Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi, commissioned for the church of Santa Maria Novella, is now in the Uffizi. According to Giorgio Vasari, the king holding out his hands towards the Holy Child's feet is Cosimo; the kneeling figure in the white robe is Giuliano, Lorenzo's brother; and the man behind him, ‘shown gratefully adoring the child’, is Cosimo's second son, Giovanni. The man on his knees in the centre foreground has been identified as Piero de' Medici; and the man on the extreme right in the saffron gown is Botticelli himself The figure in the black gown with a red stripe down the shoulder may be an idealized portrait of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
After his Primavera was finished, Botticelli was kept as busily occupied as any painter in Florence. His work was to be seen in most of Florence's principal churches, in the Ospedale degli Innocenti and in the Palazzo della Signoria. And Piero de' Medici, who encouraged Botticelli in his adaptation of classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and her rulers, remained throughout his life the artist's champion, friend and patron.
Towards the beginning of the last year of Piero's life, on 7 February 1469, a spectacular tournament was held in Florence in the Piazza Santa Croce.12 Eighteen young men from Florence's oldest and most distinguished families, wearing magnificent clothes over armour made especially for the occasion, paraded round the square, attended by pages and men-at-arms as gorgeously clothed as themselves, applauded and cheered by spectators crowded on to the roofs and balconies, and peering down from every window.
In many cities of northern Europe the tournament that followed might well have developed into a violent conflict, with much blood spilled and even lives lost. Indeed, it was at Urbino, in a tournament held to celebrate the accession of his friend Francesco Sforza as Duke of Milan, that Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, lost his right eye and the bridge of his nose, wounds which led to subsequent portraits of him, such as that by Piero della Francesca, being painted in profile.13 But in Florence the tournament was essentially an extravagant display of colour and beauty, noisy and exuberant, with trumpets blaring, drums beating and standards flying as the Queen of the Tournament, on this occasion the delicious Lucrezia Donati, was escorted to her panoplied throne.
This tournament of 1469, which cost 10, 000 ducats, was to celebrate the betrothal of Piero de' Medici's elder son, Lorenzo, to the sixteen-year-old Roman heiress, Clarice Orsini. It was not a popular match in Florence, and no doubt the Medici felt that the lavish festivities to which the citizens were treated might reconcile them to it. Customarily even the grandest families looked for wives from families within the city, immense care being taken, and great sums of money being spent, to ensure the selection of a suitable bride, with a satisfactory dowry and a healthy body, from a family preferably as high if not higher in the Florentine social scale, but certainly no lower. The Medici's decision to ally themselves with one of the greatest of Rome's families, possessor of immense estates within the Kingdom of Naples as well as in the Patrimony of St Peter, was seen in some quarters as aggrandizement of a peculiarly unacceptable kind.
Lorenzo's mother had been to Rome to see the girl covertly for herself, giving as her excuse for the journey a wish to visit her two brothers who worked in the Medici bank in Rome. Soon after her arrival in the city, she caught sight of Clarice on the way to St Peter's but neither upon that nor upon a second occasion was she able to inspect her properly, since Roman women, as she reported, were ‘always entirely covered up’. She saw enough, however, beneath the folds of the girl's lenzuolo to be reasonably well satisfied. Her hair was reddish rather than properly fair, she told her husband, and she did not carry her head elegantly as their own daughters did but poked it forward awkwardly; she also seemed to be rather shy. She was fairly tall, however, had a well-shaped bosom, a good complexion and ‘long, slim hands’.
The negotiations completed and the amount of the dowry settled, Clarice Orsini arrived in Florence in June to find that the husband to whom she had been married by proxy in Rome was a young man of almost startling ugliness. The prominent nose in his sallow and already deeply lined face was long and flattened; his heavy jaw jutted forward so far that his lower lip almost enclosed the upper; his eyebrows, black, thick and irregular, spread sideways to touch the long, lank hair, parted in the middle, which almost reached his shoulders. He spoke in a high-pitched voice, cracked and nasal; he was short-sighted and had no sense of smell. Yet Lorenzo de' Medici was a far from unattractive man. Virile, animated, clever and amusing, his company was as eagerly sought by men as by women. Like most of his contemporaries, he took what seems to modern sensibilities a most unappealing pleasure in practical jokes; he also took delight in stories of the most obscene bawdy; he was intensely competitive, determined to win or be on the winning side in the many games, from a kind of football to a sort of fives, both of which he played with great skill. Angry when he lost, he was just as disagreeable when defeated in some intellectual exercise. Yet his numerous friends, in praising what Marsilio Ficino called his ‘natural happy nature’, his joie de vivre, his limitless and infectious enthusiasm, spoke also of his essential kindliness, his capacity for deep affection. A scholar as well as a sportsman, a poet of extraordinary diversity and marvellous verve, a talented musician, a gifted amateur architect and highly perceptive connoisseur, he devoted as much energy and interest to the planning of his garden at Careggi and the rearing of his pheasants at Poggio a Caiano as he did to the study of Plato or the artistry of making love.
When it came to planning the celebration of his marriage in Florence, he brought to these arrangements, too, the application of his eager, quick and restless mind. It was understood that there must be no cheese-paring. Weddings in Florence among the rich merchant classes were expected to be public spectacles, not merely family celebrations. Several hundred guests would be entertained over a period of two or three days, and food would be provided for many more citizens who were not invited to the splendid banquets. At the grandest of these banquets the guests would be offered basins of rose-water for washing their hands before settling down to a first course comprising some exotic dish such as capons in white sauce with gilded pomegranate seeds or minced goat's liver flavoured with ginger. The tables would be covered with three or four tablecloths which, together with the used drinking cups, would be removed one by one as course succeeded course, as peacocks and pheasants were brought in to a flourish of trumpets, roebucks and sucking pigs, geese, gilded bread and silvered eels, aniseed and petal syrup, sturgeons and almond soup, jellies and coated almonds and ornate confections of sugar and marzipan in the shape of palaces and churches, family emblems and coats of arms. From time to time servants would appear with towels and more bowls of rose-water or lemon-water; and throughout the meal there would be musical interludes.
The expense of such banquets was naturally enormous: the celebrations attendant upon the marriage of Lorenzo's sister, Lucrezia, to Bernardo Rucellai cost 6,000 florins and necessitated the employment of over fifty cooks and the building of a special kitchen adjoining the Rucellai's palace. The banquet, Giovanni Rucellai declared,
was held out of doors on a platform – which filled the entire piazza opposite our house. It was hung with very beautiful cloths and tapestries – and a ceiling above to keep off the sun made of turquoise cloths turned inside out adorned across the entire width with garlands of green foliage with roses in their midst and green festoons surrounding them with four escutcheons (half with the Medici arms and half with those of the Rucellai) and with many other adornments and above all a sideboard richly loaded with silver plate.
The whole thing was generally considered to be the most beautiful and impressive display that had ever been prepared for a wedding feast and on the said platform people danced, celebrated and laid out tables for both lunch and dinner. There were present at the said festivities fifty smart and richly dressed ladies and likewise thirty young men well turned out for the occasion. Between friends and neighbours, about fifty of the most impo
rtant citizens were invited to each meal so that at the first table one hundred and seventy people sat down to dine, and at the second, third and fourth tables… five hundred were fed.
For guests, too, weddings were an expensive business. Special clothes had to be made and costly presents bought. Rich as her husband was, Filippo Strozzi's wife pretended to be ill so that she would not have to go to a grand wedding which was to be celebrated over several days. Presents brought by guests to the Rucellai wedding included all kinds of exotic fruits and sweetmeats, baskets of pomegranates and marzipan as well as quails and hares, wine and a pair of calves.
Attempts were occasionally made to enforce obedience to sumptuary laws; but with families of good standing in the city there seems to have been little interference. Most banquets were conducted with decorum. Francesco Sforza caused some surprise when at a feast given in his honour in Florence in 1445 he strolled about from table to table picking bits he fancied from the plates of other guests, accompanied by a page reciting verses in praise of his achievements; but this, those disconcerted by his behaviour were assured, was quite usual in Milan ‘among lords and great masters.’
To celebrate Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini there were to be no fewer than five banquets at the Medici Palace over a period of three days. Cartloads of food were brought in from the contado, game and poultry, fish and meat, 250 calves, 2,000 brace of capons, as well as immense casks of wine, Trebbiano and Vernaccia, sugared almonds and all kinds of fruit from the Mugello. Confectioners and cooks at the Medici Palace worked far into the night on the preparation of fanciful dishes to impress the Roman guests, while long tables were set out in the hall, on the balcony above the loggia, in the garden and in the courtyard. Following Florentine custom the guests were to be separated at these tables in accordance with their sex and age, young women at one, young men at another, the older women at the table presided over by the bridegroom's mother, the older men at his father's table in the courtyard where large copper coolers stood full of Tuscan wine. Between the banquets there were to be musical entertainments and dances, theatricals performed on a specially erected stage hung with tapestries and enclosed by curtains embroidered with the Medici and Orsini arms. There were to be speeches and songs and allegorical masques.
The bride, followed by a long procession of maids of honour and attendants, arrived on a white charger which had been given to the bridegroom by the King of Naples. She was wearing a dress of white and gold brocade; and, as she entered through the gateway, a wreath of olive leaves – traditionally hung over Florentine doorways and in windows when a wedding was to take place – was placed upon her auburn hair.
She behaved with due modesty, an onlooker conceded, overcoming her inborn Roman hauteur; but it was clear that she was nervous and ill at ease. And, as the days passed, it also became clear that she would find it difficult to accustom herself to Florentine ways. She remained a Roman at heart, haughty and petulant when she was unsure of herself, excessively proud of her ancient lineage. Yet her husband grew fond of her and she of him, though at the time of his marriage he had written dismissively, ‘I have taken a wife, or rather she was given to me.’ She bore him ten children, and seems to have accepted with equanimity both Lorenzo's romantic attachment to Lucrezia Donati and his infidelities with other young ladies, only to be expected in a man who was, in Francesco Guicciardini's words, ‘very licentious and very amorous’.
Lucrezia Donati had been ‘Queen of the Tournament’ in that spectacular display in Piazza Santa Croce four months before Clarice Orsini's arrival in Florence, when Lorenzo – in armour presented to him by the Duke of
Sprightly entertainments on one of Florence's numerous feast days, from a painting of the school of Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio.
Jousting at the quintain in the Via Larga (now the Via Cavour) from a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio. The rider was required to charge the shield of a dummy, strike it with his lance and avoid the whip which would lash at him as the dummy swung round.
A procession in the Piazza San Giovanni. The Duomo on the left lacks the façade which, designed by Emilio De Fabris, was to be built between 1871 and 1887.
Milan, riding a horse given by the Marquis of Mantua, and wearing jewel-encrusted outer garments replete with symbolic devices – had been awarded the first prize, ‘a helmet inlaid with silver and a figure of Mars on the crest’, although, as Lorenzo himself confessed in his diary, the award was by way of compliment to him as the host rather than in recognition of any unsurpassed prowess, since he had not been ‘a vigorous warrior, nor a hard hitter’.
Lucrezia Donati was also ‘Queen of the Tournament’ a few years later when another and even more expensive giostra was held in the Piazza Santa Croce in honour of Lorenzo's brother, Giuliano, who appeared before the excited crowds in a series of costumes made specially for the occasion, carrying a standard designed by Botticelli and, in a coup de spectacle, wearing a helmet created by Verrocchio in expectation of his victory. Lorenzo's earlier victory was celebrated in a charming poem, Luigi Pulci's ‘La Giostra di Lorenzo de' Medici’; Giuliano's by the ‘Stanze della Giostra di Giuliano de' Medici’, the first masterpiece by Angelo Ambrogini, known from his birthplace as Poliziano, the finest Italian poet since Boccaccio.
The months after Clarice's wedding were afterwards renowned in Florence, already famous all over Europe for its marvellous spectacles, for giostre like these, for carnivals and festivals, for parades and revels, and firework displays, for fancy-dress parties in the Mercato Vecchio, for mock battles in
Caption
The Return from the Palio by Giovanni Maria Butteri (c. 1540 – 1606). The winning horse, ‘Il Seicento’, is paraded through the streets of the city.
the Piazza Santa Croce, for naumachia on the Arno and fêtes champêtres on its banks, for circuses in the Piazza della Signoria – where, once, a mare was set loose among rampant stallions, ‘a most splendid entertainment for girls to behold’ though it ‘much displeased decent and well-behaved people' – and for parties on the bridges where couples and lines of dancers leaped and jumped about in the energetic Florentine manner.
On St John the Baptist's Day, the day of the city's patron saint, the workshops were closed and the shops decorated with banners and wreaths of foliage. In the Piazza della Signoria gilded castles, symbolizing the towns subject to Florence, were carried on wagons past the ringhiera of the Palazzo. Processions of priests and choristers, of citizens dressed as saints and of their wives as nuns, passed down the streets carrying candles, as many as twenty thousand of which were sold for this day's celebration alone. The processions on foot were followed by decorated chariots bearing the Duomo's most sacred relics, among them a nail of the Holy Cross, a thorn of the Holy Crown and the thumb of the Baptist. The Piazza del Duomo was covered with blue canopies emblazoned with silver stars; beneath it votive offerings of painted wax were taken to the Baptistery; and from the Porta al Prato down Via della Vigna Nuova, through the Mercato Vecchio and the Corso to Porta alla Croce, riderless horses, with spiked balls hanging at their sides, were sent racing helter-skelter through the city. In the afternoon there was another horse-race, like the one still held at Siena; the winner was presented with a palio, an expensive silk banner attached to a pole.
On May Day it was the custom for young men to hang branches of flowering shrubs, maii, decorated with ribbons and sugared nuts, on the doors of their sweethearts' houses, and for young girls to wear their best frocks to go dancing the rigoletto to the music of lutes in the Piazza Santa Trinita.
At night the streets were crowded with young men strolling up and down in clothes which would have horrified Dante, in ‘beautiful rose colour,’ so Marco Parenti said, ‘in violet or black, and every colour of silk and rich linings’, in pink capes and satin jackets, white stockings with silver lace, velvet caps with feathers in the brim. Carrying flaming torches, singing, shouting, blowing trumpets, they called up to the windows of their inamoratas' houses. One winter's nigh
t when the snow lay thick underfoot, a crowd of them gathered outside the palace of Marietta Strozzi, the pretty, wayward granddaughter of the great Palla Strozzi, and began to hurl snowballs at her window. ‘And what a triumph it was when one of the besiegers succeeded in flinging snow upon the maiden's face,’ a friend of Lorenzo de' Medici reported. ‘Moreover Marietta herself, so graceful and so skilled in the game, and beautiful, as everyone knows, acquitted herself with great honour.’
*
Piero de' Medici was too ill now to take part in any of Florence's pageants. He spent most of his days indoors either at his villa at Careggi or in the large, cool rooms of the Palazzo Medici, supervising, in his meticulous way, the affairs of the bank, arranging commissions for his protégés, going over progress reports for the works he had commissioned himself, the tabernacles at San Miniato al Monte and Santissima Annunziata,14 and the rebuilding of the Badia Fiesolana, examining the coins he had collected and studying the books he had bought for the family library ‘as if they were a pile of gold’. ‘One day he may simply let his eye pass along these volumes to while away the time and give recreation to the eye,’ Antonio di Pietro Averlino Filarete, the Florentine architect and sculptor was told.
The next day, then, so I am informed, he will take out some of the effigies and images of all the emperors and worthies of the past, some made of gold, some of silver, some of bronze, of precious stones or of marble and other materials which are wonderful to behold… The next day he would look at his jewels and precious stones of which he had a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved, others not. He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at these and in discussing their various excellencies. The next day, perhaps, he will inspect his vases of gold and silver and other precious material, and praise their noble worth and the skill of the masters who wrought them. All in all, when it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects he does not look at the price.15
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