Handsome as the Palazzo Medici undoubtedly was, it scarcely deserved the attacks which were made upon it by Cosimo's enemies, one of whom wrote maliciously, ‘He has begun a palace which throws even the Colosseum at Rome into the shade. Who would not build magnificently if he could do so with other people's money?’
Cosimo, hard as he tried to avoid it, could not hope to escape such criticism as his influence in Florence increased. It was held to be understandable that he should wish to place on the corner of his new palazzo, above a finely wrought iron lamp by Niccolò Grosso,23 the Medici arms carved in stone with Cosimo's personal device of three peacocks' feathers signifying the three virtues he most admired, temperance, prudence and fortitude, sprouting from the shield. But it was considered to be hubristic to insist upon the Medici palle being displayed upon the public buildings, even though he had contributed so large a proportion of their cost. At San Marco, for instance, where he provided the funds for Michelozzo's rebuilding, he had, so one of his rivals complained, emblazoned ‘even the monks' privies with his balls’. He had also presented the friars with vestments, chalices and illustrated missals, and when the aesthetic connoisseur Niccolò Niccoli died, much in his debt, and Cosimo had acquired eight hundred of his books, he gave all the religious volumes to San Marco, retaining the rest for his own library, which, open to all his friends who wished to study there, was to become one of the great libraries of the world.24
As well as San Marco, the monasteries of Santa Croce and Santissima Annunziata, the library of the now demolished church of San Bartolommeo and the monastery known as La Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole25 all seem to have benefited from Cosimo's generosity, as did Orsanmichele, where he paid more than his share for a statue of St Matthew, patron saint of bankers, which his guild, the Arte del Cambio, had commissioned from Lorenzo Ghiberti for one of the fourteen niches on the outside walls, each of which was to contain a statue by a leading sculptor.26
Soon after the first of the marvellous collection of statues for Orsanmichele had been placed in its appropriate niche, work had begun on a task which some experts had declared impossible, the crowning of Santa Maria del Fiore with a dome 138 feet in diameter. This had been entrusted to Filippo Brunelleschi, by now the most notable architect in Florence.
With a characteristic combination of petulance and arrogance, Brunelleschi declared that the construction of the dome was really quite simple and could easily be done without scaffolding, though he declined to say how he intended to set about it. Pressed to do so, he remained steadfast in his refusal, becoming so argumentative and insolent that the committee appointed by the masons' guild to supervise the work ordered him to be removed from their presence. Attendants accordingly seized him, carried him out of the room and dropped him on his back in the piazza. This happened twice, according to Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi's biographer: and ‘as a consequence he was later often wont to say that during the period in which that occurred (some days elapsed between the first and second occasion) he was ashamed to go about Florence. He had the feeling that behind his back they were saying, “Look at that madman who utters such nonsense.” ’
Vasari tells the story of how Brunelleschi asked for an egg and pronounced that anyone who could make it stand upright would be clever enough to build the dome. ‘So an egg was produced and they all in turn tried to make it stand on end; but none of them could do so. Then Filippo took the egg and cracked its bottom and made it stay upright. The others complained that they could have done as much, and Filippo retorted that they would also have known how to vault the cupola if they had seen his model and plans.’
A relief in the south aisle of the Duomo of the cantankerous genius Filippo Brunelleschi by his adopted son, Buggiano, probably taken from the architect's death-mask in 1446.
Having decided to accept Brunelleschi as the only man capable of realizing the project satisfactorily, the committee declined to leave him in sole charge, making it clear that he must work under the general supervision of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was at that time architectural consultant to the cathedral authorities. As the work progressed, Brunelleschi found what he deemed to be Ghiberti's incompetent interference intolerable, and pretended to be too ill to carry on, leaving his superior to supervise the work. This Ghiberti could not do, not being a skilled engineer; and soon some of the members of the committee went to see Brunelleschi to sympathize ‘with him over his illness’, in Vasari's words, and to tell him ‘what great confusion the building had fallen into and what awful trouble his illness had brought upon them’.
‘Oh, isn't that fellow Lorenzo there?’ Brunelleschi asked. ‘Can he do nothing?’
‘He will do nothing without you.’
Filippo retorted, ‘I would do it well enough without him.’
So Brunelleschi was allowed to continue with the work on his own as capomaestro while Ghiberti, though later protesting that he had been responsible for much more of the design than his rival would allow, gradually disappeared from the scene. For over fifteen years the work continued, as Brunelleschi's roof – dispensing with the traditional armature of scaffolding by building up the brickwork in a herringbone pattern between a framework of stone beams in the manner of the ancient Romans – slowly took shape. Immense blocks of stone were brought into Florence from quarries devoted exclusively to the Duomo's needs, bluish-grey sandstone known as macigno from Trassinare near Settignano, white Carrara marble by oxcart from the docks at Porto Pisano, bricks from kilns kept alight by night and day. ‘The building had now grown so high that it called for great exertions to climb to the top and down again,’ Vasari recorded,
and the builders were losing a great deal of time in going to eat or drink, as well as suffering intensely from the heat of the day. So Filippo arranged for canteens equipped with kitchens and serving wine to be provided on the cupola itself… Filippo… never took any rest; he would often visit the kilns where the bricks were being shaped and demand to see and handle the clay, insisting… on selecting them very carefully with his own hands. He also inspected the stones being used by the stonecutters to see if they were hard and unflawed, and he would give them models for the joints and the turnings made of wood or wax, or cut from a turnip… he made iron tools for the smiths. He also invented hinges with heads and pivots.
In 1436 the dome was at last completed and on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, the first day of the year according to the Florentine calendar, there was a consecration ceremony in the most splendid tradition of the city. A raised wooden pathway was built between the papal apartments in Santa Maria Novella to the door of the cathedral and ‘hung with draperies of blue and white, the colours of the Pope,’ Vespasiano da Bisticci recorded. ‘And the woodwork which supported these draperies was adorned with myrtle, laurel, pine and cypress… Heavy curtains were stretched all the way between the churches, carpets also and benches on both sides, a marvellous sight to behold.’ The Pope ‘in full pontificals and mitre, and all the cardinals in damask mitres… and the whole court of Rome duly arrayed’ were attended by the Gonfaloniere, the priori and all the principal officials of the city.
The Pope was Eugenius IV, the austere son of a Venetian merchant, who, having quarrelled with the powerful Colonna family to which his predecessor, Martin V, had belonged, had been driven from Rome to seek shelter in Florence. He was an imposing figure as he moved slowly along the raised pathway beneath a scarlet canopy, wearing a white and jewelled tiara, walking past banners and garlands, streamers and trophies, and rows of soldiers to keep back the crowds, with a choir singing hymns of praise.
8
ARTISTS OF THE MEDICI 1439 – 64
‘Artists of genius are to be treated with respect.’
COSIMO DE' MEDICI
Three years after the grand ceremony of consecration in Santa Maria del Fiore, there was an even more splendid pageant when, in the summer of 1439, the leaders of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches decided to hold their General Council in Florence. It
was an acknowledgement, so a contemporary Florentine observed, of the high regard in which the city was held not only in Italy but throughout Europe.
The Eastern Emperor, John VIII Paleologus, had called for help in the name of Christ to save Byzantium from the Ottoman Turks, who had been threatening it for generations and were now almost at the gates of Constantinople. The Pope, the Venetian-born Eugenius IV, recognizing in the Emperor's plight an opportunity to settle the differences which had kept the two great churches of Christendom apart for so long, responded to the plea and called for a General Council.
The deliberations began at first in Ferrara; but when plague broke out in that city a Florentine delegation urged the Pope and the Patriarch – and the more than seven hundred scholars, theologians, interpreters and officials whom they had brought with them – to transfer their discussions to the more healthy city on the Arno, where they would be welcomed as honoured guests, and, furthermore, granted a generous loan of 1,500 florins a month for as long as the Council lasted.
Although well aware that the Florentines were prompted to make their offer not so much by a desire to see a reconciliation between the two churches as by the financial and political advantages of acting as host, Pope and Emperor both agreed to move south to Florence; and so, in an inauspiciously torrential rainstorm, the delegates and their numerous servants and attendants rode into the city, the Patriarch moving into the Palazzo Ferranti in the Borgo Pinti, the Eastern Emperor into the houses of the Peruzzi family, the Pope into his apartments at Santa Maria Novella.
The discussions began on a sour note, to the accompaniment of pouring rain and blustering wind; but, as the days went by and the arguments about such doctrinal matters as the nature of the Holy Ghost grew less heated, a compromise seemed possible. At the beginning of July it was reached. ‘Let the heavens rejoice and the earth exult,’ one of the cardinals declared at a ceremony in the cathedral on 5 July, his words being repeated in Greek by the Archbishop of Nicaea. ‘The wall which divided the Western and Eastern Churches has fallen. Peace and concord have returned.’
They did not return for long. The agreement was soon abandoned; the Emperor waited in vain in Constantinople for the help which the West had promised him; and within little more than a decade eighty thousand Turks were laying siege to his capital. They burst through the gates, massacred the inhabitants in a riot of pillage that lasted three days, and displayed the severed head of his successor, the last of the Eastern Emperors, on a column of porphyry.
Yet, while the General Council achieved little for Christendom and did nothing to prevent the collapse of the Empire of the East, for Florence it had served not only as an impetus to trade but also as an inspiration. For the Florentines who watched them pass by in the streets, the sight of the luxuriantly bearded delegates from the East, their gorgeous clothes and astonishing head-dresses, their Moorish and Mongol servants, the strange animals they had brought with them, were never to be forgotten. Certainly there were artists in Florence at the time whose memories of those days were to be reflected years later in their canvases. Benozzo Gozzoli, for example, was nineteen years old then, apprenticed to a Florentine goldsmith; and it is probable that, as well as being influenced by the Adoration of the Magi painted for the altar of the Chapel of Onofrio Strozzi at Santa Trinita by Gentile da Fabriano and by the pageants of the Three Kings which traditionally took place in Florence on the Feast of Epiphany – and in which members of the Medici family habitually took part – Gozzoli's wall-paintings in the chapel of the Medici Palace carry echoes of the spectacles witnessed in Florence in 1439. Lorenzo Ghiberti, too, may well have had memories of these scenes in mind when working on the panel depicting Solomon and the Queen of Sheba for the eastern doors of the Baptistery.
Moreover, the presence of so many Greek scholars in Florence had quickened the growing interest in classical texts and classical history, classical art and philosophy, and particularly the study of Plato, the great hero of the humanists, who had so long been overshadowed by his pupil Aristotle. Some of these Greeks, including Giorgios Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine philosopher and Neoplatonist scholar, were persuaded to remain for a time in Florence, and Cosimo de' Medici, who took particular pleasure in their company, conceived the idea of forming an academy devoted to Platonic studies. This ambition was later realized, when Cosimo adopted the son of one of his physicians, a young medical student named Marsilio Ficino, and installed him in the villa known as Montevecchio (now Le Fontanelle) where the clever, ugly little protégé was to translate all Plato's works into Latin and to become head of the Platonic Academy of Florence at the nearby Medici villa at Careggi.1
For the occasion of the General Council's meeting, which he had helped to bring to Florence through his friendship with Pope Eugenius IV, Cosimo de' Medici had been elected Gonfaloniere. He was now fifty years old, richer and more influential than ever, and as concerned as always to be recognized as a discerning patron of architecture, painting and sculpture. In his own palace he provided rooms for both Donato di Niccolò de Betto di Bardi, known as Donatello, the son of a Florentine wool carder, and Fra Filippo Lippi.
Although Donatello was three years older than Cosimo, his patron treated him rather as though he were a favourite child, buying him smart clothes, which he was rather reluctant to wear, and taking proprietorial pride in his successes: in his bronze of Pope John XXIII for the Baptistery, his St George for Orsanmichele, his pulpits for San Lorenzo,2 his enigmatic and erotic bronze David, which once stood in the courtyard of the Medici Palace,3 his Judith Slaying Holofernes, which was once a fountain figure in the garden there,4 and the many other works which graced or still grace the city.
When he was too old to work, Donatello was given a small farm on the Medici estates near Cafaggiolo; but he was not happy in the country and so he was brought back to Florence and given a pension instead. He was ‘more than satisfied with this arrangement,’ so Vasari said,
and, as a friend and servant of the Medici family, he lived carefree and happy all the rest of his life…
Donatello's death plunged into mourning the citizens and artists of Florence and all who had known him… they buried him honourably in San Lorenzo, and all the painters, architects, sculptors, and goldsmiths, the whole city almost, assisted at his funeral… The world remained so full of Donatello's works that it may be said with confidence that no artist has ever produced more than he did. He delighted in everything, and so he tried his hand at everything… He devoted his life to art.
Donatello's David (c. 1430) was moved from the Palazzo Medici to the Palazzo della Signoria on the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1495. It is now in the Bargello.
Tiresome as he could be on occasions as a member of the Medici household, the homosexual Donatello did not cause as much trouble as the extremely heterosexual Filippo Lippi, who was also born in Florence, some twenty years after Donatello and, having taken the vows of a Carmelite monk upon the death of his father, a butcher, was living at the monastery of Santa Maria del Carmine when Masaccio was working there on his marvellous frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel.5 Lippi himself was far happier with a paintbrush in his hand than a missal, and soon developed a distinctive style of his own which led Bernard Berenson to place him among the ‘painters of genius’.
He entered the Medici household in the late 1430s after his great gifts had been recognized by Cosimo. But he immediately proved himself as difficult as a guest as he had been as a monk at Santa Maria del Carmine, where his superiors had been intensely relieved when he abandoned his vows and left the convent. It was generally agreed that he was a most fanciful liar, a cheat, a drunkard and a compulsive lecher. Frequently, when painting in the studio allotted to him at the Medici Palace, ‘his lust was so violent that when it took hold of him he could never concentrate on his work’ and he would throw down his brush and hurry out in search of some compliant girl; and because of this, when he was working on a picture for the Medici, Cosimo would have him locked in. But
after he had been confined for a few days, Fra Filippo's ‘animal desires drove him… to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bed-sheets and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasure for days on end’. When Cosimo discovered that he had gone, he searched for him and eventually got him back to work. ‘And after that he always allowed him to come and go as he liked, having regretted the way he had shut him up before and realizing how dangerous it was for such a madman to be confined.’ Cosimo determined for the future to keep a hold on him by affection and kindness, and, being served all the more readily, he used to say that ‘artists of genius are to be treated with respect’, an attitude not common in those days when painters and sculptors, even of the highest distinction, were, like architects, still generally considered to be at best highly skilled craftsmen, as they had been in the earliest Middle Ages.
One day while working on an altarpiece, Fra Filippo asked the nuns who had commissioned it if he could use one of their young novices, Lucrezia Buti, as a model for the Blessed Virgin. Innocently, the nuns agreed; Fra Filippo seduced her and carried her off. She bore him several children including Filippino Lippi, who was also later to work for the Medici.
Florence Page 12
