DEATH IN FLORENCE: THE MEDICI, SAVONAROLA AND THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE RENAISSANCE CITY (III)

 

 

1.   SECURING THE MEDICI DYNASTY

 

WHEN LORENZO THE Magnificent learned that Innocent VIII had been elected the new pope, he at once launched a diplomatic offensive designed to win him over to his cause. But what precisely was his cause? Undoubtedly, Lorenzo wished to maintain the balance of power in Italy, so that Florence and her thriving trade could continue to prosper without threat from her powerful neighbours. An alliance with the pope, a major spiritual and political force throughout the land, was essential to this end. But it soon became clear that Lorenzo the Magnificent had ulterior motives for becoming the pope’s ally and friend: he wanted to secure the Medici dynasty, and was intent upon doing this in the most spectacular fashion.

Lorenzo the Magnificent’s oldest son Piero was thirteen years old in 1484, and was seen as Lorenzo’s natural successor to power in Florence. He was a difficult, somewhat arrogant child, who had many of his father’s more dashing physical attributes, but as yet had demonstrated little of Lorenzo’s intellect or judgement. Despite being educated by the likes of Poliziano and Ficino, Piero showed more interest in hunting than in learning or affairs of state. In an attempt to rectify this, Lorenzo despatched his son, accompanied by Poliziano, at the head of the Florentine delegation to Rome to congratulate the new pope on his succession.

Innocent VIII was a suave, mild-mannered and somewhat devious character, who had only been elected as a compromise, when neither the powerful and notorious Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, nor his sworn enemy the well-connected Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had been able to muster sufficient votes for themselves. Lorenzo knew that having diplomatic dealings with the fifty-five-year-old pope might prove an overawing task for the inexperienced teenage Piero, and as a result he found himself behaving in much the same overprotective way as his own father, Piero the Gouty, when Lorenzo was sent on his first youthful diplomatic missions. An indication of this can be seen in the five-page letter he sent on 26 November 1484 to Piero in Rome, which is little more than a litany of similarly detailed instructions on how to conduct himself:

Be careful not to take precedence of those who are thine elders, for although thou art my son, thou art but a citizen of Florence … When Giovanni[1] thinks fit to present thee to the Pope privately first inform thyself well of all the needful ceremonies, then when presented to His Sanctity kiss my letter which will be given thee for the Pope, entreating him to deign to read it.¹

 

Yet it was not until the third page of this letter that Lorenzo came to the heart of the matter:

After this thou art to say to His Holiness that having thus recommended me, brotherly love constrains thee to recommend also Messer Giovanni, whom I have brought up as a priest.

 

‘Messer Giovanni’ was Lorenzo’s second son, who was just nine years old and was intended for high office in the Church. Giovanni was a likeable chubby child who already showed signs of great intelligence; and, to his father’s dismay, great indolence – a most uncharacteristic trait for a Medici. Even so, Lorenzo was prepared to place his highest hopes in Giovanni, and would set about paving his way to high office in the customary fashion by purchasing for him a number of rich benefices, providing him with both an income and a position within the Church. Although such methods were not unusual, they had certainly become more commonplace with the advent of Innocent VIII’s reign of blatant simony, which had upset more than just Savonarola. Lorenzo would seize the opportunity presented by this new laxness, and had even taken the unusual step of making young Giovanni Bishop of Arezzo, a senior Church post within his Tuscan domains; and he would soon begin cajoling the King of France into making Giovanni Archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, an important benefice that came with a considerable income.

Significantly, this was the beginning of Lorenzo’s attempt to establish the Medici in France. Only with hindsight is it possible to determine the enormity of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s ambitions for his family. At the time, he was not even officially ruler of Florence, and his position had no title – even his friend and courtier Pico della Mirandola was a count. And Lorenzo’s claim to rule Florence was precarious enough, as the Pazzi conspiracy had shown. Yet the plans he was now covertly setting in motion were intended to bring the Medici family to the highest thrones in Europe, no less: to the papal throne and the throne of France. It was now that Lorenzo began secretly engraving that permanent marque on his expensive jewels – LAU.R.MED: Lorenzo Rex Medici. He saw himself as the founding father of a dynasty of kings. Such breathtaking ambitions would not come to fruition during his lifetime, and indeed not until well into the next century – yet without Lorenzo’s foresight, the fortunes of the Medici might never have extended beyond Florence, the city that his wise grandfather had predicted would tire of them within fifty years. It was now more than three decades since Cosimo had made this ominous prediction.

Meanwhile Lorenzo despatched his financial fixer, Antonio Miniati, to scour Europe for rich benefices for the young Giovanni. At the same time, similar messages were sent to the managers of the international branches of the Medici bank, but these were of little avail. By this stage the Medici bank had declined to such an extent that it now only had branches in Rome, Naples, Pisa and Geneva-Lyons (a joint branch). Over the past few years branches had been closed in Milan (1478), Avignon (1479), London (1480), Bruges (1480) and Venice (1481). Although several distinct factors had contributed to this decline, it undoubtedly represented a catalogue of disasters for the Medici finances. The ailing branch in Venice, for instance, had been forced to close at the time of the Venice–Ferrara war, severly curtailing income resulting from German and Levantine trading ventures. The London branch had never recovered from the 80,000 florins owed by Edward IV and his nobles. The closure of the highly lucrative Bruges branch had in part been due to the extravagance and financial legerdemain of the trusted long-term manager Tommaso Portinari. In order to establish the prestige of the Medici bank (and its manager), Portinari had spent almost 10,000 florins buying and renovating the Hôtel Bladelin, which was (and remains to this day) one of the finest medieval residences in Bruges. Later, he had invested Medici bank assets in a joint side-venture in the wool trade, which was skilfully contracted so that he personally received a large share of the profits, while the bank (and Lorenzo) was responsible for any losses. Lorenzo, in his somewhat lackadaisical attitude towards the family banking business, had not noticed this, until it was pointed out to him too late. Meanwhile the wily and inept Portinari had delivered his masterstroke, investing – contrary to all strict and explicit instructions – in a hazardous Portuguese expedition to the Guinea coast of West Africa. When this failed, Portinari destroyed all the evidence he could lay his hands on, so that, as the Medici financial historian de Roover put it with masterly understatement: ‘Not much is known about this profitless venture.’² Although Lorenzo had competent advisers at the Medici bank in Florence, as well as his uncle in Rome, the overall affairs of the bank remained largely unsupervised. After his father Piero the Gouty’s initial ill-advised mistake in calling in the bank’s debts, Piero had applied his considerable commercial talents to steering the bank through the difficult period of his five brief years at the helm. On the other hand, his attentions were constantly directed elsewhere, and chicanery such as that of Portinari was almost bound to have occurred. Indeed, Portinari was not the only manager to become involved in underhand deals, which for the most part went undetected until they were beyond remedy.

Lorenzo does not seem to have realised quite how deeply Portinari was involved in working against Medici interests. After the closing of the Bruges branch, the ageing Portinari was left facing large personal debts. Lorenzo felt that these were at least in part the responsibility of the Medici, and thus conferred diplomatic status upon the banker so that he could return home to Florence without constraint from his creditors. A few years later Portinari died, but in a final twist his son refused to accept his inheritance – for as he did not have diplomatic status, this would have left him open to prosecution by agents despatched to recover his father’s large debts.

Thus, partly through mismanagement, and partly through Lorenzo the Magnificent’s neglect, the Medici bank was now entering what appeared to be a period of terminal decline. The income derived by the Medici from this source continued to dwindle, but Lorenzo saw no reason to reverse this state of affairs. On the contrary: a family with ambitions to become one of the royal houses of Europe would not wish to be seen as mere bankers. And by the mid-1480s Lorenzo’s income was no longer dependent upon currency transactions or financing commercial enterprises. He had identified himself so totally with Florence that he had come to regard its exchequer as his own – both as his income, and to dispense with as he saw fit in the city’s interests. To his mind, Florence’s interests were now inseparable from Medici interests: when one flourished, so did the other.

However, there remained certain technical differences. Although the purchase of benefices for young Giovanni de’ Medici may have been subsidised by the Florentine exchequer, through Miniati’s financial sleight of hand the rich incomes provided by these benefices went directly to their Medici owner – a subtle distinction of which the people of Florence remained ignorant. It was now that Lorenzo the Magnificent chanced his most daring request of his new friend Innocent VIII. In 1484 he broached the subject of his son Giovanni being made a cardinal. Even with the advent of institutionalised simony, such a request was unprecedented. The College of Cardinals was the most important and influential body in the Church, second only in power and prestige to the pope himself. Indeed, it was the College of Cardinals that was responsible for electing the new pope – in the secret conclave held in the Vatican after the death of the incumbent. Here, isolated from outside influences, the different factions would bargain for votes, occasionally joining in prayer for divine guidance. Those who supported the victorious candidate could expect favours and rewards, as well as the possibility of exerting influence upon papal policy. Lorenzo the Magnificent was now suggesting that his eleven-year-old son Giovanni be made a member of this venerable assembly. In fact, the boy was not even eleven: in his effort to persuade Innocent VIII, Lorenzo added two years to his son’s age. If Giovanni became a cardinal, this meant that by the time any other young candidates entered the College of Cardinals, he would be well established: a senior, experienced and well-connected operator within the group. A pope-maker, no less – well positioned at some later stage to become pope himself. But Innocent VIII would not be persuaded; such an appointment was liable to call his entire programme of simony into question, by reducing it to an absolute mockery. Lorenzo was irritated and disappointed; Innocent VIII assured him that he should bide his time, but Lorenzo was determined to persist in his campaign by more covert means.

Meanwhile, in order to secure the Medici succession in Florence as far as he could, Lorenzo arranged in 1488 for his seventeen-year-old son and heir Piero to marry into another branch of his mother’s aristocratic Roman family, the Orsini. The father of Piero’s bride Alfonsina Orsini had died fighting for King Ferrante of Naples, who had thereupon taken her under his wing. Her marriage to Piero de’ Medici was to reinforce a strategic alliance: it would serve the multiple purpose of strengthening the Medici’s claim to aristocratic status, as well as allying Florence with Naples, and further cementing their links with the powerful Orsini in Rome. With the Medici backed by such powerful friends, any enemies would be forced to think twice before attempting to take over Florence.

Besides attempting to secure the Medici family succession, Lorenzo had also done his best to secure the Medici intellectual heritage. To this end, he had appointed his grandfather’s favourite intellectual, Marsilio Ficino, as a canon of Florence Cathedral, a sinecure that enabled the hunchbacked classicist to continue with his philosophical works unhindered by financial worries. Ficino’s attempt to reconcile Platonism with accepted Christian belief had by now led him to write a number of commentaries on Plato, which can be seen as original works in their own right. Notable amongst these was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, the celebrated work in which the Ancient Greek philosopher describes a banquet where Socrates and others explore the nature of love, from its ideal aspects to more scurrilous homoerotic examples. Plato asserted that love, with its attraction to the form of beauty, led us to the philosophical quest for wisdom. (It is not difficult to recognise how such ideas affected Botticelli, and how he embodied them in works like Primavera.) Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium is called De Amore (About Love), and takes the form of a similar banquet at one of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s villas, which is attended by members of the Palazzo Medici intellectual circle. In this work, Ficino also discusses homerotic love, a subject that was certainly not foreign to Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano and others present. On a more elevated plane, it elaborates Neoplatonic ideas of how life is created by love, the world is sustained by love, and how creation attains its highest wisdom and returns to its ideal by means of love of beauty. However, in this and other similar works Ficino had been influenced by the Neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus and its hermetic aspects, as well as by thinkers of an even more metaphysical and magical inclination. Ficino was drawn by temperament to such esoteric ideas and wished to believe what they said. (The arrival of Pico to study with him in Florence was attributed by Ficino to the astrological omens on the day in question.)

Pico della Mirandola was for his part also attracted to the more esoteric and metaphysical aspects of Ficino’s teaching. This chimed with Pico’s attempt to draw together all regions and philosophies, in the search for a universal truth that underlay them. This attempt at reconciling disparate philosophies and religions would come to be known as syncretism[2].

Interestingly, it took a mind as perceptive as that of Savonarola to surmise with some degree of accuracy the direction of Pico’s thought during the period after he arrived in Florence in 1484. Years later, referring to the occasions when Pico visited him in his cell at the monastery of San Marco and they spent their time ‘piously philosophising’ together, Savonarola would recall his impressions of Pico in a sermon:

He was wont to be conversant with me and to break to me the secrets of his heart: in which I perceived that he was by private inspiration called by God to religion. Wherefore he purposed oftentimes to obey this inspiration and follow his calling. Yet not being suitably disposed for such great benefices of God, or restrained by weakness of the flesh (he was a man of delicate physique), he shrank from the labour. Or he blithely thought he had no need of [the Christian] religion.³

There would seem to be much truth in these observations concerning Pico’s ambivalence. Beneath his wish to reconcile all thought and belief was a longing to believe in a single universal certainty, yet he could not bring himself to accept that this might be God, for he was unwilling to submit himself to the intellectual sacrifices and spiritual discipline that this might involve.

However, neither the intellectual delights of the Palazzo Medici nor the profound spiritual questioning of Savonarola could long retain a mind as restless as that of Pico della Mirandola, and in July 1485 he left Florence to set out once more on his quest for truth in all its philosophical manifestations. As his nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico, wrote concerning ‘his studye in phylosophe & devynyte’, in the biography he published just four years after Pico’s death (translated into English by Sir Thomas More):

As a desyrous searcher of the secretes of nature he left these common trodden pathes and gave hym self hole to speculation & philosophy as well humane as devyne. For the purchasing whereof (after the manner of Plato and the Pythagorean scholar Appollonius) he scrupulously sought out all the famous doctours of his tyme, visiting studiously all the universities and scholes not onely through Italy but also through Fraunce.⁴

 

After leaving Florence, Pico travelled to Paris, where the great Aristotelian scholar Thomas Aquinas had taught at the Sorbonne two centuries previously, establishing his version of scholasticism as the prevalent Christian orthodoxy. Even in Pico’s time, Paris remained the great intellectual centre of Europe – though only where medieval learning was concerned. By now Italian centres such as Florence and Padua were establishing themselves in the forefront of the new learning: the revival of classical studies, the new humanism and proto-science. Having imbibed scholasticism from its purest source, attending lectures by the professors at the Sorbonne, Pico seems to have set off back for Italy some time late in 1485.

Here he returned for a while to a villa that he had built for himself just outside Mirandola, a home that held little attraction for him, judging from his faint praise of this residence as being ‘pleasant enough, considering the nature of the place and district’.⁵ This would seem to suggest that Pico’s wanderlust was inspired by more than the search for knowledge, and in fact he had good reason to feel uncomfortable at home. His oldest brother had apparently resented their father’s will, which divided his estates amongst all the brothers, and had even imprisoned another of Pico’s brothers in his dungeon at Mirandola – until the pope himself intervened, ordering him to desist from such behaviour.

During this brief residence at his villa outside town, Pico played host to Flavio Mithridates, the celebrated Jewish-Italian humanist scholar, who extended Pico’s understanding of Arabic and began teaching him the rudiments of Aramaic, the ancient Semitic language of the early Talmud and parts of the Old Testament, as well as that probably spoken by Jesus.

Some time during the winter of 1485–6 Pico left his villa outside Mirandola and returned to Florence, where he was pleased to renew his close friendship with Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano, Ficino and others at the Palazzo Medici. Here, inspired by the humanist philosophy and more liberal mores of Lorenzo’s intellectual circle, he composed a treatise on love, which is usually known as the Commento. This was the twenty-three-year-old Pico’s first important original philosophical work. In it, he argued that the early classical and pagan gods should be seen as embodiments of more abstract metaphysical ideas, such as those of Plato. Seen in this light, the goddess Venus thus became the abstract ideal of beauty. (Here again, Botticelli springs to mind.) Pico’s Commento was in part a criticism of Ficino’s De Amore, which Pico regarded as too poetical and imprecise, especially in its view of metaphysical and physical love as just varying degrees of the same impulse. Pico insisted on the separation of divine love, in its cosmic and Platonic forms, from the psychological process involved in secular physical love.

This latter subject was one in which the apparently effete scholar, for all his hours of obsessive study, was well practised. Pico was certainly bisexual. He seems at some point to have become more than poetically involved with Poliziano (whose effusive description of him as ‘a hero on whom nature had lavished all the endowments both of body and mind’ may well date from this period), and there are indications that Pico may also have formed a similar attachment to the bisexual Lorenzo the Magnificent. However, despite Pico’s slightly effeminate appearance, there was no denying that there was a strong heterosexual element to his nature, and it was this that would get him into trouble.

Some time early in 1486, Pico became romantically involved with a young woman called Margherita, the wife of an ageing grocer from Arezzo. When the grocer died, Margherita was compelled by the family of her former husband to marry a local tax official, Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici, a distant relative of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Upon hearing of this, some time in May 1486, Pico set out on his horse for Arezzo, in the foothills of the Apennines forty miles south-east of Florence, accompanied by twenty mounted armed men. They met up with Margherita, who was waiting at the city gate, and rode off with her. The local authorities at once sent a detachment of the city’s armed guards in hot pursuit. When they caught up with Pico and his men there was a violent fracas, during which fifteen men were said to have been killed. (This must have been a particularly hot-headed encounter: the carefully choreographed battles of the period in Italy often resulted in fewer casualties than this, before one of the opposing mercenary armies decided to flee the field.)

Pico and his secretary, along with Margherita, managed to escape from this bloody encounter, but their pursuers caught up with them at the village of Marciano in the hills twenty miles to the north of Arezzo, where they were detained and the two men were later imprisoned. When news of this incident reached Florence, it proved a considerable embarrassment to Lorenzo the Magnificent. He had no wish to abandon his close friend Pico in his time of need, even though he was evidently in the wrong; yet at the same time the honour of the Medici family was at stake and had to be seen to be protected. Lorenzo reached a verdict that demonstrated to the full his diplomatic skills. He ordered that Margherita should be returned to her husband forthwith, as it was impossible to believe that any wife would be unfaithful to her Medici husband; in which case, there was no further reason to detain Pico, who was to be released. The entire incident was blamed on the machinations of Pico’s secretary, whose fate remains unclear. Lorenzo’s friends at the Palazzo Medici appear to have regarded the whole thing as something of a joke, which was commemorated by Ficino, who wrote a poetic Apologus in which the affair was likened to a classical scene in which a nymph was raped by one of the gods.

But this embarrassment caused by Pico della Mirandola to Lorenzo the Magnificent was as nothing compared with what was to follow. And this would prove no laughing matter, either to Lorenzo or to the intellectuals at the Palazzo Medici. It is no exaggeration to claim that the ensuing events in Pico’s life would be instrumental in transforming the intellectual climate of the Renaissance, and would later lead to its eclipse in the city of Florence.

 

 

NOTES

1. ‘Be careful not …’ et seq.: Letter from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Piero de’ Medici, 26 November 1484. See Ross, Early Medici, pp.260–5

2. ‘Not much is …’: de Roover, Medici Bank, p.349

3. ‘He was wont …’ et seq.: see Savonarola’s sermon, cited in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: His life by his nephew Giovanni Francesco Pico translated from the Latin by Sir Thomas More (London, 1890 edn), pp.26–7. Here I have modified More’s sixteenth-century English for greater clarity.

4. ‘As a desyrous …’: ibid., p.9, with the same qualification as above

5. ‘pleasant enough …’: cited ibid., p.85

6. Slightly differing reports of this Arezzo incident appear in a number of biographies. See, for instance Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Vita e Dottrina(Florence, 1936), p.25, and Giovanni Semprini, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Todi, 1921), p.55 et seq. Both these sources cite the article by D. Berti in the journal Rivista Contemporanea, Vols. XVI–XVII (Turin, 1859), pp.49–51, docs I–III (one of which is Antonimo Magliabechiano). In English, see Seward, Savonarola, p.27

 

 

 

5. PICO’S CHALLENGE

 

PICO’S SYNCRETISM, TO say nothing of his unprecedented intellectual ambitions, now reached their apotheosis in the form of 900 theses which he drew up, claiming that they dealt with, and answered, all questions in philosophy and theology. These were taken from Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew sources, and were intended as the central axioms for a new universal knowledge, as well as a system of belief that incorporated the truth of all faiths. This was to be the foundation of the one true religion, no less.

Pico’s Nine Hundred Theses contained many deep insights into the human condition, which remain of interest to this day. Take, for instance, his assertion: ‘Because no one’s opinions are quite what he wills them to be, no one’s beliefs are quite what he wills them to be.’ The implication here is that elements of our deepest beliefs arise from beyond our conscious, willing mind. In other words, we are something more than simply rational beings. This insight, and the questions it raises, would echo through the centuries, achieving a particular relevance in the modern era with the writings of Freud on the unconscious, as well as contemporary attempts to define consciousness. Others among Pico’s theses have a similar prescience: ‘When the soul acts, it can be certain of nothing but itself.’ This uncannily anticipates the celebrated conclusion that was reached one and a half centuries later by the French philosopher René Descartes – his ‘I think, therefore I am’, which many see as the starting point of modern philosophy. Indeed, Pico’s entire project bears a striking similarity to Descartes’ philosophic aim, which sought the undeniable foundation upon which human knowledge rested, as well as seeking to establish the proper method for scientific thinking.

Pico’s Nine Hundred Theses were in many ways the nearest the Renaissance came to producing an original philosophy. Renaissance art, literature and thought would be characterised by humanism. Yet humanism was not in itself a coherent philosophy, more an attitude that pervaded all the arts and humanities[3]. Philosophically speaking, the Renaissance was a period of rediscovery of classical thinkers such as Plato, some forgotten works of Aristotle, Lucretius, Plotinus and the like, which awoke a new enthusiasm for such secular thought. This may have released Renaissance thinkers from the strictures of a stale and hidebound Scholasticism, yet in doing so it overwhelmed their imagination and originality, to such an extent that they would produce little new philosophic thought of their own.

Many of the works of these ancient philosophers had reached Italy around the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when fleeing scholars had salvaged all they could from the extensive libraries and archives of the doomed Byzantine Empire. But these libraries also harboured manuscripts and ancient scrolls relating to the darker side of Byzantine learning – works dealing with the hermetic arts, astrology, alchemy, magic and the like. And these too would represent part of the world that the new humanism sought to understand. Indeed, the darker and the clearer sides of Byzantine thought were often inextricably mixed. Astronomy was still permeated with the ‘meaning’ imposed upon it by astrology, whilst alchemy had yet to give birth to the science of a chemistry cleansed of all attempts to transform base metals into actual or spiritual gold. Pico was influenced by such sources, and was clearly intrigued by the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbala, as plainly stated in his Nine Hundred Theses: ‘No science affords better evidence of Christ’s divinity than magic and Kabbalistic practices.’ Aided by the clear vision of hindsight, it is easy to spot the muddle of rational and metaphysical categories here. This indeed is a prime example of the confused thinking that preceded (and helped give birth to) the consequent Age of Reason. In this example of Pico’s theses, ‘science’ and empirical evidence are both invoked – but not in the search for physical truth. Instead, they are summoned to provide evidence for metaphysical truth, for ‘Christ’s divinity’. In a further conceptual confusion, the ‘science’ that is deemed best suited to this search is not that conducted by means of secular reasoning, but that of magic and mystical practices. Western thought would have to evolve for more than two centuries before it learned how to disentangle such antithetical categories and pursuits.

At the same time Pico’s brave, if misguided, attempt to incorporate hermetic and mystical thinking into the search for divine truth was leading him into dangerous territory. His other theses may have been unorthodox, but those invoking Kabbalistic mysticism were undoubtedly heretical. However, Pico refused to see it this way – either through political naivety or simply blind hubris, it is difficult to tell which. This supreme confidence is reflected in the other title that he appended to his Nine Hundred Theses, which characterised them as Conclusiones. Far from being tentative hypotheses or proposals, as a liberal interpretation of the word ‘theses’ might have allowed, Pico saw his theses as conclusive. And he was prepared to defend them as such. In order to do this he decided to travel to Rome, where he would publish his Nine Hundred Theses, with the aim of achieving their widespread distribution amongst the scholars of the day. These would be invited to travel to Rome, at Pico’s expense, and he would then hold a public debate, defending his Nine Hundred Theses against all arguments. Some time in the spring of 1486 Pico set out on his journey to Rome[4].

His arrival in the Eternal City was greeted with considerable suspicion by the Church, despite the fact that Pico had announced he would ‘maintain nothing to be true that was not approved by the Catholic Church and her chief Pastor, Innocent VIII’.² Pico duly circulated copies of his Nine Hundred Theses, and by November 1486 claimed in a letter to a friend that these were ‘on public display in all the universities of Italy’.³ But news soon reached the Vatican concerning the controversial nature of Pico’s work. Innocent VIII may have been a venal man, but as pope he was mindful of the authority of the Church. And Pico’s behaviour was nothing less than a challenge to this authority. Innocent VIII forbade Pico’s proposed public discussion and set up a committee of cardinals and theologians to examine his theses in detail. The committee decided that Pico’s theses contained material that was by its very nature ‘heretical, rash and likely to give scandal to the faithful’,⁴ declaring that no fewer than thirteen of Pico’s theses were indeed explicitly unacceptable. On 4 August 1487 Innocent VIII drew up a papal Brief specifically condemning Pico’s work.

However, owing to the somewhat lackadaisical ways of the Church administration, this Brief would not be published until December that year. When Pico read Innocent VIII’s Brief, he was determined to defend himself. In the white heat of indignant inspiration he claimed that he wrote ‘in twenty nights’⁵ an Apologia for his theses, which he dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent. This he published beyond the jurisdiction of Innocent VIII in nearby Neapolitan territory, pre-dating it to May 1487, so as to give the impression that he was not knowingly contradicting the papal Brief. The gist of this ‘apology’ had already been set down in a proposed introduction to his Nine Hundred Theses, which would eventually be published on its own under the title On the Dignity of Man. This earlier work is now widely regarded as one of the first clear and explicit statements of Renaissance humanism, the nearest that this era came to an original philosophy. On the Dignity of Man likened the human condition to that of Adam, and in recounting the myth of human creation, Pico put the following words into God’s mouth:

We have given thee, oh Adam, no fixed abode, no formed inner nature, nor any talent that is peculiarly thine. We have done this so that thou mayest take unto thyself whatever abode, form or talents thou so desirest for thyself. Other creatures are confined within the laws of nature which We have laid down. In order that thou may exercise the freedom We have given thee, thou art confined to no such limits; and thou shalt fix the limits of thy nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the centre of the world, so that thou mayest the better look around thee and see whatsoever is in the world. Being neither mortal nor immortal thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou choosest. Thou canst grow downwards and take on the base nature of brutes; or thy soul canst grow upwards by means of reason towards the higher realms of the divine.⁶

 

Apart from Pico’s use of biblical language, these sentiments appear as fresh today as they must have done five centuries ago. But such existential freedom was anathema to the Church: God had no place in such a world. What use was prayer if the human condition allowed humanity to create itself in whatever image it chose? Where lay the authority of the Church? Only when Pico began living in Rome was it brought home to him how fundamentally he was contradicting the teachings of the Church. This was no easy-going Florence, where he was at home amongst the witty and talented intellectuals of the Palazzo Medici. Here he had no indulgent Lorenzo the Magnificent to protect him; here he was on Church territory, residing within the very power-base of Christendom.

After publishing the Apologia, which reasserted his heretical ideas, Pico deemed it wise to slip away from Rome and flee to France. Whereupon Innocent VIII ordered his arrest. News of this soon reached French territory, where the authorities detained Pico on a charge of heresy and he was thrown into prison. The fact that Pico had dedicated his Apologia to Lorenzo the Magnificent put the ruler of Florence in a delicate situation. It is unclear whether Pico had sought Lorenzo’s permission for this dedication. On the other hand, it was certainly apt. Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his intellectual circle, had not only inspired Pico’s work, but also embodied much that it stood for. Yet no matter how Lorenzo might privately have viewed Pico’s Apologia, this time his transgression was more than a mere peccadillo that could be discreetly pardoned. Its ramifications reached far beyond Florentine territory.

Fortunately, Lorenzo’s diplomatic dealings meant that he was not only regarded as a close friend by Innocent VIII, but was also favourably regarded by the French regent, Anne of France, acting for the teenage Charles VIII. At some risk to his reputation, Lorenzo the Magnificent loyally interceded on Pico’s behalf, requesting that he be freed. Innocent VIII conceded to Lorenzo’s request, and the French regent ordered the release of the prisoner. Pico was allowed to travel to Florence, where he was placed under Lorenzo’s jurisdiction, and a villa was set aside for him at Fiesole in the hills north of Florence. Despite this, the charge of heresy was not dropped. Deeply chastened by this turn of events, and knowing full well the danger of his situation (heretics could be burned at the stake), Pico vowed to devote himself to a more orthodox pursuit of the truth.

This was particularly welcomed by Lorenzo, who had himself recently become more inclined towards religion, a transformation brought about by an accumulation of factors. Although Lorenzo was not yet forty, his body was becoming increasingly racked by the family affliction. His gout may not have been as crippling as that of his father, but there were still days when he would be reduced to his bed by the agonising pain of his swollen joints. As he wrote in a letter dating from November 1484, explaining his late reply, ‘Pain in my feet has hindered my correspondence. Feet and tongue are indeed far apart, yet they interfere with each other!’⁷

His poetry now turned to religious questions:

When the spirit escapes from the sea of storm and strife⁸

That is our life, and finds refuge in some tranquil haven of calm,

We find ourselves beset with doubts which we seek to resolve.

If man is incapable of striving ceaselessly for eternal happiness

Unless he is blessed by God, and that blessing can only be given

To those who are ready to receive it,

What must come first?

God’s blessing,

Or our readiness?

 

Then in August 1488 his wife Clarice died, and ominously Lorenzo was so stricken with gout that he was unable to attend the funeral. Although Lorenzo had by no means been sexually faithful to his wife, he had remained close to her. She had provided domestic stability amidst the political machinations and intellectual excitements of the Palazzo Medici. The depth of his feeling for her was evident when she had fallen out with his favourite, the poet Poliziano, who had played such a central role in Lorenzo’s extracurricular activities, both intellectual and amorous. Lorenzo had unhesitatingly sided with his wife, and Poliziano had been encouraged to cool his hot temper with a spell of exile in nearby Mantua, from which he was only allowed to return a year later when he had learned his lesson. The family was all-important for Lorenzo the Magnificent, and he was determined to do all he could to ensure the Medici legacy. By marrying his eldest son Piero to Alfonsina Orsini, the protégée of King Ferrante of Naples, he had done his best to secure the Medici succession in Florence, ensuring that it would be backed by powerful allies. For his talented second son Giovanni, he continued with his campaign to secure for the Medici a powerful place in the Church hierarchy. Giovanni was now thirteen years old, and had become much more than the Bishop of Arezzo – Lorenzo had finally persuaded the French king to appoint Giovanni to the important post of Archbishop of Aix-en-Provence. He had also purchased for Giovanni, courtesy of King Ferrante of Naples, the extremely lucrative post of Abbot of Monte Cassino; further to this, Ludovico ‘il Moro’ Sforza, the ruler of Milan, had allowed him to purchase the prestigious post of Abbot of Miromonda. Lorenzo was not only securing for Giovanni an ever-higher place in the Church hierarchy, but was also cementing Florence’s vital protective alliances with Naples and Milan.

Purchasing these benefices had cost Lorenzo a considerable sum, much of which was almost certainly ‘deducted’ from the Florence exchequer by the Medici henchman in the financial department, Antonio Miniati. Yet Lorenzo knew that all these benefices would continue to provide Giovanni with a considerable income, even if the Medici lost control of the Florence exchequer. However, all this was not enough, and Lorenzo continued to pressurise Innocent VIII to appoint Giovanni as a cardinal. There was no time to be lost: Innocent VIII was now fifty-six years old, and was rumoured to be showing signs of ill-health. If he died, no successor to the papal throne was liable to consider the teenage Giovanni as a suitable candidate for the College of Cardinals.

In the determined pursuance of his policy, in 1488 Lorenzo had even given his fourteen-year-old daughter Maddalena as a bride to the pope’s oldest son Francescetto, a degenerate forty-year-old gambler. Around this time, Innocent VIII’s extravagances had left him temporarily out of funds and he had appealed to Lorenzo the Magnificent for a loan of 30,000 florins. Lorenzo took a considerable risk in ordering Miniati to embezzle such a sum from the Florentine exchequer and divert it into the Medici bank, so that it could be transmitted to Rome. It was no longer so easy to disguise what was happening to taxpayers’ money, and many were beginning to become suspicious of Miniati’s activities.

Eventually Innocent VIII relented, and in March 1489 Giovanni’s name was added to the list of cardinals. Yet even Innocent VIII was aware that such an appointment would be viewed as a scandal, and he made Lorenzo the Magnificent swear, on pain of excommunication, that this appointment would not be made public for another three years. Only then would Giovanni’s promotion be finalised. Lorenzo wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, telling of his joy: ‘This is the greatest honour that has ever befallen our house.’⁹ Even so, Giovanni’s cardinalate still remained very much in the balance. During the autumn of 1490 news reached Florence from Rome that the overweight Innocent VIII had suffered an apoplectic fit. If the pope died before the formal confirmation of Giovanni’s appointment, then all was lost. Fortunately he recovered from this fit, but a chastened Lorenzo made sure that he kept in close contact with Innocent VIII, corresponding regularly with Rome.

Earlier in 1490, in another letter to the Florentine ambassador at the papal court, Lorenzo had written with news that he expected to be conveyed to Innocent VIII:

The Count della Mirandola is here leading a most saintly life, like a monk. He … observes all fasts and absolute chastity: has but a small retinue and lives quite simply with only what is necessary. To me he appears an example to other men. He is anxious to be absolved from what little contumacy is still attributed to him by the Holy Father and to have a Brief by which His Holiness accepts him as a son and as a good Christian … Do all you can to obtain this Brief in such a form that it may content his conscience.¹⁰

 

But Innocent VIII would not relent. In truth, since the scandal over Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo himself had become increasingly concerned about his own orthodoxy, and was worried that his circle of humanist intellectuals might themselves have begun to embrace heretical ideas. Ficino’s Platonism and Poliziano’s interpretations of Botticelli’s pagan paintings began to appear increasingly suspect. And this was not all. Lorenzo now began to see himself as responsible for the increasingly lax attitude towards religion that had begun to prevail amongst the citizens of Florence – an attitude that had to a large extent been encouraged by the joyous and irreverent festivals which he himself had provided for them. Such matters were starting to prey on his mind.

Then there was the pressing matter of young Giovanni’s education. If he was to fulfil his role in the Church with any seriousness, he would now have to become conversant with a far stricter theology than prevailed at the Palazzo Medici amongst his tutors such as Ficino and Poliziano. Lorenzo had communicated with Rome, requesting that Innocent VIII be approached for advice on this matter, telling him, ‘I much wish to know how to order Messer Giovanni’s future life.’¹¹ He also spoke of these matters with Pico della Mirandola. However, Pico was in no position to advise his friend. After his condemnation by the pope, he too was looking to the Church for guidance and was desperate for the pardon that the pope continued to withhold. Still Lorenzo put the question to him. What should he do? In his misery, Pico’s mind turned to thoughts of the one man whose erudition and spirituality had impressed him above all others – namely, Savonarola. Here was the man who could solve Lorenzo’s problems. This was a man whose orthodoxy was beyond question; this was surely the man to infuse Florence with a new enthusiasm for religion. Lorenzo the Magnificent was immediately convinced by Pico’s argument – to such an extent that he even placed the whole matter of Savonarola’s invitation in Pico’s hands, telling him: ‘So that you may be assured that I desire to serve you sincerely and faithfully, Your Lordship shall write the letter in whatever form you please, and my chancellor will write it out and seal it with our seal.’¹² A letter requesting the recall of Savonarola to the monastery of San Marco in Florence was duly despatched to the Vicar General of the Dominican order.

After leaving Florence some two years previously, Savonarola had travelled to Bologna, where he had taken up his new post as master of studies at his alma mater, the Studium generale. He would remain here for several months, before being posted back to his home town of Ferrara, where he took to visiting his mother, and the rift between them appears to have been healed. However, there was to be no softening of his attitude towards the rest of the world. His earlier revelation in Florence ‘that a scourge of the Church was at hand’¹³ and his subsequent delivery of Lenten sermons at San Gimignano prophesying this scourge (yet at the same time insisting ‘I am [not] a prophet’), had transformed his entire being. Judging from remarks he made during his later sermons, it was around now that he first began to have inklings that before him lay a larger destiny, which he had to fulfil.

Ferrara seems to have served as little more than a home base for Savonarola; he spent almost two years travelling ‘to various cities all over the place’¹⁴, as he put it in one of the letters he wrote back to his mother. Savonarola was now fulfilling his intended role as a monk in the preaching order of Dominicans, and it is known that he preached throughout much of Lombardy and northern Italy, travelling to places as far afield as Brescia, Piacenza and even Genoa. The last-named would have involved a journey of more than 130 miles, across the high passes of the Apennine mountains whose peaks rise to well over 6,000 feet in this region, and it is known that Savonarola always travelled on foot, refusing the comparative comfort of travel by donkey or mule, to which he would have been entitled. Hiking barefoot in leather sandals in all weathers may well have appealed to his ascetic nature, but how was it fulfilling the increasing sense of destiny that he felt within him? Savonarola would later claim that he continued to preach during this period in the sensational prophetic manner he had first tried out at San Gimignano, often using Old Testament subjects: ‘In this way I preached in Brescia and in many other places throughout Lombardy, frequently on the same topics.’¹⁵ In a letter to his mother he even went so far as to claim that his sermons had such a great effect that ‘when it is time for me to leave both men and women are wont to burst into tears and set great store by what I say to them’.¹⁶ However, although contemporary local chroniclers in the cities he visited were in the habit of recording anything out of the ordinary, ranging from the weddings of the local ruling family to simple gossip, no mention was made of Savonarola’s sensational sermons. Possibly this was because he did not remain in one particular spot, which would have enabled him to drive home his message and inspire a devoted following. Only one source supports Savonarola’s claim to have made such a great impression with his sermons, and this is his contemporary and early biographer Pacifico Burlamacchi, who learned much of his information from Savonarola himself and those close to him. Burlamacchi refers to a single occasion in Brescia when Savonarola delivered an Advent sermon on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1489. Taking the Book of Revelation as his theme, he delivered a prophetic sermon during which ‘he spoke with a voice of thunder; reproving the people for their sins, denouncing the whole of Italy, and threatening all with the terrors of God’s wrath’.¹⁷ In the course of his sermon, he referred to the four and twenty elders of the Apocalypse seated around the throne of God, whom the Bible described as clothed in white raiment with gold crowns upon their heads. Savonarola recounted how in a vision he had seen one of these elders rise to prophesy that the citizens of Brescia:¹⁸

would fall a prey to raging foes; they would see rivers of blood in the streets; wives would be torn from their husbands, virgins ravished, children murdered before their mothers’ eyes; all would be terror and fire, and bloodshed.

 

Standing in the pulpit above the aghast faces of the congregation, Savonarola brought his sermon to a close with ‘a general exhortation to repentance, inasmuch as the Lord would have mercy on the just’.

The people of Brescia would have cause to remember Savonarola’s words when twenty-three years later their city was sacked by an invading French army and around 10,000 of its inhabitants were slaughtered amidst scenes of the same hideous cruelty that Savonarola had described[5].

Savonarola’s travels through northern Italy may have enabled him to hone his preaching skills, but his mother soon became pained by his frequent absences from Ferrara, and wrote telling him so. Savonarola replied to one of her letters:

You must not be upset that I am so far away from you … because I am doing all this for the good of many souls – preaching, exhorting, hearing confession, reading and counselling. It is for this reason that I am constantly travelling from place to place wherever my superiors send me. For this reason you should take comfort from the fact that one of your children has been chosen by God to undertake such work. If I remained continually in Ferrara, I would not be able to do such good work as I manage to do outside it. Hardly ever does a genuinely religious person work fruitfully in his own country. This is the reason why we are so frequently told in the Scriptures that we must leave our own country, for the preaching and counsel of a local man is never appreciated as much as that of a stranger. This is why Our Saviour says that a prophet has no honour in his own country. Therefore, because God has deigned to elect me from my sinful state to such a high office, you should be content that I labour in the vineyard of Christ so far from my own country.¹⁹

 

It is evident from these words that his sense of his own destiny as a prophet had by this stage become firmly fixed in his mind – indeed, central to his sense of his own identity. And it was now that news reached Savonarola of his call to return to Florence. Savonarola was ordered to take up residence as a teaching master at his old monastery of San Marco. Here at last he would have a more permanent base, and a permanent congregation on which he could exercise his powers to some lasting effect. We know that some time around late May 1490, Savonarola set out from Bologna on the fifty-mile journey south along the Savena valley towards the pass across the high Apennines to Florence.

According to an illuminating tale recorded by Burlamacchi, Savonarola only reached the village of Pianoro, some ten miles down the road, before he was overcome with exhaustion. Despite his earnest, youthful appearance, Savonarola was by now no longer a young man – indeed he was less than three years from his fortieth birthday (a ripe old age in an era when the evidence of the monastery registers suggests that a monk was very lucky to live beyond fifty). Yet still he obstinately refused to modify his ascetic ways, even whilst travelling; as a result, his frugal diet proved inadequate for the physical task of trudging up the long trail into the mountains, and he finally collapsed. The unconscious monk, devoid of possessions other than his breviary and the worn Bible he had inherited from his grandfather Michele, was found lying at the roadside by an anonymous traveller who gave him food and drink. After a night’s rest at a wayside tavern, Savonarola continued on his way, accompanied by the kind stranger. Some time later they approached Florence, with the dome and towers of the city visible beyond the walls, and the traveller accompanied him right up to the Porta San Gallo, where he took his leave of Savonarola and bade him: ‘Go and do the task which God has assigned to you in Florence.’²⁰ Savonarola never discovered the name of his Good Samaritan, but he would remember his charity and his benediction for the rest of his life.

This tale has all the ingredients of mythology, yet it may well contain a grain of truth. It certainly has psychological veracity: we know from remarks made in his later sermons that Savonarola felt he had specifically been guided back to Florence by God, so that he could embark upon a new life and fufil the destiny that he was convinced now lay before him.

 

NOTES

1. A complete reprinted text of Pico’s theses can be found in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones sive Theses DCCCC (Geneva, 1973), pp.27–90

2. ‘maintain nothing …’: see Pastor, History of the Popes, Vol. V, p.342

3. ‘on public …’: Pico letter of 12 November 1486. See Chanoine Pierre-Marie Cordier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole (Paris, 1957), p.30

4. ‘heretical, rash, and …’: see Pastor, History of the Popes, Vol. V, p.343

5. ‘in twenty nights’: cited ibid.

6. ‘We have given …’: G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate …, ed E. Garin (Florence, 1942), Vol. I, pp.104, 6

7. ‘Pain in my feet …’: cited in Hugh Ross Williamson, Lorenzo the Magnificent(London, 1974), p.262

8. ‘When the spirit escapes …’: Roscoe, Lorenzo, p.308, n.41, gives the Italian version, though I have not adhered to Roscoe’s translation

9. ‘This is the greatest …’: letter from Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, 14 March 1489. See Ross, Early Medici, p.303

10. ‘The Count della Mirandola …’: letter from Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, 19 June 1489. See Ross, Early Medici, p.310

11. ‘I much wish to …’: letter from Lorenzo to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, 14 March 1489. See Ross, Early Medici, p.303

12. ‘So that you …’: see Ridolfi, Savonarola, trans. Grayson, p.29. In this latest English translation (and the Italian original) the last-but-one word of the quotation reads ‘your’ (vostra): other sources relating this incident make it plain that Lorenzo must have been referring to ‘our’ seal – that is, the seal of the Medici. Pico’s seal would have carried no authority with the Church at this time; indeed, it would certainly have undermined the request made in the letter. The original source of this quotation is an early version of Burlamacchi, Vita del P.F. Girolamo Savonarola(Lucca, 1764) – for full details of this, see Villari, La Storia … Savonarola, Vol. I, p.91 n.1. Except where indicated otherwise, from now on I have cited the Lucca 1764 edition of Burlamacchi, which is available in the British Library.

13. – ‘that a scourge …’ et seq.: see notes to pp. 72, 73

14. to various cities …’: letter dated 25 January 1490, Girolamo Savonarola, Le Lettere, ed. R. Ridolfi (Florence, 1933), pp.11–14

15. ‘In this way …’: Savonarola, Lettere, p.12 et seq.

16. ‘when it is time …’: ibid., pp.11–14

17. ‘he spoke with a voice …’ et seq.: see Villari, La Storia … Savonarola, Vol. I, p.86, paraphrasing Burlamacchi, Savonarola, p.15

18. The four and twenty elders are described in Revelation, Ch. 4, v.4

19. ‘You must not be …’: Savonarola, Lettere, pp.11–14

20. ‘Go and do the task …’: see Burlamacchi, Savonarola, p.18

 

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[1] Giovanni Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s trusted and well-connected uncle, manager of the Rome branch of the Medici bank.

[2] This derives from the Greek words syn, meaning ‘together’, and kretismosmeaning ‘Cretans’, referring to the habit of the Ancient Cretans, who habitually fought each other, but came together (syncretismos) when faced with a common enemy. Syncretism would not become a recognised philosophy until the seventeenth century, when it attempted to reconcile the Protestant and Catholic religions. Pico della Mirandola would be seen as one of syncretism’s leading modern forerunners.

 

[3] Our term ‘humanities’, as in the academic classification, dates from this period. The humanities embraced the study of secular (that is, human) learning and literature, especially classical literature, and natural philosophy (that is, science) – as distinct from divinity, which studied divine knowledge, or theology.

 

[4] A number of sources claim that Pico’s amorous incident at Arezzo took place whilst he was on his way to Rome, and the dates of this incident and his departure for Rome would appear to be close, despite their disparate intentions.

 

[5] The years following Savonarola’s apocalyptic prediction were particularly turbulent in Italy, and many cities in northern Italy beside Brescia would have fulfilled such a prophecy.