De'Medici: Not such a bad guy?
Well, yes, he was, but this biography is more sympathetic than others.
The Brilliant Life and Violent Times
of Lorenzo De'Medici
By Miles J. Unger
Simon & Schuster.
504 pp. $30.
Reviewed by Bill Kent
Bankers tend to get bad press in their lifetimes, worse when they're dead.
J.P. Morgan personally rescued America from economic ruin during several monetary crises, but is characterized most frequently as a scowling manipulator whose complex web of interlocking trusts plundered our industrial might.
Though the Rothschilds bailed out several European monarchies, they have been wrongly tarred as a cabal bent on furthering a Zionist agenda, even though the family had so many interfaith marriages that many descendants don't consider themselves Jewish.
The one banker whose reputation has suffered the most seems to be Lorenzo de'Medici, the 15th-century Florentine financier who refrained from calling himself "il Magnifico," the Magnificent, but did not stop others from doing so, especially if they owed him money and were slow to pay.
The third and most celebrated leader of a Renaissance banking dynasty whose offspring went on to become some of Europe's worst kings, queens and popes, Lorenzo managed what may have been the single largest accumulation of wealth east of the Ottoman Empire.
He inherited the family fortune when he was 20 and died in 1492 of an unknown illness, at the age of 43.
Inspired by his grandfather and dynasty founder Cosimo, who commissioned works of art and architecture to aggrandize the family name and establish Florentine cultural superiority, Lorenzo supported many important Renaissance poets, scientists, architects and artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, whose talent as a teenager so impressed Lorenzo that Lorenzo gave him a place to live inside the Medici Palace.
Lorenzo was also astute at maintaining his family's power, at least for the early part of his career, until a series of bad loans and unraveling political alliances hobbled the family fortune.
Having avoided an angry mob that wanted to slaughter his family and survived an assassination attempt that killed his younger brother, Lorenzo was responsible for the banishment, incarceration, torture or death of most who opposed his rigid, though never completely secure, control of Florence's republican government.
While Lorenzo was never as blatant in dispatching his enemies as Cesare Borgia, whose brutal efficiency so impressed Niccolo Machiavelli, his blend of dignified sophistication and homicidal ruthlessness inspired a recent PBS documentary about the Medicis to call him a "godfather of the Renaissance."
Most of the bad press comes from an antagonist Lorenzo could not kill (although others later did). In a series of widely disseminated sermons, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest, blasted Lorenzo's materialism and licentiousness. Protected by Medici rivals, Savonarola even claimed that a syphilis epidemic was God's punishment of the Italian people for permitting the Medicis, and the corrupt pope they supported, to remain in power.
Though much of what Savonarola said has been discredited, most biographies of Lorenzo describe him as far less than magnificent: a self-aggrandizing despot who supported the arts as a way of gratifying his ego and promoting his family's power.
Miles J. Unger, a former editor of Art New England and author of
The Watercolors of Winslow Homer
, is more sympathetic.
After examining how political survival in Renaissance Europe was often a vicious, bloody mess, Unger shows that in the two decades that Lorenzo covertly ruled Florence, the republic mostly benefited from his stewardship.
Unger also uses Lorenzo's poetry and letters as well as eyewitness accounts of his character to suggest that Lorenzo wasn't the ardent sensualist his critics maintain. Like his grandfather and father, he preferred the quiet of his country estate to the banquets and political intrigue at his Florentine palace.
Unger portrays a Lorenzo whose love of art was sincere, and who, when he wasn't slipping into melancholy near the end of his life, maintained a humanistic faith that God had created all men with an inherent goodness that shapes us far more any fortune could.
He was, in his own way, a Renaissance man.