Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City

by Paul Strathern

  Lorenzo does not seem to have realised quite how deeply Portinari was involved in working against Medici interests. After the closing of the Bruges branch, the ageing Portinari was left facing large personal debts. Lorenzo felt that these were at least in part the responsibility of the Medici, and thus conferred diplomatic status upon the banker so that he could return home to Florence without constraint from his creditors. A few years later Portinari died, but in a final twist his son refused to accept his inheritance – for as he did not have diplomatic status, this would have left him open to prosecution by agents despatched to recover his father’s large debts.

  Thus, partly through mismanagement, and partly through Lorenzo the Magnificent’s neglect, the Medici bank was now entering what appeared to be a period of terminal decline. The income derived by the Medici from this source continued to dwindle, but Lorenzo saw no reason to reverse this state of affairs. On the contrary: a family with ambitions to become one of the royal houses of Europe would not wish to be seen as mere bankers. And by the mid-1480s Lorenzo’s income was no longer dependent upon currency transactions or financing commercial enterprises. He had identified himself so totally with Florence that he had come to regard its exchequer as his own – both as his income, and to dispense with as he saw fit in the city’s interests. To his mind, Florence’s interests were now inseparable from Medici interests: when one flourished, so did the other.

  However, there remained certain technical differences. Although the purchase of benefices for young Giovanni de’ Medici may have been subsidised by the Florentine exchequer, through Miniati’s financial sleight of hand the rich incomes provided by these benefices went directly to their Medici owner – a subtle distinction of which the people of Florence remained ignorant. It was now that Lorenzo the Magnificent chanced his most daring request of his new friend Innocent VIII. In 1484 he broached the subject of his son Giovanni being made a cardinal. Even with the advent of institutionalised simony, such a request was unprecedented. The College of Cardinals was the most important and influential body in the Church, second only in power and prestige to the pope himself. Indeed, it was the College of Cardinals that was responsible for electing the new pope – in the secret conclave held in the Vatican after the death of the incumbent. Here, isolated from outside influences, the different factions would bargain for votes, occasionally joining in prayer for divine guidance. Those who supported the victorious candidate could expect favours and rewards, as well as the possibility of exerting influence upon papal policy. Lorenzo the Magnificent was now suggesting that his eleven-year-old son Giovanni be made a member of this venerable assembly. In fact, the boy was not even eleven: in his effort to persuade Innocent VIII, Lorenzo added two years to his son’s age. If Giovanni became a cardinal, this meant that by the time any other young candidates entered the College of Cardinals, he would be well established: a senior, experienced and well-connected operator within the group. A pope-maker, no less – well positioned at some later stage to become pope himself. But Innocent VIII would not be persuaded; such an appointment was liable to call his entire programme of simony into question, by reducing it to an absolute mockery. Lorenzo was irritated and disappointed; Innocent VIII assured him that he should bide his time, but Lorenzo was determined to persist in his campaign by more covert means.

  Meanwhile, in order to secure the Medici succession in Florence as far as he could, Lorenzo arranged in 1488 for his seventeen-year-old son and heir Piero to marry into another branch of his mother’s aristocratic Roman family, the Orsini. The father of Piero’s bride Alfonsina Orsini had died fighting for King Ferrante of Naples, who had thereupon taken her under his wing. Her marriage to Piero de’ Medici was to reinforce a strategic alliance: it would serve the multiple purpose of strengthening the Medici’s claim to aristocratic status, as well as allying Florence with Naples, and further cementing their links with the powerful Orsini in Rome. With the Medici backed by such powerful friends, any enemies would be forced to think twice before attempting to take over Florence.

  Besides attempting to secure the Medici family succession, Lorenzo had also done his best to secure the Medici intellectual heritage. To this end, he had appointed his grandfather’s favourite intellectual, Marsilio Ficino, as a canon of Florence Cathedral, a sinecure that enabled the hunchbacked classicist to continue with his philosophical works unhindered by financial worries. Ficino’s attempt to reconcile Platonism with accepted Christian belief had by now led him to write a number of commentaries on Plato, which can be seen as original works in their own right. Notable amongst these was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, the celebrated work in which the Ancient Greek philosopher describes a banquet where Socrates and others explore the nature of love, from its ideal aspects to more scurrilous homoerotic examples. Plato asserted that love, with its attraction to the form of beauty, led us to the philosophical quest for wisdom. (It is not difficult to recognise how such ideas affected Botticelli, and how he embodied them in works like Primavera.) Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium is called De Amore (About Love), and takes the form of a similar banquet at one of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s villas, which is attended by members of the Palazzo Medici intellectual circle. In this work, Ficino also discusses homerotic love, a subject that was certainly not foreign to Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano and others present. On a more elevated plane, it elaborates Neoplatonic ideas of how life is created by love, the world is sustained by love, and how creation attains its highest wisdom and returns to its ideal by means of love of beauty. However, in this and other similar works Ficino had been influenced by the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus and its hermetic aspects, as well as by thinkers of an even more metaphysical and magical inclination. Ficino was drawn by temperament to such esoteric ideas and wished to believe what they said. (The arrival of Pico to study with him in Florence was attributed by Ficino to the astrological omens on the day in question.)

  Pico della Mirandola was for his part also attracted to the more esoteric and metaphysical aspects of Ficino’s teaching. This chimed with Pico’s attempt to draw together all regions and philosophies, in the search for a universal truth that underlay them. This attempt at reconciling disparate philosophies and religions would come to be known as syncretism.fn2

  Interestingly, it took a mind as perceptive as that of Savonarola to surmise with some degree of accuracy the direction of Pico’s thought during the period after he arrived in Florence in 1484. Years later, referring to the occasions when Pico visited him in his cell at the monastery of San Marco and they spent their time ‘piously philosophising’ together, Savonarola would recall his impressions of Pico in a sermon:

  He was wont to be conversant with me and to break to me the secrets of his heart: in which I perceived that he was by private inspiration called by God to religion. Wherefore he purposed oftentimes to obey this inspiration and follow his calling. Yet not being suitably disposed for such great benefices of God, or restrained by weakness of the flesh (he was a man of delicate physique), he shrank from the labour. Or he blithely thought he had no need of [the Christian] religion.3

  There would seem to be much truth in these observations concerning Pico’s ambivalence. Beneath his wish to reconcile all thought and belief was a longing to believe in a single universal certainty, yet he could not bring himself to accept that this might be God, for he was unwilling to submit himself to the intellectual sacrifices and spiritual discipline that this might involve.

  However, neither the intellectual delights of the Palazzo Medici nor the profound spiritual questioning of Savonarola could long retain a mind as restless as that of Pico della Mirandola, and in July 1485 he left Florence to set out once more on his quest for truth in all its philosophical manifestations. As his nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico, wrote concerning ‘his studye in phylosophe & devynyte’, in the biography he published just four years after Pico’s death (translated into English by Sir Thomas More):

  As a desyrous searcher of the
secretes of nature he left these common trodden pathes and gave hym self hole to speculation & philosophy as well humane as devyne. For the purchasing whereof (after the manner of Plato and the Pythagorean scholar Appollonius) he scrupulously sought out all the famous doctours of his tyme, visiting studiously all the universities and scholes not onely through Italy but also through Fraunce.4

  After leaving Florence, Pico travelled to Paris, where the great Aristotelian scholar Thomas Aquinas had taught at the Sorbonne two centuries previously, establishing his version of scholasticism as the prevalent Christian orthodoxy. Even in Pico’s time, Paris remained the great intellectual centre of Europe – though only where medieval learning was concerned. By now Italian centres such as Florence and Padua were establishing themselves in the forefront of the new learning: the revival of classical studies, the new humanism and proto-science. Having imbibed scholasticism from its purest source, attending lectures by the professors at the Sorbonne, Pico seems to have set off back for Italy some time late in 1485.

  Here he returned for a while to a villa that he had built for himself just outside Mirandola, a home that held little attraction for him, judging from his faint praise of this residence as being ‘pleasant enough, considering the nature of the place and district’.5 This would seem to suggest that Pico’s wanderlust was inspired by more than the search for knowledge, and in fact he had good reason to feel uncomfortable at home. His oldest brother had apparently resented their father’s will, which divided his estates amongst all the brothers, and had even imprisoned another of Pico’s brothers in his dungeon at Mirandola – until the pope himself intervened, ordering him to desist from such behaviour.

  During this brief residence at his villa outside town, Pico played host to Flavio Mithridates, the celebrated Jewish-Italian humanist scholar, who extended Pico’s understanding of Arabic and began teaching him the rudiments of Aramaic, the ancient Semitic language of the early Talmud and parts of the Old Testament, as well as that probably spoken by Jesus.

  Some time during the winter of 1485–6 Pico left his villa outside Mirandola and returned to Florence, where he was pleased to renew his close friendship with Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano, Ficino and others at the Palazzo Medici. Here, inspired by the humanist philosophy and more liberal mores of Lorenzo’s intellectual circle, he composed a treatise on love, which is usually known as the Commento. This was the twenty-three-year-old Pico’s first important original philosophical work. In it, he argued that the early classical and pagan gods should be seen as embodiments of more abstract metaphysical ideas, such as those of Plato. Seen in this light, the goddess Venus thus became the abstract ideal of beauty. (Here again, Botticelli springs to mind.) Pico’s Commento was in part a criticism of Ficino’s De Amore, which Pico regarded as too poetical and imprecise, especially in its view of metaphysical and physical love as just varying degrees of the same impulse. Pico insisted on the separation of divine love, in its cosmic and Platonic forms, from the psychological process involved in secular physical love.

  This latter subject was one in which the apparently effete scholar, for all his hours of obsessive study, was well practised. Pico was certainly bisexual. He seems at some point to have become more than poetically involved with Poliziano (whose effusive description of him as ‘a hero on whom nature had lavished all the endowments both of body and mind’ may well date from this period), and there are indications that Pico may also have formed a similar attachment to the bisexual Lorenzo the Magnificent. However, despite Pico’s slightly effeminate appearance, there was no denying that there was a strong heterosexual element to his nature, and it was this that would get him into trouble.

  Some time early in 1486, Pico became romantically involved with a young woman called Margherita, the wife of an ageing grocer from Arezzo. When the grocer died, Margherita was compelled by the family of her former husband to marry a local tax official, Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici, a distant relative of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Upon hearing of this, some time in May 1486, Pico set out on his horse for Arezzo, in the foothills of the Apennines forty miles south-east of Florence, accompanied by twenty mounted armed men. They met up with Margherita, who was waiting at the city gate, and rode off with her. The local authorities at once sent a detachment of the city’s armed guards in hot pursuit. When they caught up with Pico and his men there was a violent fracas, during which fifteen men were said to have been killed. (This must have been a particularly hot-headed encounter: the carefully choreographed battles of the period in Italy often resulted in fewer casualties than this, before one of the opposing mercenary armies decided to flee the field.)

  Pico and his secretary, along with Margherita, managed to escape from this bloody encounter, but their pursuers caught up with them at the village of Marciano in the hills twenty miles to the north of Arezzo, where they were detained and the two men were later imprisoned. When news of this incident reached Florence, it proved a considerable embarrassment to Lorenzo the Magnificent. He had no wish to abandon his close friend Pico in his time of need, even though he was evidently in the wrong; yet at the same time the honour of the Medici family was at stake and had to be seen to be protected. Lorenzo reached a verdict that demonstrated to the full his diplomatic skills. He ordered that Margherita should be returned to her husband forthwith, as it was impossible to believe that any wife would be unfaithful to her Medici husband; in which case, there was no further reason to detain Pico, who was to be released. The entire incident was blamed on the machinations of Pico’s secretary, whose fate remains unclear. Lorenzo’s friends at the Palazzo Medici appear to have regarded the whole thing as something of a joke, which was commemorated by Ficino, who wrote a poetic Apologus in which the affair was likened to a classical scene in which a nymph was raped by one of the gods.

  But this embarrassment caused by Pico della Mirandola to Lorenzo the Magnificent was as nothing compared with what was to follow. And this would prove no laughing matter, either to Lorenzo or to the intellectuals at the Palazzo Medici. It is no exaggeration to claim that the ensuing events in Pico’s life would be instrumental in transforming the intellectual climate of the Renaissance, and would later lead to its eclipse in the city of Florence.

  fn1 Giovanni Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s trusted and well-connected uncle, manager of the Rome branch of the Medici bank.

  fn2 This derives from the Greek words syn, meaning ‘together’, and kretismos meaning ‘Cretans’, referring to the habit of the Ancient Cretans, who habitually fought each other, but came together (syncretismos) when faced with a common enemy. Syncretism would not become a recognised philosophy until the seventeenth century, when it attempted to reconcile the Protestant and Catholic religions. Pico della Mirandola would be seen as one of syncretism’s leading modern forerunners.

  5

  Pico’s Challenge

  PICO’S SYNCRETISM, TO say nothing of his unprecedented intellectual ambitions, now reached their apotheosis in the form of 900 theses which he drew up, claiming that they dealt with, and answered, all questions in philosophy and theology. These were taken from Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew sources, and were intended as the central axioms for a new universal knowledge, as well as a system of belief that incorporated the truth of all faiths. This was to be the foundation of the one true religion, no less.

  Pico’s Nine Hundred Theses contained many deep insights into the human condition, which remain of interest to this day. Take, for instance, his assertion: ‘Because no one’s opinions are quite what he wills them to be, no one’s beliefs are quite what he wills them to be.’ The implication here is that elements of our deepest beliefs arise from beyond our conscious, willing mind. In other words, we are something more than simply rational beings. This insight, and the questions it raises, would echo through the centuries, achieving a particular relevance in the modern era with the writings of Freud on the unconscious, as well as contemporary attempts to define consciousness. Others among Pico’s theses have a similar pre
science: ‘When the soul acts, it can be certain of nothing but itself.’ This uncannily anticipates the celebrated conclusion that was reached one and a half centuries later by the French philosopher René Descartes – his ‘I think, therefore I am’, which many see as the starting point of modern philosophy. Indeed, Pico’s entire project bears a striking similarity to Descartes’ philosophic aim, which sought the undeniable foundation upon which human knowledge rested, as well as seeking to establish the proper method for scientific thinking.

  Pico’s Nine Hundred Theses were in many ways the nearest the Renaissance came to producing an original philosophy. Renaissance art, literature and thought would be characterised by humanism. Yet humanism was not in itself a coherent philosophy, more an attitude that pervaded all the arts and humanities.fn1 Philosophically speaking, the Renaissance was a period of rediscovery of classical thinkers such as Plato, some forgotten works of Aristotle, Lucretius, Plotinus and the like, which awoke a new enthusiasm for such secular thought. This may have released Renaissance thinkers from the strictures of a stale and hidebound Scholasticism, yet in doing so it overwhelmed their imagination and originality, to such an extent that they would produce little new philosophic thought of their own.