side of the Baptistery, the side facing Santa Maria del Fiore; and for this work, which was to take a further twenty-seven years to complete and was to cost some 22,000 florins, there was never any doubt that Ghiberti should be

  Caption

  The East Doors of the Baptistery, on which Lorenzo Ghiberti worked from 1426 to 1452. The porphyry columns from Majorca on either side were given to Florence by the Pisans in 1117. The marble Baptism of Christ (1502–5) above is by Andrea Sansovino and was finished by Vincenzo Danti in 1564.

  One of the panels of Ghiberti's East Doors, depicting Joseph sold and recognized by his brethren.

  chosen. He devoted himself to it with the assiduity and devotion which he had bestowed upon the doors on the northern side, meticulously depicting in gilded bronze panels scenes from stories in the Old Testament. ‘I conducted this work,’ Ghiberti himself acknowledged, ‘with the greatest diligence and the greatest love.’

  The doors were finished at last in 1452; and Michelangelo was said to have stood transfixed in wonderment before them, declaring them ‘fit to be the gates of Paradise’.2 Three years later Ghiberti died. Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, who had helped to obtain his first commission for him, had long since been buried beside his wife in the sarcophagus by Buggiano which lies beneath the table in San Lorenzo's Old Sacristy.3

  Before his death Giovanni had benefited Florence by far more than his share of the Baptistery's doors. It was he who, heading a committee of seven other parishioners, had persuaded the Commune to restore the ancient edifice of San Lorenzo, which was by now collapsing into ruins. The seven parishioners, Giovanni suggested, would each build a family chapel in the church, while he himself would not only pay for a family chapel but also for the sacristy, if the commune would undertake the cost of the rest. It was agreed: as architect for the sacristy, Giovanni chose the young, cantankerous architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who was soon afterwards entrusted with the construction of the whole church, one of the great masterpieces of the early Renaissance.4 Brunelleschi was also entrusted with the design of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the foundling hospital in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, which was established in 1419 by the Arte della Lana and was generously endowed by Giovanni.5

  Giovanni saw to it that his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, received an excellent education, first at the school of the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which stood on the site of the present hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, a hospital founded in 1286 by Folco Portinari, the father of the young woman whom Boccaccio identified as Dante's Beatrice.6 Thereafter the two boys attended the lectures and seminars of Roberto de' Rossi and were brought into contact with the great intellectuals of Florence, with men sharing that reverence for
classical learning and classical ideals, combined with a deep interest in man's life on earth, which was to characterize those who were to become known as humanists.

  Among these humanists in Florence, whose ideas had so profound an influence upon the culture of the Renaissance city, were Carlo Marsuppini, a lecturer in rhetoric and poetry at the Studio Fiorentino,7 a scholar whose learning was so extensive that in the course of a single lecture he was said to have contrived to quote from every known Greek and Latin author; Marsuppini's rival, the tirelessly energetic, conceited and spiteful polymath, Francesco Filelfo, who rushed about the Studio Fiorentino lecturing and talking endlessly, finding time to write prolifically in verse and prose, and to give a public discourse in Santa Maria del Fiore once a week on Dante; and Leonardo Bruni, also known as Aretino (from Arezzo). Leonardo Bruni was intense, earnest and strait-laced, a civic official as well as a scholar, Chancellor of the Republic of Florence for seventeen years from 1427, historian of the city and biographer of its greatest writers; his books on Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch helped to stimulate the humanists' growing appreciation of Italian poetry.