Building a Dynasty

Lorenzo may never have seriously contemplated the transformation of the republic into a principate, but he did seek new kinds of personal power that he tried to bequeath to his children. Building a dynasty and protecting his family’s future, both in and out of Florence, became the overriding objectives of his last years. Patronage and favors were the daily nuts and bolts of a system of unofficial governance that put Lorenzo and his wishes in the anxious expectations of every officeholder in and out of the city and of clients and notables throughout the dominion. But it was ritual, ceremony, and the appropriation of religion by which he sought to make himself the always visible, indispensable, and yet mysterious and charismatic center of Florentine life: to place himself, in effect, in the consciousness and emotions of thousands who would never meet him, speak with him, or write him a letter. It has been argued that Lorenzo was the author, or promoter, of a “ritual revolution” in Florence.525 In the early 1470s he suppressed, or showed deadly indifference to, a variety of traditional Florentine rituals, as the government cut funding for the annual celebrations on the feast day of the Baptist, and the religious spectacles organized by confraternities for the feasts of the Annunciation,

Ascension, and Pentecost all either lapsed or suffered from inadequate support.526 Even the festivals surrounding the cult of the Magi, so important to Cosimo, were terminated.

In the place of these now neglected traditional celebrations, Lorenzo himself became the organizing principle of new ritual spaces and forms. Observers noted precisely at what time, by what route, and in what company Lorenzo made his way around the city or into the countryside. His visits to churches, monasteries, and convents were eagerly awaited and well remembered events whose every detail was recorded by the flattered and entranced religious who believed (or gave to believe) they had been visited by a sacred person. Lorenzo continued his family’s long-standing effort to claim patronage rights throughout the local church and to fuse the city’s sacred spaces with the family’s history and power. Although he lacked the funds that permitted Cosimo to rebuild churches and monasteries on a grand scale, he extended Medici patronage ties to a long list of ecclesiastical institutions in almost every religious order. He made gifts of relics and had ex-voto images of himself placed near the altars of churches that benefited from his attention or largesse.527 He joined lay confraternities, several of which entrusted him with authority to settle disputes or rewrite their statutes, tasks that he delegated to others but which were remembered as the bestowal of his benevolence and wisdom. In the confraternity of San Paolo, whose membership included politically prominent citizens, Lorenzo played an active role over many years. His other confraternity memberships were usually honorary, although the honor was more often felt as Lorenzo’s gift to them than theirs to him.528 Even as he limited his appearances to particularly significant occasions, he could have a powerful effect on these lay religious associations. Originally a popular neighborhood confraternity, Sant’Agnese in Drago Verde in the Oltrarno was radically transformed by what has been described as a “Medicean infiltration.” Lorenzo joined in the early 1470s, and in the 1480s a long list of his closest associates, including his secretary Niccolo Michelozzi and the chancellor Scala,

Also joined and began monopolizing confraternal offices. Lorenzo dominated the association’s charitable work, especially the annual distribution of bread to the poor, which henceforth became known as his own philanthropic gesture. In 1488 the company ignored its age requirements and elected Lorenzo’s seventeen-year-old son Piero among its captains; the next year it bowed to Piero’s wish to perform a Pentecost play in the church of the Carmine, where Sant’Agnese met, declaring that, since his family was the confraternity’s “benefactor,” its captains “wished to provide him with every assistance,” granting him “complete authority and power” to “make use of the said company and all its possessions” for the festival.529 In such ways, Lorenzo co-opted and controlled confraternities, once viewed with suspicion as potential sources of political intrigue but now docilely dependent on him for honor, subsidies, and favor.

Lorenzo’s attention to youth confraternities and working-class festive associations marks a significant innovation in Medici strategy. Youth associations appeared in Florence early in the fifteenth century, and their increasing popularity induced Pope Eugenius to impose regulations and ecclesiastical supervision. Boys’ confraternities, soon affiliated with church schools, engaged in prayer and laud singing, attended orations, and performed plays.530 Increasing emphasis on youthful innocence in the community’s self-representation merged with the cult of Lorenzo’s own youthful persona. He participated in these associations, enrolled his sons, and even wrote a religious play, the Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo, performed by the company of San Giovanni Evangelista which included his youngest son, Giuliano.531 Partly as a result of Lorenzo’s support, boys’ groups became perhaps the most prominent actors in Florentine processional life: a development that links Lorenzo’s Florence with Savonarola’s across the political boundary of 1494. Lorenzo also supported festive associations of workers, called potenze, some based in neighborhoods, others in occupational groups, and consisting mostly of textile laborers who had been driven from the political stage a century earlier and now reappeared in festive garb. In the early 1470s, Lorenzo permitted the potenze to emerge more openly and display their fanciful division of the city into festive “kingdoms” ruled by “emperors,” “kings” and “nobles,” such as the “Kingdom of the Millstone” and the “Grand Monarchy of the Red City.” Potenze exchanged elaborate ritualized visits and organized pageants that sometimes parodied the solemn representation of the social order enshrined in older communal rituals. The government authorized associations of both silk weavers (1481) and wool beaters (1488), who formed a company that was part confraternity, with a hospital for their poorer members, and part festive potenza. Lorenzo broke with two centuries of official repression of workers’ associations in extending his patronage to these groups and allowing them a place on Florence’s ritual stage. In 1489, for example, he made a loan of plates and table service (on which the Medici arms were of course prominently displayed) to the king of the potenza of Camaldoli in the Oltrarno for the group’s May Day festivities.532 As he restricted ritual for the political classes, Lorenzo cultivated previously marginalized groups of youths and workers: another tacit admission of the precariousness of his hold on the upper classes.

For a decade after the Pazzi catastrophe, Lorenzo suppressed most civic festivals, and when he cautiously permitted their resumption in the late 1480s their character had changed. In 1491 the San Giovanni festival featured a re-creation, with fifteen wagons drawn by fifty pairs of oxen, of the triumph of the Roman general and consul Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the conqueror of Macedonia who returned to Rome with immense booty. Although Vasari attributes the design of the triumphal wagons to the artist Francesco Granacci, a contemporary chronicler recorded that the whole pageant was Lorenzo’s conception and that it was meant to highlight, through his identification with the Roman hero, Lorenzo’s beneficence, popularity, and valor in protecting the republic against its enemies. It was, to say the least, a remarkably incongruous addition to the celebration of the feast day of the Baptist.533 In place of the old community-based religious pageants, he promoted spectacles that marked the transition from festival to theater and sponsored scripted plays (including his own), saints’ lives and Latin comedies, performed by youth companies instead of the adult confraternities that once staged traditional pageants. Lorenzo’s direct involvement (reminiscent of his determination to control every aspect of patronage and politics) reveals an obsessive insistence on defining and controlling the city’s festivals according to his tastes and interests, and probably also some apprehension about allowing people to manage them themselves.

Lorenzo’s aim of elevating the Medici above all other Florentines required the one further crucial step of finally getting a cardinal who would give the family a power base independent of the vicissitudes of Florentine politics. To this end, and also to revive the bank’s fortunes, he needed to re-establish good relations with the papacy, and the opportunity came with the election of Innocent VIII in 1484. After 1487, when Lorenzo married his daughter Maddalena to Innocent’s son, Franceschetto Cybo, he regained some of the old Medici influence in Rome. Papal accounts and contracts were either restored or given anew to the Medici bank, which gave Lorenzo access to funds that he used in part to finance his new son-in-law’s territorial ambitions.534 That same year Lorenzo arranged Piero’s marriage to Alfonsina of a Neapolitan branch of the Orsini. Since Lorenzo’s wife was a Roman Orsini, and her brother was still Florence’s archbishop, Piero’s marriage solidified ties to a noble family with influence in both major states to the south.

But the greatest benefit of the alliance with Innocent was the pope’s acquiescence in Lorenzo’s ambition for his middle son Giovanni, who, in 1487, was only twelve years old. Even in an age in which the church was widely accepted as an arena for powerful families to pursue wealth and political aggrandizement, Lorenzo’s zeal on behalf of so young a child raised eyebrows. Whether he believed that his family’s ambition for princely status could only be realized through the church, or whether he thought, more modestly, that control in Florence would be strengthened by a family cardinal able to protect the bank and keep the friendship of successive popes, is a matter for speculation. In the early 1480s he tried to get Giovanni’s foot in some ecclesiastical door: a benefice that might be the first rung of a ladder leading to a cardinalate. In 1484 Lorenzo even had troops seize the abbey of Passignano in order to install Giovanni as abbot.535 He got both his Neapolitan and Milanese allies to press Innocent to grant Giovanni possession of prestigious monasteries in their territories. By 1487 negotiations were underway for a cardinalate, linked to those for the marriage of Lorenzo’s daughter to Innocent’s son, and in 1489 Innocent finally consented to make the thirteen-year-old Giovanni a cardinal. Because of the boy’s age, the pope wanted the appointment kept secret and insisted that he wait three years before being consecrated in the office. Lorenzo, craving the political benefit of immediate publicity, could not wait, much to Innocent’s annoyance. When Giovanni went to Rome, his father wrote him a letter impressing upon him that this was “the greatest honor ever bestowed on our house,” urging him “to become a good churchman” and “to love the honor and estate of the Holy Church and Apostolic See more than anything in the world,” and adding: “But even with this reservation, you will not lack opportunity to help the city of Florence and our family.”536

In lavish celebrations the Florentines indulged Lorenzo’s need to hear expressions of joy and reverence for the holy youth who now represented and protected Florence in Rome, despite the huge sums the deal with Innocent had cost and the well-founded suspicion that much of the money had come from the public treasury. No one knew exactly how much: according to Piero Parenti, after the Medici were exiled a review of communal accounts showed that Lorenzo had taken 100,000 florins for Giovanni’s cardinalate;76 Giovanni Cambi thought it was 50,000, and Alamanno Rinuccini 200,000.77 Widespread anger after the expulsion over Lorenzo’s misappropriation of communal funds suggests that not everyone was as deliriously happy as Lorenzo wanted to believe when he himself wrote about the 1489 celebrations that there had never been “a truer and more universal happiness” in Florence. But it was not a moment to spoil the party. After all, a Florentine cardinal could indeed do good things for his city. Three years later, when the still adolescent but now consecrated cardinal returned home six weeks after his father’s death, he was given a triumphal entry of the sort usually reserved for noble foreigners.78 No one knew, of course, that just two years later the Medici would be in exile, or that, when they returned in 1512, cardinal Giovanni would be just months away from becoming Pope Leo X. Whether he ever fulfilled Lorenzo’s admonition to “help the city of Florence” was later much debated, but he certainly helped his family.

In the almost quarter-century of Lorenzo’s leadership, relations between the regime and the ottimati lurched from crisis to crisis, in large part because Lorenzo sought a kind of power alien to their notions of aristocratic rule. Although the regime seemed to emerge stronger after each crisis, in the sense that controls became tighter and opposition voices weaker, its hold on the ottimati became more fragile. This underlying instability left the city deeply divided and ill-prepared to face the suddenly more dangerous world that began in 1494. Beneath the apparent pacification of the 1480s, many ottimati feared that things had gone too far, and two years after Lorenzo died they brought down the regime. What had taken sixty years to build, defend, and consolidate collapsed in a matter of days. Decades later, the pre-1494 generation came to be seen as a time of enlightened rule, domestic tranquility, and cultural splendor. The culture was indeed splendid, but behind the facade of tranquility was a brittle regime that did not trust its own citizens, and least of all the ottimati.

Parenti, Storia, p. 198.

Brown, Medici in Florence, p. 177n.

Trexler, Public Life, pp. 456-7; Carew-Reid, Les fFtes florentines, pp. 171-2.