In one point Lorenzo was inferior to his grandfather. He had no commercial talent. After suffering the banking business of the Medici to fall into disorder, he became virtually bankrupt, while his personal expenditure kept continually increasing. In order to retrieve his fortunes it was necessary for him to gain complete disposal of the public purse. This was the real object of the constitutional revolution of 1480, whereby his privy council assumed the active functions of the state. Had Lorenzo been as great in finance as in the management of men, the way might have been smoothed for his son Piero in the disastrous year of 1494.
If Lorenzo neglected the pursuit of wealth, whereby Cosmo had raised himself from insignificance to the dictatorship of Florence, he surpassed his grandfather in the use he made of literary patronage. It is not paradoxical to affirm that in his policy we can trace the subordination of a genuine love of art and letters to statecraft. The new culture was one of the instruments that helped to build his despotism. Through his thorough and enthusiastic participation in the intellectual interests of his age, he put himself into close sympathy with the Florentines, who were glad to acknowledge for their leader by far the ablest of the men of parts in Italy.
According as we choose our point of view, we may regard him either as a tyrant, involving his country in debt and dangerous wars, corrupting the morals and enfeebling the spirit of the people, and systematically enslaving the Athens of the modern world for the sake of founding a petty principality; or else as the most liberal-minded noble of his epoch, born to play the first part in the Florentine Republic, and careful to use his wealth and influence for the advancement of his fellow-citizens in culture, learning, arts, and the amenities of life. Savonarola and the Florentine historians adopt the former of these two opinions. Sismondi, in his passion for liberty, arrays against Lorenzo the political assassinations he permitted, the enervation of Florence, the national debt incurred by the republic, and the exhausting wars with Sixtus carried on in his defense.
His panegyrists, on the contrary, love to paint him as the pacificator of Italy, the restorer of Florentine poetry, the profound critic, and the generous patron. The truth lies in the combination of these two apparently contradictory judgments. Lorenzo was the representative man of his nation at a moment when political institutions were everywhere inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of the Italians found its noblest expression in art and literature. The principality of Florence was thrust upon him by the policy of Cosimo, by the vote of the chief citizens, and by the example of the sister republics, all of whom, with the exception of Venice, submitted to the sway of rulers. Had he wished, he might have found it difficult to preserve the commonwealth in its integrity. Few but doctrinaires believed in a governo misto; only aristocrats desired a governo stretto; all but democrats dreaded a governo largo. And yet a new constitution must have been framed after one of these types, and the Florentines must have been educated to use it with discretion, before Lorenzo could have resigned his office of dictator with any prospect of freedom for the city in his charge. Such unselfish patriotism, in the face of such overwhelming difficulties, and in antagonism to the whole tendency of the age, was not to be expected from an oligarch of the Renaissance born in the purple, and used from infancy to intrigue.
Lorenzo was a man of marvelous variety and range of mental power. He possessed one of those rare natures fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sympathize with the most diverse forms of life. While he never for one moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers he passed for a sage, among men of letters for an original and graceful poet, among scholars for a Grecian sensitive to every nicety of Attic idiom, among artists for an amateur gifted with refined discernment and consummate taste. Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine who jousted with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merriest, sought adventures in the streets at night, and joined the people in their May-day games and carnival festivities. The pious extolled him as an author of devotional lauds and mystery-plays, a profound theologian, a critic of sermons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees than for his pithy apothegms and maxims, as good a judge of cattle as of statues, as much at home in the bosom of his family as in the riot of an orgy, as ready to discourse on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot the death of a dangerous citizen.
An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the epitome of his nation’s most distinguished qualities, that the versatility of the Renaissance found in him its fullest incarnation. It was the duty of Italy in the fifteenth century not to establish religious or constitutional liberty, but to resuscitate culture. Before the disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus. Therefore, the prince who in his own person combined all accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how to stimulate the genius of men superior to himself in special arts and sciences, who spent his fortune lavishly on works of public usefulness, whose palace formed the rallying-point of wit and learning, whose council-chamber was the school of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and every act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and generous deeds, can not be fairly judged by an abstract standard of republican morality. It is nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At his death he left her socially more dissolute, politically weaker, intellectually more like himself, than he found her. He had not the greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make himself the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his republic. In other words, he was adequate, not superior to, Renaissance Italy.
This, then, was the man round whom the greatest scholars of the third period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo, Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of these names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of those to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo’s villas, where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse or social converse, heightening the sober pleasures of Italian country life with all that wit and learning could produce of delicate and rare, have been so often sung by poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades of Academe. “In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence,” writes the austere Hallam, moved to more than usual eloquence in the spirit-stirring beauty of his theme, “on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment.” As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole or linger beneath the rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi’s garden walls, once more in our imagination “the world’s great age begins anew”; once more the blossoms of that marvelous spring unclose. While the sun goes down beneath the mountains of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian stars come forth above, we remember how those mighty master spirits watched the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. Savonarola in his cell below once more sits brooding over the servility of Florence, the corruption of a godless church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in his memory, and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, rests chin on hand and elbow upon knee, like his own Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof the after-fruits shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs. Then, when the strain of thought, “unsphering Plato from the skies,” begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last made ballatta.
GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.
By JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
[An Italian reformer, a member of the Dominican order of monks, born 1452, executed 1498. His fervid eloquence as a preacher, and his fierce denunciation of the vice and corruption of the Italian Renaissance speedily made Savonarola a power to be reckoned with in Florentine affairs. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the prophet’s activity extended to political as well as religious ideals, and he preached an austere theocratic republic and the deposition of the Pope. The return of the Medici family to power was the downfall of Savonarola’s hopes; and he and two of his companion reformers were strangled and their bodies burned.]
We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillows of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola’s soul. Here for the first time he prophesied, “The Church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.” These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.