The Ugly Renaissance (10 page)

As one of the dominant forces within the guild structure, Jacopo Salviati wielded colossal influence not only over the workings of the Florentine economy as a whole but also over every stage of the
David
’s creation. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, as he worked on the statue,
Michelangelo was every bit in thrall to the Florentine guilds as if he had been an active member of one himself. His monumental statue was commissioned by the city’s most powerful
arte
; his other patrons were key players in the major guilds; his skilled assistants had their lives confined by guild regulations; and his unskilled workers were kept close to poverty by the guild structure. As an artist—even a
free
(non-guild) artist—Michelangelo was subject to the guilds and tacitly obliged to perpetuate the norms that they laid down for Florence’s economic life.

P
IERO
S
ODERINI
: P
OLITICAL
I
NEQUALITIES

If Jacopo Salviati embodied the economic conditions on which the
David
depended, his good friend and colleague
Piero Soderini encapsulated the political influences that were brought to bear on Michelangelo during the completion of the project.

A wizened and grim-faced figure,
Soderini was the head of the Florentine state. Having spent much of his life in government service, he had been seen as a safe pair of hands after Savonarola’s fall and had been appointed
gonfaloniere di giustizia
for life as a means of bringing some semblance of stability to the shattered city. Although far from perfect, he ruled wisely and justly and appears to have let a strong sense of public morality guide his judgment in all things. He had seen the vicissitudes of the last Medici and the Savonarolan regime and was determined to ensure that the city would enjoy what would be its last taste of “popular” government as fully as possible.

Acutely aware of the propagandistic potential of art,
Soderini saw that commissions such as the
David
could play a vital role in fostering the civic spirit that he wished to serve as a bastion of public life for generations to come. This was certainly not a new idea. Almost two centuries earlier, comparable circumstances had been made visible in
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s
Allegory of Good and Bad Government
in the Sala
dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A rich and complex allegorical celebration of republican virtues, Lorenzetti’s frescoes testify to his acute awareness of the tenor of contemporary political thought and to an ongoing dialogue between artist and communal officials. But given the political situation he had inherited, Soderini was keen to take special care with the
David
and involved himself closely with Michelangelo’s project from the very beginning. Although originally commissioned by the
Opera del Duomo, the statue was ultimately to serve as a celebration of republican “liberty.” In its final position, outside the main doors of the Palazzo Vecchio, it was intended to be a potent symbol not merely of Florence’s independence from external aggressors but also of the city’s capacity for autonomous self-government. In Soderini’s eyes, the
David
was an emblem of the strength and resilience of a city unified under the banner of republican freedom.

Like modern democracies, the Republic over which Soderini presided was divided into two parts. The executive was headed by the
Signoria, which comprised eight priors—each of whom served a single two-month term—and Soderini himself, the
gonfaloniere di giustizia
—who usually served for a similarly brief tenure, but, in Soderini’s case, for life. Thus constituted, the nine-man committee was invested with tremendous clout. As
Gregorio Dati observed some seventy years earlier, the Signoria was normally entrusted simply with the execution of the laws but had “
unlimited power and authority” and could do whatever it thought fit in times of emergency.

Soderini’s Signoria was, however, neither the sole repository of executive authority nor an organ of centralized policy formation. There were a host of other bodies that made up the executive. In addition to the sixteen
gonfalonieri
who advised the Signoria, there was the Dodici buoni uomini; the Dieci di balìa, which handled defense in times of war; the Otto di guardia, which oversaw the internal security of the republic; and a multitude of other magistracies that dealt with more highly specific needs, such as the supply of grain and the maintenance of bridges.

Supporting the Signoria and the other executive committees was a burgeoning bureaucracy of highly educated humanists. Heading this growing body of professional administrators was the office of chancellor—previously filled by luminaries such as
Coluccio Salutati and
Leonardo Bruni—but there were also a vast number of other posts,
many of them filled by men who had an active hand in civic art, several of whom rose to quite spectacular prominence. Particularly prized by Soderini was the second chancellor,
a rising young man by the name of
Niccolò Machiavelli.

Legislation, on the other hand, was handled differently. In Soderini’s time, the power to pass laws belonged to the
Consiglio Maggiore.
Consisting of a staggering three thousand members, the
consiglio
comprised roughly 20 percent of the adult male population over twenty-nine and was responsible for all decisions regarding the levying of taxes, the imposition of forced loans, and the conduct of foreign relations.

At the time he took Michelangelo under his wing, Soderini was proud to boast that Florence had the most “popular” government it had ever experienced. To modern eyes, it has an almost democratic feel to it. The sheer size of the Consiglio Maggiore appeared to guarantee a measure of popular participation, while the short periods for which executive offices were held ensured
a high turnover of personnel that theoretically opened government up to the population at large. It was perhaps no surprise that speaking with regard to the reforms which paved the way for the early-sixteenth-century constitution,
Leonardo Bruni had earlier declared:

Equal liberty exists for all … ; the hope of winning public honors and ascending [to office] is the same for all, provided they possess industry and natural gifts and lead a serious-minded and respected way of life; for our commonwealth requires
virtus
and
probitas
in its citizens. Whoever has these qualifications is thought to be of sufficiently noble birth to participate in the government of the republic … This, then, is true liberty, this equality in a commonwealth: not to fear violence or wrong-doing from anybody, and to enjoy equality among citizens before the law and in the participation in public office.

By the same token, the decentralized, almost byzantine character of Florentine government seemed to bristle with checks and balances.

In contrast to the city’s past, there is little doubt that the Florentine government was exceptionally open and broad-based in 1501, and there is good reason to see the
David
as an expression of a genuine commitment to liberty.

For much of the fourteenth century, Florence’s constitutional history had been characterized by long-standing tensions between “popular” and “oligarchic” tendencies that manifested stark socioeconomic inequalities and often had the effect of worsening the broader position of the
popolo minuto
. Government had been the exclusive preserve of the guilds. Every officeholder was chosen both by and from among the guild hierarchy, with significantly more influence given to the major guilds. This automatically excluded the thousands of laborers and artisans whose economic function debarred them from guild membership. Even then, being a member of an important guild was no guarantee of being able to take part in communal government. Elections as we know them today simply did not exist. Within each guild, a committee of scrutiny determined who was eligible to be considered for office, and the members who passed muster were subsequently put forward for election by sortition (choice by lot). Of the five to six thousand men who were theoretically eligible to take part in communal government in the late fourteenth century, perhaps as few as 30 percent ever held office. Given that the priors, the
buonuomini
, and the
gonfalonieri
were elected for two, three, and four months, respectively, the number of people who held these positions was remarkably small.

With scrutiny and sortition in the hands of a very narrow mercantile elite, not only was government the plaything of the wealthy, but politics was also exposed to endemic corruption. Manipulating networks of business and patronage, ultra-wealthy guildsmen worked behind the scenes to influence the selection of officeholders by using a mixture of bribery, nepotism, and threats.
In 1361, eight people were convicted of offering bribes, while four were found guilty of accepting backhanders, and the whiff of comparable scandals was scented again in 1364 and 1367. In their chronicle, Matteo and
Filippo Villani frequently complained of bribes being offered to committee members for favor at the scrutiny itself, and this in turn had a damaging effect on attitudes toward public office. As
Matteo Villani wrote,

Citizens of simple mind and newly acquired citizenship, through bribery, gifts, and great expense, manage to get their names regularly included in the bags at the triennial scrutinies. There are so many of this sort that the good, wise, and prudent citizens of long-standing reputation are rarely able to attend to the affairs of
the commune and can never support them fully … Now each person regards the two months that he spends in the high office in terms of his own advantage, to favor his friends or harm his enemies with the influence of the government.

With its narrow social basis and in-built tendency toward corruption, the government of early-Renaissance Florence was inevitably vulnerable to internal weaknesses. The city was rent by factional conflict and violence, a fact that is attested to most eloquently by
Dante’s exile at the hands of his factional rivals, the
Black Guelfs, in 1302. But most important, the oligarchic nature of Florentine government aroused resentment from those whose occupation or status precluded them from taking part in the political process. It is no surprise that the greatest unrest was found among the propertyless wage laborers who were so systematically excluded from the guilds. In addition to being a protest against the appalling conditions in which semi- and unskilled cloth workers were forced to work, the
Ciompi Revolt was also a struggle for political representation. The Ciompi sought to establish a more equitable distribution of political power through a broad-based regime, albeit unsuccessfully.

Reform was inevitable. In 1382, a more overtly “popular” regime was instituted that would lay the foundations for the political world familiar to Michelangelo. The guilds were removed from the picture, eligibility for political office was widened dramatically, scrutinies were handled by a centralized body, and a conscious effort to cultivate a “civic” spirit emerged. In the decades that followed,
parlamenti
—large, public gatherings of the whole citizen body—were occasionally summoned to make major political decisions, and the
Consiglio Maggiore was eventually established as an alternative to the smaller, more restricted councils that had gone before. The “people” (if one can speak in such terms) seemed finally to have achieved a share of power.

But appearances were deceptive. Far from being designed to broaden participation in a truly “republican” government, the reforms of 1382 were intended merely to secure the interests of the same narrow mercantile elites and to limit the incidence of unrest by creating the illusion of popular consent. The same small group of exceptionally rich individuals continued to dominate the course of Florentine politics—although
seldom in the public view—while the poor and the unskilled remained on the very fringes of the political process.

Far from being an independent legislative body, the
Consiglio Maggiore was heavily constrained. Not only was it permitted to vote only on measures introduced by the
Signoria, but it was also forbidden to debate motions except in extremely specific, and very rare, circumstances. So too, the
parlamenti
were susceptible to open demagoguery, rabble-rousing, and bribery. More important, while the number of people eligible for executive office expanded, new—and much more nefariously inventive—restrictions were introduced to limit the freedom of the centralized committee of scrutiny. A whole slew of electoral controls (
accoppiatori
,
balìe
, and
borsellini
) were brought in to ensure that the “right” people were selected for office.

The Republic retained its tendency toward oligarchy throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although they seldom held office in person, the
Medici family came to overshadow Florentine politics from 1434 until the 1492 expulsion of
Piero de’ Medici by manipulating both networks of patronage and the electoral controls that had been created at the end of the previous century. As Michelangelo would have witnessed during his time in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household, this one family decided who was in and who was out and succeeded in establishing itself as the head of a ruthlessly powerful oligarchy. Indeed, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later
Pope Pius II) observed that Lorenzo’s father, Cosimo, was “
not so much a citizen as the master of his city.” “
Political councils,” Piccolomini noted, “were held at his house; the magistrates he nominated were elected; he was king in all but name.”

This is not to say that such a
reggimento
(regime) was without its critics. On the one hand, the Medici oligarchy inevitably generated enmities from families envious of their influence. It was precisely this that catalyzed
the bloody but abortive
Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, in the course of which Lorenzo’s brother, the rather handsome Giuliano, was stabbed to death in Santa Maria del Fiore and the ringleader,
Jacopo de’ Pazzi, was defenestrated by an angry mob. On the other hand, there were those who were ideologically opposed to the dominance of so limited an oligarchy and equated the Medici
reggimento
with tyranny. In his
Memorie
,
Marco Parenti reported that
Cosimo de’ Medici had imposed “
a sort of servitude” on the city that was contrary to liberty, and later the
former Medici loyalist
Alamanno Rinuccini launched a vitriolic attack on Lorenzo for precisely the same reasons in his
Dialogus de libertate
. This line of attack was subsequently pursued by
Girolamo Savonarola.
Outlining his views in the
Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze
(1498), Savonarola inveighed against the “tyranny” of individual rulers who have regard only for their own interests, and contrasted this strongly with the “civil government” that Florence had (he believed) enjoyed in the period 1382–1434.