Despite the constraints to which he had earlier been subjected in the Medici Palace, it was here that several of the greatest of Fra Filippo's earlier works were painted.6
Also working for the Medici in the 1440s was a friar of a very different nature, Guido di Pietro, later known as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, or Fra Angelico, a saintly man who was said to have knelt in prayer before taking up his brush and to have painted scenes of the Crucifixion with tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘When any work was required of him he would answer with singular goodness of heart that they must go and ask the prior, and if the prior wished it he would not fail them.’ Born at Vicchio near Florence about 1400, he became a Dominican monk some twenty years later at the monastery of San Domenico di Fiesole, where his murals of the Crucifixion and the Madonna and Child are still to be seen.
Remaining at Fiesole for almost twenty years, he undertook various commissions for Florentine patrons, including the Deposition for Santa Trinita, before coming down to live at the monastery of San Marco, where his Annunciation and Crucifixion and the vibrant, delicate paintings on the walls of the cells, some by himself, others by assistants, are a reflection of a personality which inspired the name by which he became known, Beato Angelico.7
The subject of Fra Angelico's painting on the wall of the cell at San Marco to which Cosimo de' Medici liked to retreat from the cares of business and politics was chosen by Cosimo himself. It was a picture of the Adoration of the Magi, an image of rich men laying down their crowns before the manger in Bethlehem, which was always a popular subject with Florentine merchants and which Cosimo liked it to be supposed he always had before his eyes for his guidance as a ruler.
9
FATHER OF THE COUNTRY 1455 – 64
‘His life was full of honour. His honour extended beyond his own city to Italy, indeed to the whole world.’
POPE PIUS II
By the time of Fra Angelico's death in 1455, Cosimo de' Medici, ‘more lettered than merchants are wont to be’, in the words of the clever, articulate Pope Pius II, had become ‘master of the country’. ‘Political questions are settled at his house,’ Pope Pius said. ‘The man he chooses holds office… He it is who decides peace and war, and controls the laws… His mind is keen and alert [though] he often passes whole nights without sleep. Nothing goes on in Italy that he does not know about… He is king in everything but name.’ Official correspondence was conducted through the Signoria as it always had been; but no important decision was ever reached without reference to the Medici Palace, through whose gates on Via Larga could be seen arriving foreign ambassadors to offer their respects and Florentine ambassadors to make reports upon returning home from service abroad. As the Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, observed, Cosimo had ‘a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day’.
Continuing to avoid the limelight, he depended upon the Medici party to maintain the status quo. They did so with the utmost efficiency, though not with the most scrupulous honesty. When critics became troublesome, Florence's taxation system was used to ruin them and its laws used to banish them, their estates being bought at bargain prices by the party managers, men such as the crafty Puccio Pucci, a brilliant politician who, raised by Cosimo from the artisan class, made a fortune buying and selling government stock, and Luca Pitti who, as a reward for his services to the Medicean party, received 20,000 florins from Cosimo as a contribution towards the cost of his huge new palace in the Oltrarno.
The constitutional institutions and offices of the state remained largely as before, with certain minor modifications like the establishment of a new council, the Consiglio Maggiore, later the Council of One Hundred, the Cento, with responsibility for national security and taxation. Yet opponents of the regime could, when necessary, be quickly excluded from election to the Signoria by entrusting the selection of candidates to commissioners known as accoppiatori, most of whom happened to be members of or to have close links with the Medici party.
From time to time efforts were made to widen the base of the party and to make less obvious the great chasm between the rich and the poor – according to the records of the catasto of 1427, the hundred richest families owned a quarter of the wealth of Florence, while 1,500 heads of households owned no property at all.
Occasionally, very occasionally, opponents of the regime made serious trouble. In 1458, at a time of economic recession, discontent ran so high that Luca Pitti thought it necessary to stage a demonstration to overawe the party's opponents. Summoning mercenaries and armed Mediceans into the Piazza della Signoria, he called for a Parlamento. As in times past, the assembled citizens, or those of them who were admitted to the piazza as appearing likely to give the required answer, were asked to approve the appointment of a Balia. And this they did when the nervous Notaio delle Riformagioni had raised his voice sufficiently for them to be able to hear him. The Signoria then returned to the palace, the citizens to their workshops and the mercenaries to their quarters. As supporters of the Medici paraded through the streets, waving banners and shouting slogans, the Balia passed a series of measures modifying the constitution, intended unobtrusively to strengthen the hold of the Medici party upon the government.
For the rest of Cosimo's life, this hold was not relaxed, although when Filippo Maria Visconti, the gifted, unbalanced Duke of Milan, died in 1447 and his son-in-law, the condottiere Francesco Sforza, laid claim to the succession, Cosimo's unremitting support of Sforza's claims and the financial burdens this support imposed upon the Florentine people almost brought about his downfall. Francesco Sforza's claim to the Duchy of Milan was contested not only by Alfonso, the King of Naples, to whom Visconti had bequeathed it, in breach of a promise made to Sforza, but also by the German Emperor, in assertion of his ancient rights, by the republic of Venice, which made it clear that no infringement of her own claims in Lombardy would be tolerated, and by the Duke of Orleans, whose mother was a Visconti. Cosimo's strong backing of Francesco Sforza, which raised up so many enemies against Florence and entailed immense loans from the Medici bank as well as huge subsidies from Florentine taxpayers, was widely condemned in the city. People grumbled that Cosimo's determination to help Sforza was dictated by selfish motives, by his fear of losing the huge sums of money he had lent him and by his expectations of having a more profitable and stable relationship with a powerful despot than he could hope to have either with any of his rivals or with the Milanese people, who had declared themselves a republic upon Visconti's death.
‘The citizens have raised a great clamour about the new taxes, and, as never before, have uttered abusive words against Cosimo,’ the Venetian ambassador reported.
Two hundred respected families, who lived on the revenues of their possessions, are in a bad way, their properties having been sold in order to enable them to pay their taxes. When this imposition was levied Cosimo had to announce that no one need complain because he would advance the money required and would not ask for it back until it suited everyone concerned. In order to retain popular favour, Cosimo has had to distribute many bushels of corn every day amongst the poor, who were crying out and grumbling because of the rise in prices.
Two of Florence's leading citizens joined their voices to the protest, Cosimo's former friend, the greatly respected and staunchly republican Neri Capponi, and Gianozzo Manetti, a rich and scholarly merchant and master of that grandiloquent rhetoric so relished by connoisseurs of Renaissance diplomacy, who had frequently been employed on foreign missions for the Signoria. Both these men argued that it was outrageous that Florentines should be taxed for the sake of an upstart condottiere and self-proclaimed duke, the declared enemy of the Venetian republic, Florence's traditional ally.
Cosimo de' Medici countered their arguments by maintaining that Venice could no longer be considered a natural ally. Indeed her interests in the Levant and her powerful fleet made her more of a rival than a friend: her territorial possessions in the eastern Mediter
ranean made her an enemy of Turkey, while Florence enjoyed a mutually profitable trade with the Turkish empire.
Cosimo had his way: Florence's alliance with Milan was signed in August 1450. But provoked by this, and by a subsequent alliance with France arranged by Cosimo's disarming friend, Agnolo Acciaiuoli of the old banking family, Venice declared war on Florence. So did King Alfonso of Naples, enraged by Florence's undertaking to stand aside if the King of France, reviving Angevin claims to his kingdom, decided to invade Italy.
King Alfonso's illegitimate son, Don Ferrante, marched north towards Tuscany, causing such alarm in Florence that crowds gathered round the Palazzo Medici demanding to be told what steps were being taken for the defence of the city. One highly agitated merchant burst into Cosimo's room, crying, ‘Rencine has fallen! Rencine has fallen!’
Cosimo, pretending not to have heard of this small town just inside the Tuscan border, softly replied, ‘Rencine? Rencine? Where is Rencine?’ His assumed calm was justified. Alarmed by the prospect of a marauding French army invading Italy and by the growing Turkish menace after the fall of Constantinople, the Italian states cautiously withdrew from conflict; and in the summer of 1454 Florence, Milan, Venice and the Papal States all joined a Most Holy League formed to guarantee the status quo in Italy and to withstand aggression from without.
Cosimo's policy was thus vindicated: Venice, too concerned with the Turks to pose any further threat to Tuscany, had been checked; Francesco Sforza, a trusted ally of Florence, was recognized as Duke of Milan; Naples was a signatory to the general peace.
There were to be no more foreign entanglements so long as Cosimo lived. When Pope Pius II asked him to supply two Florentine galleys for a crusade against the Turks, Cosimo made the disingenuous excuse which his descendants were to find useful in similar circumstances: ‘You write to me as though I were a reigning prince rather than a private man who is satisfied with the moderate dignity of a private citizen… And you will know how limited is the power of a private citizen in a free state under democratic government.’
The peace which came to Florence after so many years of expensive, intermittent warfare, and the political stability which the Medicean party was able to impose upon the city after centuries of feuding, allowed several of Florence's great families, in addition to the Medici themselves, to build grand new palaces. In the recent past such extravagance and display of wealth would have been considered most unwise. ‘Never show your wealth,’ Giovanni Morelli, the rich merchant and diarist, had advised. ‘Keep it hidden, and always by words and acts make people believe that you possess only half as much as you really do possess.’ ‘Spending a lot and making a big impression,’ another merchant warned in the late fourteenth century, ‘are in themselves too dangerous.’
But now attitudes had changed. It was not only that the city was no longer rent by faction, not only that a softening attitude towards usury had made those involved in banking less wary of flaunting wealth acquired by means frowned upon by the Church, there was also a strong self-congratulatory feeling: Florence which, from such modest beginnings, had become one of the greatest cities of Europe, with a model constitution and a flourishing commercial life, surely deserved buildings on the grandest scale.
An account of the city's prosperity was given by a Medici agent who witnessed it, Benedetto Dei, whose passion for statistics rivalled that of the fourteenth-century Giovanni Villani. In his Cronaca fiorentina of 1472, Benedetto Dei estimated that the population of the city was 70,000, almost 20,000 more than it was to be a hundred years later. There were 180
A painting of a goldsmith's workshop by Alessandro Fei del Barbiere (1543 – 92) in the Studiolo di Francesco I in the Palazzo Vecchio.
churches, 50 piazze, 270 woollen-goods shops, 83 shops belonging to members of the silk guild, 66 apothecaries' shops, 84 shops kept by woodworkers, 54 by sculptors and stonecutters, 70 butchers' shops, 8 shops belonging to poulterers and dealers in game, 44 to goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewellers, 30 to workers in gold leaf and silver wire, as well as 33 banks, whose cashiers dealt with their customers sitting outside their premises behind counters on which their quills and inkwells, ledgers and abacuses were laid upon expensive carpets, tokens of their worth and distinction.
Yet Florence was not only distinguished because of its commercial prosperity: it was a city in which the greatest artists of the time from the days of Cimabue and Giotto had lived and worked, in which Dante and Boccaccio had spent their formative years, which Petrarch's parents had left with regret and from which the ideas of the Rinascimento were to spread across Europe. Such a city was surely worthy of the honour that great private buildings and public monuments could bestow upon it.
Moreover, the rich now had more money to spend – the gabella had been reduced to such an extent that a man like Filippo Strozzi, although twenty times as rich as his father, was required to pay far less in tax – and they were anxious to build palaces which would be not merely a demonstration of their owners' personal distinction and ‘bring considerable honour, being more visible than all one's possessions’, as Michelangelo was to say, but would also be aesthetically pleasing in themselves. Most of these rich merchants and bankers who built family palaces in the fifteenth century had served on an opera, a building committee formed for the erection or maintenance of a church or a hospital, the headquarters of a guild or a state institution; and, during their term of office, for which they were paid not with a salary but with presents such as spices at the Ospedale degli Innocenti or a goose every week at Santo Spirito, they had acquired some knowledge of architecture. They knew what they wanted and often knew also the architect whom they wished to employ to carry out their ideas and with whom, provided he were not a Brunelleschi, they hoped to cooperate.
Having chosen and acquired a suitable site, usually at the expense of existing houses – over twenty had had to make way for the Medici Palace – the next step, after approval of the plans, was to consult an astrologer as to the most propitious time for building to begin. Accuracy was important in this; and since it frequently happened that when several astrologers were consulted the answers varied considerably, there were often lengthy disputes as to the ideal day. When the date had been finally agreed upon, there was just as often a dispute as to the exact moment at which the foundation stone should be laid in place. This also being settled, the stone was laid with appropriate ceremony: coins and medals and other mementoes, together with portraits of the family perhaps, were thrown on top of the stone; and often a mass was said and hymns were sung. When the foundation stone of the Strozzi Palace was set in place, on 6 August 1489, a man who happened to be passing by was asked if he would like to throw in a coin. He ran off to fetch his children and his son was allowed to throw in a coin, too, together with a bunch of flowers. ‘I took Guarnieri [my son, then four years old] in my arms and told him to look down there [wrote Tribaldo de' Rossi, a friend of the Medici]. I gave him a coin with a lily to throw
The Strozzi Palace was begun in 1489 for Filippo Strozzi, who contrived to obtain Lorenzo de' Medici's approval for an even larger edifice than was at first proposed.
down, also a bunch of little damask roses which I had in my hand. I said to him, “Will you remember this?” “Yes,” he said. The other children then came with our servant, Tita.’
The huge Palazzo Strozzi, on the corner of Via Strozzi and Via Tornabuoni, was designed by Giuliano da Sangallo and built under the supervision of a fellow Florentine, Simone del Pollaiuolo, known, because of his enthusiastic accounts of Rome, as Il Cronaca, the Chronicler, who seems also to have created the decorative details.1 As well as these two men, Filippo Strozzi, as was common practice, employed a provveditore, or purveyor, to take care of the financial arrangements and the supply of building materials, and a foreman to supervise the one hundred or so craftsmen and labourers, stonecutters, carpenters and smiths working on the site. The annoyance to those who lived in the vicinity of the building operations was at times insupporta
ble. ‘A great number of overseers and workmen were employed,’ complained Luca Landucci, whose shop was opposite, ‘and all the streets around were filled with heaps of stones and rubbish, and with mules and donkeys carrying away the refuse and bringing gravel, making it difficult for anyone to pass along. We shopkeepers were continually exasperated by the dust and the crowds of people who collected to watch the progress of the work and by those who could not pass by with their beasts of burden.’
Provided the money was available – and Filippo Strozzi was very rich indeed – there was rarely difficulty in Florence in acquiring building materials as and when they were needed at short notice, while for finished details, like capitals and mouldings, the provveditore merely had to look into the small workshops and masons' yards with which the city abounded.
The limy sandstone known as pietra forte, with which so many of the city's buildings are faced, came from several quarries just outside the city gates as well as from one inside them, a deep quarry in what are now the Boboli Gardens. In earlier times pietra forte was used in the form of very roughly cut blocks; but when the Florentines developed a taste for rustication in the manner of the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria there was an increasing demand for dressed stone and for craftsmen with the skills to produce it.
‘The refinement of this taste for stonework through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, Professor Goldthwaite has written,
implies a considerable development of the stone industry. More and higher-skilled stoneworkers were needed, and stylistic innovations opened up new possibilities for the development of their skills that obviously had consequences of inestimable value to the craft traditions of the city. There was probably not another city in all Europe with such a large number of highly skilled stoneworkers as were found in Florence by the fifteenth century, and in fact the emigration of them throughout Italy was of considerable importance for the diffusion of Renaissance taste.
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