MEDICI, Lorenzo de', called the Magnificent. - Born in Florence on 1 January 1449, died at Careggi (Florence) on 8 April 1492. Still very young, he effectively helped his father Piero to thwart the plots of his adversaries, and in 1466, in derogation of the age limits sanctioned by the Statutes, he was admitted to the Council of the Hundred. In 1469 he married Clarice Orsini. On the death of Piero, in December of that year, the authority of first citizens was recognized in L. and his brother Giuliano; but Giuliano took no interest whatever in public affairs.
The internal conflicts that had troubled Piero's government convinced L. of the need to reorganize the State and strengthen the regime; but the constitutional reforms were carried out with prudent slowness and at long intervals: in 1470-71 and in 1480. Only in the last years were foreign affairs almost entirely centralized in L.'s personal Chancery; but he never came to assume formally absolute power.
L. was at first on cordial terms with Pope Sixtus IV, who entrusted him with the depository of the Church and gave open support to Florence when, in 1472, it repressed the rebellion of Volterra, reducing the city to full subjection. But the friendship was disturbed by the expansionist designs into which Sixtus IV allowed himself to be drawn by his ambitious nephew Girolamo Riario, eager to carve out a lordship for himself in central Italy. The first clash took place in 1473, when the Pope, with the help of the Pazzi, rivals of the Medici, forestalled Florence in the purchase of Imola. The quarrel, which grew ever more bitter, had its tragic epilogue in the conspiracy of 1478. On 26 April, during a Mass in S. Maria del Fiore, the two Medici were treacherously attacked: Giuliano was killed, but L. managed to save himself. The atrocity of the deed unleashed a furious popular reaction, and some leaders of the conspiracy, among them Archbishop Salviati, were put to death. There followed the excommunication of L., the interdict hurled against the city and a general war. Ferdinand of Naples took up arms for the Pope, and the military operations turned to the disadvantage of Florence, to which its allies, Milan and Venice, gave only scant aid. L. found himself in serious difficulties, also because his adversaries cleverly declared that they were making war on him and not on the city. Therefore in December 1479 he took the bold decision to go to the court of his most powerful enemy, Ferdinand of Aragon, to attempt an agreement. At Naples he succeeded in convincing the King, and departed from there with peace concluded: a success for which «he returned to Florence very great, if he had left it great» (Machiavelli).
In L.'s directives the so-called policy of equilibrium now takes shape. In this, however, two phases should be distinguished. During the war of Ferrara and up to the peace of Bagnolo (1484), L. set himself the same objective that had been pursued by Cosimo the Elder: to keep the forces of the Italian States balanced, preventing hegemonic ambitions from endangering the peace through a shrewd play of alliances. But when in 1485 the Neapolitan barons, supported by the new pope Innocent VIII, rebelled against the King, giving rise to a new general war, and L., overcoming the reluctance of his fellow citizens, insisted that Florence side with Milan and with Naples against the Holy See, this intervention had a very different character from that of 1482. L. knew that any Italian ruler, when he found himself losing, would not hesitate to invoke foreign aid; he knew that the new France, unified under a powerful monarchy, constituted the gravest threat to the liberty of the peninsula, a threat from which the Italian States could not hope to defend themselves except by uniting all their forces together. Therefore, while spurring the allies to act with the utmost energy, he prevented Florence from formally declaring war on the Church, and opened and continued throughout the conflict secret negotiations with the Pope, with the aim of preparing a «true peace». L.'s correspondence now reveals his near and distant aims. Since a weak and discordant Italy would be an easy prey for the ultramontanes, it was necessary to consolidate the alliance between Florence, Milan and Naples; which, however, must be nothing but the first step toward a general League, into which the Pope would enter, once he had renounced his expansionist plans. Finally Venice too would have to join it, so as not to estrange itself definitively from Italian political life.
L.'s action was fully successful, because, after the peace of Rome (1486), his relations with the Pope became most cordial and their friendship lasted unchanged until L.'s death. Innocent VIII gave proof of this by having his son Franceschetto marry L.'s daughter Maddalena, offering in 1488 the cardinal's purple to L., who refused it, giving it shortly afterward to the adolescent Giovanni. There persisted nevertheless, as a permanent danger of new conflicts, the antagonism between Rome and Naples, which Milan and Venice fomented rather than quieted. For six years L. had to watch, one might say, hour by hour the moves of the contenders, spy out their intentions, dissuade them from any act that could produce irreparable consequences. And for six years, availing himself of the uncontested moral predominance that he now exercised in Italy, he succeeded in maintaining peace. A few months before his death, in January 1492, the agreement that settled the long-standing dispute between the Pope and the King of Naples was made public. Thus L. had accomplished the mission he had assigned himself, inducing the Italian rulers to a more or less willing recognition of the common interest.
No less original than his political action was the mark that L. impressed on our literature.
His poetic work consists of a collection of Rime; a Comento sopra alcuni de' suoi sonetti; two Selve d'amore; three short poems: l'Ambra, gli Amori di Venere e Marte, La caccia col falcone; two eclogues: il Corinto and l'Apollo e Pan; nine unfinished capitoli: Simposio ovvero I beoni; Canzoni a ballo and Canti carnascialeschi; six philosophical capitoli: l'Alterazione; Rime spirituali and Laudi; a Rappresentazione de' ss. Giovanni e Paolo. The attribution of an idyll, La Nencia da Barberino, is disputed. Recently the authorship of a prose novella has been recognized as his: the Novella di Giacoppo. His vast correspondence is still for the most part unpublished.
Unlike the humanists of his time, who mostly preferred to use Latin, L. always wrote in the vernacular, and in the Comento sopra alcuni de' suoi sonetti he composed the finest apology, after that of Dante, of the traditional virtues, the magnificent possibilities and the national value of our language. After a brief period of Stilnovist and Petrarchan imitation, L. is among the first to introduce into literature a vigorous popular vein. His realism is not a mere reproduction of nature: he does not limit himself to observing it with an attentive eye, but relives its spirit and interprets and translates it with universally human expressions.
As a man, L., if he was not immune from contradictions and faults, nevertheless demonstrated in the seriousness of his family affections, in his manner of life far removed from all ostentation, that he had remained faithful to the plebeian simplicity of his lineage, and to the solid moral and religious education received from his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. If he indulged the custom of the time by writing licentious songs, he nonetheless gave vent to the deepest aspirations of his soul by composing religious verses, of which the very lack of stylistic refinements attests their absolute sincerity, and by expressing in the Rappresentazione de' ss. Giovanni e Paolo, which may be considered his spiritual testament, a sadness inspired by the sense of the vanity of human pomp and pleasures. He faced death with Christian serenity, and requested and obtained, before his passing, the blessing of Savonarola.
In L. are joined and fused the virtues typical of the Italian people: repugnance for abstraction and a taste for the concrete and the practical; cautious acceptance of the new insofar as it does not destroy the spiritual patrimony inherited from the fathers; fundamental moral soundness. In politics as in art, L.'s life represents a continuous ascent from Florentineness to Italianness. He is the first statesman who, freeing himself from the municipalistic conception of the Middle Ages, rises to the broader vision of the common interests of the entire nation.
Bibliography6 works
Roberto Palmarocchi