The Measure of Man by Lawrence Rothfield

Author:Lawrence Rothfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2020-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

“Lorenzo is brilliant and makes the whole company gay”

The elderly Toscanelli formed part of the dazzling intellectual and cultural circle that gathered around Lorenzo. At the democratically informal dinner table in the Palazzo Medici, where there were no fixed seating arrangements, could be found on any given night a who’s who of poets, artists, and philosophers: Poliziano (depicted in Ghirlandaio’s Confirmation leading up the stairs his pupils, Lorenzo’s sons Giuliano, Piero, and Giovanni), the greatest poet of his age, whom Lorenzo had found in tatters translating the Iliad into Latin hexameters; the now aged bookseller and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci; the great musician Antonio Squarcialupi, befriended as a boy by Cosimo’s son despite having a butcher as his father, and whom Lorenzo excused for personal failings, saying, “If you knew what it takes to excel in any [artistic] activity you would speak more gently and moderately of him”;26 even, for a week or two before he died, Cosimo’s old slanderer Filelfo, exiled since 1434, whom Lorenzo permitted to return to Florence in 1481 after the savage polemicist turned his poison pen against Sixtus IV.

It was not Lorenzo’s power alone that attracted the Florentine intelligentsia, but also his superb cultural attainments and immense personal charisma. His highly accomplished mother (and, Lorenzo said on her death, his most trusted advisor), Lucrezia Tornabuoni, had seen to it that the young Lorenzo received the best humanist education. From the future ambassador to France, Gentile de’ Becchi, he had learned the art of oratory and writing; from the first modern literary critic, the Dante commentator Cristoforo Landino, and Landino’s friend, the now elderly arch-humanist Leon-Battista Alberti, Lorenzo had been taught to appreciate and honor poets; and from the great refugee scholar from Constantinople, Argyropoulos, he had acquired proficiency in reading ancient Greek.

Lorenzo’s most important teacher, however, was Cosimo’s pint-sized protégé Ficino. It was Ficino who introduced the young, athletic sportsman to the mysteries of Plato. At Ficino’s villa in the pine forest at Montevecchio, the philosopher conducted symposia in which later generations of Medici suggested Lorenzo participated periodically. This reincarnation of the ancient Platonic Academy supposedly delved into such deep questions as the essence of true nobility, the virtues of the active as opposed to the contemplative life, and the nature of God. Legend also had it that every November 7, Lorenzo celebrated Plato’s birthday with a banquet at his villa in Careggi, where votive candles burned in front of an enshrined bust of the philosopher.

As James Hankins has shown, these stories are myths.27 Certainly Lorenzo was supportive of Ficino, but he also paid the salaries of others who attacked Platonism instead of supporting it. The reality is that the intellectually voracious Lorenzo never became a mere epigone of the humanists who hoped to steer him. He was too restless and too responsive to physical beauty to submit to ascetic discipline. Fascinated by Ficino’s neo-Platonic talk about the soul’s ascent from the carnal to the spiritual, he also loved French romances, hunting, soccer, and, as we have seen, the competitive pageantry of jousts.

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