Magnifico (30 page)

It is tempting to read into these juvenile scribblings hints of the men and women Lorenzo’s children will become. “Please send me some figs,” the five-year-old Piero wrote to his grandmother from Trebbio, “for I like them. I mean those red ones, and some peaches with stones, and other things you know I like, sweets and cakes and other little things, as you think best.” Piero’s nagging for various gifts seems to portend the future leader who will alienate his fellow citizens by his ostentatious lifestyle and high-handed ways. When, years later, Piero insulted Michelangelo with the demeaning request that he sculpt him a snowman for the family courtyard, it was only the latest in a long string of demands from one who was used to having his every whim indulged.
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And when Lorenzo’s daughter Lucrezia passes along a request by four-year-old Giovanni for “some sugar-plums, and says that last time you sent very few,” can we detect the first signs of the appetite that will turn the future Pope Leo X into the glutton whose massive girth fills out the famous portrait by Raphael?

Family life, while often chaotic, was marked by warmth and genuine affection. Lorenzo valued Clarice for her maternal instincts, all the more because he could rarely spend as much time at home as he would have liked. A household intimate recounts one happy occasion when Clarice, having been away for a few weeks, was reunited at long last with her children:

Not surprising, Lorenzo’s daughters have come down to us as less fully realized personalities than his sons, all of whom played prominent public roles later in life. But Lorenzo’s love for them emerges even more clearly than for his sons, where a fatherly affection was mingled with concerns lest they not live up to his expectations for them.
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In this he was repeating his relations with his own parents and grandparents: relations among the men were always complicated by their heavy responsibilities and by a streak of competitiveness; only the women could give their love unstintingly, without fear that an overt display of affection would encourage weakness. Indeed one of the reasons that mothers were not more deeply involved in their sons’ education was the fear that the female influence would make them soft and unfit for the world.

As for Clarice, she—along with Lorenzo’s grandmother Contessina (until her death in 1474) and the always competent, energetic Lucrezia—continued faithfully to tend to hearth and home during Lorenzo’s frequent absences. Though not unhappy with the role assigned to her, an occasional note of reproach creeps in: “We are sending you by the bearer seventeen partridges, which your falconer took today,” she wrote to Lorenzo from Cafaggiolo, where she had been anxiously awaiting his arrival:

For all Lorenzo’s desire to spend more time with his family, he was not willing to sacrifice those recreations that were vital to his sense of well-being. Any journey was certain to be interrupted by side trips to particularly well-stocked hunting grounds, and even when Lorenzo was attending to important business he managed to find time for his favorite sports. It is perhaps telling that Clarice usually received reports of these expeditions not from Lorenzo himself but through one of his companions who was given the task of keeping her abreast of his activities. “Yesterday,” wrote Angelo Poliziano in 1475 during Lorenzo’s extended sojourn in Pisa, “though there was little wind, he went hawking, but their luck was not good, as they lost Pilato’s nice falcon, the one called
Il Mantovano
. This morning we also went into the country, but the wind again spoilt the sport. We saw some fine flights, however, and Maestro Giorgio made his peregrine falcon fly, and it returned most obediently to the lure. Lorenzo has fallen completely in love with it.”

Though Clarice would never openly accuse her husband of neglect, it is difficult to imagine she read these vivid reports without some twinge of jealousy. This letter may have been particularly hard to bear since at the very moment Lorenzo was galloping across the countryside she was confined to bed, about to deliver their fifth child. But one should not assume that Clarice was fundamentally discontented with her lot: a fifteenth-century wife knew it was her fate to remain at home while her husband pursued his many interests, and the expectation of narrow horizons made them more tolerable, if no less diminishing to the women who thus found little scope for their talents. Lorenzo, while busier than most husbands, was not untypical in his attitudes, and Clarice accepted her role with few complaints.

Only on rare occasions would she stand up to her formidable husband, though in the end it was always Lorenzo who prevailed in important matters. Their most famous quarrel came, not surprisingly, over the education of their children. Their disagreement is interesting not only for the light it sheds on their personal relationship but on the clash of cultures between the pious Roman matron and the liberal-minded Florentine. The confrontation was precipitated by a young man who would ultimately come to be regarded as the greatest poet of the age, a talented writer and scholar whom Lorenzo had discovered and invited into his home to serve as tutor to his children—Angelo Poliziano.
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Lorenzo’s friendship with Poliziano, perhaps the most profound and enduring of his life, had all the complexity and difficulty that comes from affection between two men of equal talent and ambition but of unequal status and power. Poliziano first came to Lorenzo’s attention in 1470 when the sixteen-year-old student, orphaned and impoverished, boldly introduced himself to the first citizen of Florence. “Magnificent Lorenzo,” he wrote,

This was an ambitious calling card for someone who had yet to establish his reputation, but Poliziano could count on Lorenzo’s love of ancient poetry and his appreciation of literary talent, particularly when combined with youthful enthusiasm, to gain him entrée into his glittering circle of artists and intellectuals. Poliziano clearly hit the mark, and within three years he had become an intimate member of Lorenzo’s household.

For the brilliant poet and scholar there was no better place on earth than the Medici household, with its unparalleled collections of ancient manuscripts and objets d’arts collected over three generations by men of learning and discernment and with the vast resources to indulge their passions. “Almost all other rich men support servants of pleasure, but you support priests of the muses,” Ficino wrote to Lorenzo on hearing that he had taken the young poet under his wing. “It was due to you that Homer, the high priest of the Muses, came into Italy, and someone who was till now a wanderer and a beggar has at last found with you sweet hospitality. You are supporting in your home that young Homeric scholar, Angelo Poliziano, so that he may put the Greek face of Homer into Latin colors.” Under Lorenzo’s aegis, Poliziano would come to prominence as both a scholar and a poet. The friendly literary competition he engaged in with his boss would prove fruitful for both men, each of whom pushed the other to new heights of poetic invention. In his
Silvae
, Poliziano described himself as both Lorenzo’s “client and pupil.”

Poliziano’s initial service to Lorenzo was to act as his children’s tutor; the master to whom Piero refers to in his letter watching over his shoulder as he plows through his lessons is none other than the great poet himself, who often must have thought his talents wasted in trying to cram Greek and Latin grammar into the head of his less than diligent pupil.
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He also served as Lorenzo’s unofficial secretary; it was he who took up the burden of writing to Clarice when Lorenzo was too busy or preoccupied.

For the most part Poliziano accepted his role, largely because it came with the friendship of a man he genuinely loved and admired. No one can read his poetry—including the heartbreaking verses he wrote upon his master’s death—or note his many acts of devotion without concluding that theirs was a friendship cemented by deep and abiding affection. There were times, however, when Angelo’s pride was stung by his lowly status, as in the summer of 1479 when he felt himself in exile in Cafaggiolo while Lorenzo was in Florence caught up in great affairs of state: “The children play about more than usual, and are quite restored in health,” he wrote, concluding mournfully, “I would have liked to serve you in some greater thing, but since this has fallen to my lot, I will do it gladly.”

Like Clarice, Angelo was forced to adjust to Lorenzo’s needs. Staring out the windows of the isolated villa into the rain of a Tuscan winter, he sorely felt his exile from the great events happening elsewhere. Adding to his gloom was the constant fear for Lorenzo’s safety. “I am anxiously awaiting news that the plague has ceased,” he wrote to Lorenzo, “both because I fear for you, and because I want to return to serve you. I had hoped and wished to stay with you, but since you, or rather my bad luck, has given me this position in your service, I will endure it.”

With Lorenzo tied up with pressing business and with the family shuttling from one distant villa to another, a quarrel between the lady of the house and her husband’s closest friend became almost inevitable. The breach came early in 1479 when Clarice decided to replace the materials that Poliziano was using to instruct the children in Latin. In keeping with own his humanist education, these texts were primarily drawn from the great pagan authors of antiquity, a choice that distressed the conventional Clarice, who, without her husband’s consent, substituted the morally uplifting (but to Angelo’s point of view grammatically barbarous and inelegant) Book of Psalms for Seneca and Cicero. Clarice was particularly worried about the effect pagan literature would have on the precocious and impressionable Giovanni, already being groomed by his parents for a life in the Church. In a letter of April 6, Poliziano warned Lorenzo: “As to Giovanni, you will see. His mother has changed his reading to the Psalter, of which I do not approve, and has taken him away from us. When she was away it is incredible what progress he made…. I have no other daily prayer to God than that I may some day be able to show you my fidelity, diligence, and patience, which I would gladly do, even at the expense of death.”

The quarrel was due to mutual jealousy, but there were larger issues at stake that reflected wider rifts within Renaissance culture between traditional Christian values and the new vogue for ancient learning of which Florence under Lorenzo was the leading center. When Poliziano declares that Clarice “has taken [Giovanni] away from us,” he knows he can count on Lorenzo as his ally in a struggle pitting an enlightened humanism against a narrow-minded piety. While most historians have sympathized with Poliziano, history has oddly vindicated Clarice’s more conservative views. The young Giovanni would grow up to become Pope Leo X, a cleric more noted for his cultivation than for his piety. It was this learned aesthete who sat on the throne of St. Peter when Martin Luther, railing against the corrupt, pagan idolaters in Rome, split Christendom in two. Had Clarice convinced her husband to let Giovanni spend more time studying scripture and less time on the profane delights of Ovid, might he have been more sympathetic, or at least more sensitive, to the concerns of the German reformer?

For the moment, however, the stakes seemed rather smaller, though in the context of Lorenzo’s family the contest of wills was fierce enough. Asserting her authority as mistress of the house, Clarice banished the offending poet. A few days later Poliziano wrote to Lorenzo defending his position: “I am here at Careggi, having left Cafaggiuolo by order of Madonna Clarice. I beg you allow me to tell you the reason and the way of my departure by word of mouth, for it is a long story. I think that when you have heard my tale you will agree that I was not wholly in the wrong.” But though Lorenzo sympathized with Angelo’s aims, he had no desire to antagonize his wife. In the end he tried to defuse the situation by installing his exiled friend in his villa in Fiesole, a far more congenial spot for the worldly poet than the wilds of Cafaggiolo, while he made other arrangements for the education of his sons.