The Ugly Renaissance (27 page)

Long experience had taught the Sforza and the Medici that they needed each other. In 1440, Galeazzo Maria’s father, Francesco, had seized control of
Milan from the Visconti with Florentine backing, backing that Cosimo had been instrumental in arranging. And only the year before, in 1458, Cosimo’s coup had been made possible by a cast-iron guarantee of military support from Francesco. The alliance had served not only to unite the two states in peace but also to keep the two families in power in the face of internal and external threats. If it was to last, each side needed to be sure of the other. Knowing he relied on Florentine support, Francesco could easily dump the Medici if he suspected that another family was better placed to ensure the money and diplomatic ties he needed. By underlining the towering strength and
stability of Medici power in the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
, Cosimo was subtly pointing out that his family was firmly in control of the city and still more than capable of keeping up its end of the bargain. The frescoes were, in other words, intended to make Francesco and Galeazzo Maria an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Having given Galeazzo Maria the opportunity to appreciate the full meaning of the chapel’s decorations, Cosimo would have been sure that, despite his dirty and disgraceful past, the Sforza-Medici axis would remain solid. In fact, despite minor fluctuations, it would remain the mainstay of Italian politics for the next two decades. And, most important of all, Cosimo knew that he had got his way not through complex and tedious negotiations but through art.

The lesson appears not to have been lost on Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Upon acceding to the ducal title in 1466, he swiftly earned a reputation for his patronage of the arts and, striving to outdo the Medici in all ways, was recognized by many of his contemporaries as the very image of the dashing, cultured prince. As one put it,

He was most magnificent in furnishings, and in his way of life, and splendid beyond measure in his court. He presented very rich gifts to his attendants … and with great salaries he attracted men skilled in whichever science.

He was renowned for his love of painting. Having patronized artists such as
Bonifacio Bembo and
Vincenzo Foppa, and having poured money into enormous projects such as the imposing frescoes of the Portinari Chapel, he would periodically indulge excited flights of fancy and would reward those who answered his call with a legendarily openhanded generosity. On one occasion, for example,
Galeazzo Maria took it into his head to have a room decorated with elaborate paintings of “noble figures” in a single night and spared absolutely no expense in pursuit of the whim. His first love was, however, music.
Filled always with the sound of the most innovative and enchanting melodies, his court became famed for the plethora of talented musicians (mostly from the Low Countries) whom he summoned to Milan at enormous cost.

Galeazzo Maria’s lavish patronage of the arts ensured that his prestige in Milan was colossally high in the early years of his reign, and even his father’s usurpation seemed to recede from the popular memory as
his court became famed as the most glittering in Europe. Thanks to his growing reputation as a cultural leviathan, he earned the respect and admiration of the kings, popes,
signori
, and oligarchs who were privileged enough to see or hear the works he had commissioned. Indeed, so close was the link between art and perceptions of power that Lorenzo de’ Medici even kept Pollaiuolo’s portrait of Galeazzo Maria in his bedroom.

But like Cosimo de’ Medici’s, Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s patronage of the arts was designed to conceal much darker and nefarious realities. It was all just a smoke screen. Without his strong-willed and disciplinarian father around to hold him in check, Galeazzo Maria rapidly became a sadistic and sexually incontinent sociopath.
Suspecting him (not without reason) of murdering his mother, Bianca Maria, the people of Milan came to fear him for his wanton savagery and heinously bad temper, which was so bad as to attract the criticism of Machiavelli himself. He delighted in seeing men tortured—occasionally even inflicting the worst pain himself—and even had a priest starved to death. None, however, had more reason to be afraid than the women of the duchy. Although he was also thought to have had a homosexual relationship with the Mantuan ambassador
Zaccaria Saggi, he had no qualms about coercing any woman who took his fancy into succumbing to his violent sexual tastes. Neither age, nor status, nor the bond of matrimony could stop him.
Even nuns were not safe, and he seems to have developed a particular fondness for breaking into nunneries to have his way with the sisters. Indeed, it was no surprise that when Galeazzo Maria was eventually assassinated at the age of only thirty-two on December 26, 1476, his three murderers had all suffered from the duke’s excesses: both
Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani’s wife and
Carlo Visconti’s sister had been raped by their liege lord, while the more bookish
Girolamo Olgiati’s tutor, Cola Montano, had been whipped through the streets of Milan on a trumped-up charge. Short though his reign may have been, it was only through the loyalty of his courtiers and the impact of his patronage that Galeazzo Maria managed to cling to power for quite as long as he did.

In the moment of silent accord between Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Cosimo de’ Medici, and in the forms of patronage it later inspired in Milan, the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
illustrated the full implications
of the “rise of the patron.” On the one hand, it represented the fulfillment of the intricate processes that had transformed the relationship between artists and patrons. On the back of a series of radical political and economic changes that had their origins in the collapse of the old Empire, a new breed of patrons had emerged who not only placed an increasingly high value on learning as a symbol of status but who were also willing and able to use patronage as a means of endowing themselves with a highly focused air of legitimacy. Working in ever closer partnership with the artists they commissioned, they became the “co-creators” of Renaissance art and contrived to direct the arts toward ever new flights of innovation in the service of their needs.

On the other hand, the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
also demonstrated that this new breed of patrons was often composed of deeply unpleasant and highly dangerous individuals who were spurred on to ever more ruthless flights of ambition by the opportunities created by the same forces from which the “rise of the patron” had emerged. Although they certainly sought to project an image of legitimacy through art, their need for legitimacy was all the more acute by virtue of the illegal, immoral, and frequently violent means by which they had risen to prominence, and by extension their need to indulge in patronage was all the more extreme. It was this most devilish class of men (and occasionally women) who were the epitomes of the “rise of the patron,” and though they remained “co-creators,” the art they commissioned was often designed to cover up the most heinous of crimes. Indeed, the more remarkable and beautiful the art such a patron commissioned, the more heinous his offenses, and the more cynical his intentions. So, while Cosimo de’ Medici and Galeazzo Maria Sforza were renowned as the greatest patrons of their age, they were also among the most ghastly people of the entire period, and the arts they fostered are as much a testimony to their moral turpitude as they are to the skills of the artists themselves.

The implications of this are significant. If patrons were every bit as important as artists in shaping the form and direction of Renaissance art, it is impossible fully to understand the art of the period without uncovering the social world they inhabited and peering into the dark and dastardly details of their private lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be seduced by the splendor of the works they commissioned, it is essential
to uncover the world behind the paintings, a world populated not by the perfect mastery of color and harmony that is usually associated with the Renaissance but by ambition, greed, rape, and murder.

Hidden among the multitude of faces in the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
are the portraits of three men who are emblematic of the three most important types of patrons in the Renaissance. When the lives and careers of bankers, mercenaries, and popes are traced, a new and utterly different Renaissance becomes clear: a Renaissance in which nothing is what it seems, and which is uglier still.

7

T
HE
M
EN WITH THE
M
IDAS
T
OUCH

I
T WAS CLEAR
that Cosimo de’ Medici was keen to use Gozzoli’s frescoes to display his wealth and power, but Galeazzo Maria Sforza would have noticed that the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
also seemed to point toward another, rather different side of the aging banker’s character. Despite the splendor and confidence of the composition, Cosimo had chosen to have himself portrayed in a deliberately understated manner. Far from occupying pride of place—as might have been expected—he appeared at some distance from the center of the drama. Riding a humble donkey, he meekly followed in the wake of his son Piero. He almost seemed to blend into the crowd behind. His golden reins and fur-trimmed cuffs notwithstanding, there was little in the way of ostentation. His clothing was simple, even penitential. Even his conical red hat seemed to have been designed to minimize his visual impact. Indeed, the whole impression was one not of pride or ruthlessness but of a self-effacing modesty and humility.

It was a puzzle. Though he could do almost anything he pleased in business and politics, Cosimo was—as Galeazzo Maria was to learn—“
anxious to remain in the background, hiding his great influence and acting, when need arose, through a deputy.” Ten years before Machiavelli had even been born, Cosimo seemed to have had an intuitive appreciation of the value of dissimulation.

But Galeazzo Maria would have found it hard to avoid the suspicion that, for all his influence, Cosimo wanted to appear humble. He was, after all, well-known for his occasional attempts to flee the life he had created for himself.
Galeazzo Maria would have heard rumors that Cosimo was fond of shutting himself away in a cell that was kept for his use in San Marco and devoting himself for days on end to silent prayer or pious discussions with his friend Fra Antonio Pierozzi. With Cosimo
seated quietly on his donkey, there was more than a whiff of the genuine penitent about his portrait.

As a snapshot of Cosimo’s life, character, and “public image,” the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
would have presented Galeazzo Maria with a strangely confused and even contradictory picture of the man standing in front of him. Lavish ostentation, political chicanery, and coldhearted cunning appeared alongside a meekness that hovered between Machiavellian deceit and heartfelt piety. The old man was an “
indecipherable sphinx.” It was almost as if there were not one Cosimo but two or even three.

But despite its apparent contradictions, what Galeazzo Maria would have seen was an entirely consistent and coherent image of Cosimo de’ Medici. Although unusual for the scale of his political and financial influence, Cosimo was the embodiment of the Renaissance merchant banker. The means by which he had acquired his wealth and power—writ large into Gozzoli’s frescoes—were an encapsulation of the process by which this new breed of businessmen had emerged and the cunning they had employed. At the same time, his urge for magnificence, atonement, and dissimulation was a vivid illustration of the altogether novel challenges that had confronted successive generations of devious merchant bankers. And perhaps most important of all, the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
summed up the extent to which Cosimo and his mercantile predecessors had used their patronage of the arts to craft a public image that responded to each of these problems.

By tracing the surprising and often shocking path that had led Cosimo de’ Medici to become the person who would have caused Galeazzo Maria Sforza such uncertainty, it is possible to see the shadowy and unpleasant world of the Renaissance merchant bankers, and the ugly and cynical concerns that underpinned their remarkable role as some of the Renaissance’s foremost patrons of the arts. Although inextricably bound up with the world of political chicanery, corruption, and coups, it’s a tale of high finance, enormous profits, and—inevitably—moral bankruptcy that puts the scandals surrounding today’s merchant bankers in the shade. And as the story behind the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
unravels, it becomes clear that this breed of super-wealthy men lived very far removed from the beauty and splendor of the works they commissioned.

F
ROM
M
ONEY
C
HANGERS TO
B
ANKERS

In many senses, the Renaissance was the golden age of merchant bankers. Even more so than today, they were defined by their staggering wealth. But in 1459, no banking family was as fabulously rich as the Medici. They made Croesus look like a pauper. Between 1435 and 1450, for example,
Cosimo de’ Medici personally made a profit of 203,702 florins.
If Giovanni Rucellai’s estimate is to be believed, this figure alone was the equivalent of some 13 percent of Florence’s total worth. But this was just profit, and the profit of a single member of the family at that. When the full range of the Medici’s investments is taken into account, their wealth easily exceeded that of any of the greatest states in Europe.

Yet the Medici had not always been rich. Their money had been amassed slowly and patiently by generations of men graced with cunning and driven by a burning desire for cash. They had come a long way, and the road they had traveled neatly embodied the route by which merchant banking itself had emerged in Renaissance Italy.

Like those of many other banking families, the
origins of the Medici are shrouded in mystery. In later centuries, they were fond of claiming descent from a legendary knight called Averardo, who was supposed to have killed a marauding giant under the Carolingians. But what little evidence survives seems to suggest rather more prosaic roots. As their name implies, they might well have started out as doctors or apothecaries. For most of Cosimo’s contemporaries, however, it seemed more probable that
they had begun as humble pawnbrokers. All that can be said with any certainty is that when they first appear in the historical record in the early thirteenth century, they had somehow discovered a talent for working with money.