Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent (vol. 2 of 2)

by Alfred von Reumont

LORENZO AS A POET.

In April 1465, as already stated, Federigo of Aragon, Prince of Naples, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, then seventeen years old, met at Pisa. A letter addressed by the young Florentine to his royal friend, probably in the following year, begins thus:[1] ‘When thou, illustrious Federigo, didst visit the most ancient city of Pisa, thou didst turn our conversation to the subject of those who have written poetry in the Tuscan language, and didst manifest a laudable desire to see all their works collected by my care. Endeavouring to fulfil thy wishes, I had a diligent search made for all the old manuscripts, and chose from them the least imperfect, which I now present to your Highness, arranged in order in a book which I earnestly desire thee approvingly to accept, as a token of especial goodwill. Let no one despise this Tuscan tongue as poor and rude, for he who can rightly estimate its value will find it rich and well cultivated. There is, indeed, nothing vigorous or graceful, impressive or ingenious, witty, harmonious, or majestic, of which examples may not be found in our two greatest poets, Dante and Petrarca; and after them, by those whom thou, Prince, hast recalled to life.

‘Petrarca shows in one of his letters that the ancient Romans were acquainted with rhyme which, after a long interval, revived in Sicily, spread through France, and was restored to Italy, its original home. The first who gave our modern poetry its peculiar form of verse were Guittone of Arezzo and his Bolognese contemporary Guido Guinicello. They were both well versed in philosophy, and wrote profoundly; but the first is somewhat harsh and rude, deficient in ornament and eloquence. The latter, who is far more clear and elegant, was called by Dante “his father,” and the father of all who write sweet and graceful love songs. He was unquestionably the first to impress on our beautiful language that attractive colouring which the bard of Arezzo had but faintly indicated. After these shone Guido Cavalcanti, one of the keenest dialecticians and most admirable philosophers of his time. He was handsome in person, and his writings are to me in the highest degree attractive; his imagination is rich and wonderfully grand; his reasoning is weighty; his tone extremely dignified. These qualities are heightened by the rich charm of a style that sets them off like a resplendent robe. He needed but a wider field to have attained the highest honours.

‘Bonagiunta of Lucca and the notary of Lentino must not be overlooked; but though earnest and weighty writers, they were so destitute of refined taste, that they must be content to find a place in this collection of honoured names. Another contemporary of Guittone was Pier delle Vigne, of whom Dante said that “he had both the keys of Frederick’s heart.” Only a few short pieces by him remain, and they are not wanting in depth or earnestness.

‘And now come the two glorious suns that have illuminated our language—Dante, and he who stands hardly below him, Francesco Petrarca. In praise of them, silence, to use the words of Sallust concerning Carthage, is better than halting speech. Greatly in need of their polish stood Onesto, and the Sicilians who in order of time preceded them, and who were not without spirit or purpose. Cino of Pistoja, tender and full of feeling, deserves his reputation. He was the first, in my opinion, who thoroughly surmounted the antique roughness which Dante, so admirable in other respects, could not entirely avoid. A host of writers follow, ranking far below those I have named. All these of the past, and some of our own time, owe lasting thanks to thee, O Prince, who hast bestowed on them life, and light, and fame, acquiring for thyself a claim to greater renown than that of the Athenian Peisistratos, who rescued from oblivion the lays of Homer. He restored life to one; thou hast revived a whole host. At the end of the book, as it seemed not unpleasing to thee, I have added some sonnets and canzoni of my own, that when thou readest them, my goodwill and affection may be vividly recalled to thy mind. Though in themselves unworthy of a place beside the admirable works of the past, it may be useful to set them side by side for a comparison which can but enhance the perfections of the latter. Pray take then, O Prince, not only into thine house, but into thy heart and mind, both them and me, even as thou abidest a welcome guest in my heart and soul.’

Thus wrote Lorenzo de’ Medici apparently in 1466. On a subsequent occasion, in a gloss on his own poems such as it was the custom then for an author himself or some of his friends to write, he gave his opinion on the much-disputed question of the value of the vulgar tongue as the language of poetry. ‘If we want,’ he wrote, ‘to prove the worth of our language, we need only apply this test: does it express with ease all our thoughts and all our feelings? Nothing can be more satisfactory than the answer given us by experience. Our countrymen Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, have in their verses and discourses, whether grave or gay, proved clearly that every thought and feeling finds easy and natural expression in this tongue of ours. Whoever reads the “Commedia” sees various questions of theology and nature discussed with as much skill as success. He finds there the three degrees of style specified by orators—the simple, the florid, and the sublime, nay, more—Dante in himself presents a union of all the qualities which Greek and Latin writers display separately. Who again can deny the warmth, tenderness, and gaiety of Boccaccio? In his love poems he shows a mingled grace and fervour that neither Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius nor Catullus have equalled. Dante’s pithy sonnets and canzoni are scarcely surpassed by anything in prose or verse, and the readers of Boccaccio, whose learning was as great as the polish of his style, must admit that in him the faculty of invention contends with the variety and eloquence of his language. Any one who examines his “Decameron” with its endless diversity of subject, its descriptions of every conceivable situation produced by love and hate, hope or fear; its exhibition of countless intrigues and artifices; its characteristic representation of diverse natures, and its expression of every passion, will be convinced that for all this no language can be better adapted than our own. It is not the language that has been unfavourable to writers, but there has been a dearth of authors who could use it. To any one with a little practice, it is full of power, harmony, and grace. It appears to me richly endowed with all that constitutes the excellence of a language, and I am persuaded that a knowledge of what has been written in it is not only useful but necessary—more especially the works of Dante, which are both solid and profound. The commentaries of learned men on the “Commedia” bear witness to this no less than the allusions made to the work from the pulpit. We may look forward to the appearance of other excellent works in this language, which still preserves its freshness and is growing in elegance and copiousness. A prospect of still greater perfection is before it, should the dominion of Florence be extended, a thing not merely to be hoped but to be striven for by our gallant citizens with all their energies of body and mind. Though such a consummation cannot positively be predicted, since it depends on fate and the will of God, yet it is within the limits of possibility. For the present the following conclusion is enough. Our native speech has all the excellencies of a language in abundance, and we ought not to be dissatisfied with it, nor ought any one to blame me for writing in a tongue to which I was born and in which I was educated. Hebrew and Latin originally were no more than vulgar tongues, yet those who hold an honoured place in literature cultivated them to a degree of perfection that was never attained by the mass of the people.’

These remarks, which are followed by others on the sonnet and on Tuscan rhythm and metre, show that from his youth up Lorenzo de’ Medici thought much of the nature and history of the language of his country. His poems opened out no new path, but served with those of many among his contemporaries to give more freedom and grace of movement to the language, more facility for applying it to manifold aims and objects, and a richer variety of idiomatic forms. His masterly handling of the language was equalled by his command of versification. Harshness he has, and that force which will not avoid a difficulty. Nor is he wanting in archaic forms and illegitimate turns of expression, while he has echoes of the artificial manner which in the poet’s youth was regarded as modern classicism. We do not always meet with the refinement of ear, accuracy of taste, and fulness of harmony, which give such importance to his contemporary Poliziano, and mark him as the true leader of the great literary movement of the fifteenth century, a movement which, in its last decade, put an end to a state of things in which it is hard to say whether stagnation or perverted energy was the worst feature. Nevertheless, Lorenzo de’ Medici takes a conspicuous and peculiar place in this movement. Had he been only a literary man, he would have shone as such. As in his whole character, so also as a poet, is he the true representative of his time, a time that strove with pious care to restore the old, while it joyfully if doubtfully anticipated the opening of new vistas and formed the threshold between two great epochs, the blending of the sunset and the dawn. Lorenzo de’ Medici, while rightly estimating the character of the literature of Dante’s age, and perceiving that it and not the pedantry of the humanistic poets contained life and hope for the future, was, nevertheless, still influenced by the great fact of the first half of his century, the revival of classical culture. Even when he most nearly approaches the lyric poets who preceded him, it is not in imitation, like Bembo’s imitation of Petrarca. Even when Dante or Guido Cavalcanti, with their subtle dissection of feelings, partaking somewhat of the character of scholasticism, and their habit of treating even earthly things with a certain unearthly solemnity of tone, have been most evidently his guiding lights—still, through all, there pierces a spirit which could only have been aroused by the contact of modes of thought derived from the antique with modern life and experience, and by a direct knowledge of the creations of Hellenic genius, which to the fathers of Italian poetry were sealed books, whose very titles were unknown to most of them.

Lorenzo de’ Medici is no imitator of Petrarca, although echoes of Petrarca and even, through the latter, of the poetry of the Troubadours occur frequently in his compositions. But, apart from other details, he has one conspicuous trait in common with Petrarca—a quick sense of the beauties of nature. The hermit of Vaucluse and Arquà is, of all modern poets, the first to whom nature seems to have been especially revealed in her inner life and in the impression which she makes on the feelings; for in Dante it is rather the historical character of the landscape and the plasticity of sharply defined individual phenomena which come out most strongly. Like Petrarca, he who dwelt in the Tuscan villas and among the wooded Apennines found in nature an inexhaustible fountain whence flowed forth an ever-fresh stream of forms and images clothed in the most varied and brilliant colours. The richness and freshness of his treatment proves how quick were his eyes to receive and his mind to realise such impressions. He delighted to consecrate to the mental and moral refreshment of a residence in the country the hours and days which he could steal from his varied and often vexatious cares and occupations. If his poetic descriptions did not sufficiently declare it, his whole life would furnish a proof that there was in him not merely an active fancy, but an actual need, as well as a true and quick apprehension of nature. He has shown in the ‘Selve d’amore,’ and in the idyl of ‘Ambra,’ what were his powers of describing nature, not merely in the illustration of thoughts and feelings, but as an independent picture complete in itself.

The greater part of his sonnets and canzoni consists, as may be imagined, of love poems. But the individualising characteristics of his poetry save them from the monotony usually inseparable from this style; for where there is no variety of tone, there is a variety of situation and colouring. The lover and poet is with Lorenzo always a disciple of philosophy, and the subject of his poems, decked in all the brilliant colours of fancy, retreats into the background infinitely more than with the great poets of the Trecento. In reading Lorenzo’s poems, one gives little more than a passing thought to Lucrezia Donati, whose name even is revealed to us only by the poet’s friends. Beatrice and Madonna Laura have been the objects of careful historical research—scarcely any one has troubled himself about the fair Florentine, sprung from a race whose name filled the history of the city when that of Medici was still unknown. The reason is not merely that Lucrezia’s bard was no Dante or Petrarca, and that his poetry, however fresh and genuine, and however important as completing a character unique in its way, yet held but a secondary place in the mind and life of Lorenzo de’ Medici; but the ideal creation threatens to swallow up the personality. The story connected with the beautiful girl lying on the bier, in which the poet sets forth how he sought and found a worthy object for his affection, sufficiently indicates that he rather transferred to this object what had already assumed a living shape in his own mind than received his impulse from it. To the greatest of Italy’s poets the angel-bride of his early youth became the ideal in which all his thoughts and feelings were wrapt up; the ideal stood before the eyes of Lorenzo de’ Medici before he knew her whose form he clothed in the magic of spiritualised desire.

The disciple of the Platonic philosophy, giving a description of his beloved one in the commentary on his sonnets,[2] thus declares himself in his definition of the nature of love. ‘Whoever seeks the true definition of love, will find that it consists in the desire for beauty. This being so, whatever is ugly repels him who truly and worthily loves. The beauty of the countenance and soul of our beloved one impels us to seek beauty in other things; to rise to that virtue which is beauty on earth as in heaven, and to reach at length the highest beauty—the Divinity, our final goal and resting-place. The necessary conditions of a true, worthy, and elevated love, appear to me to be two: first, that the object shall be one, then that the love shall be constant. It is not given to all to fulfil these conditions, seeing that but few women possess the lofty power of attaching men so entirely to themselves that they shall never offend against the two conditions without which there is no true love.’ But his philosophical view of life and human happiness is contained in a longer poem in terza rima, (‘L’Altercazione’), in which Marsilio Ficino is personally introduced as teacher, and decides between the poet and his interlocutor. The former has left the tumult of the city, the confusion of party politics, the throng of the market, to bring his soul to a haven of rest, a life free and secure from anxiety, in the solitude of the country. He describes what he seeks and hopes to find in this retreat to the shepherd whom he meets; the latter points out to him the toils and troubles of his humble lot, and how he drags on day after day beneath ever-renewing cares. Then Marsilio comes to place in their true light the worth and the worthlessness of sublunary things; to show how happiness depends neither on the high position of the one nor the lowly station of the other, but is to be found in the knowledge and love of the Author of all things. As may be seen from this sketch of its contents, the poem contains nothing original, but it is pleasing from its life-like description of contrasts, and interesting as a token of the earnest self-introspection of a richly and variously endowed mind.[3]