Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli. It would not be an exaggeration — although it is fashionable to dispute it — to say that he was the central figure of the golden age of the Florentine renaissance.
He stamped his image on his city and his time to an extent unequalled in European history since Caesar and Augustus. And he did so, unlike the Romans, without armies at his back. With charm and bold diplomacy he succeeded in maintaining his own position and that of his city against far more powerful rivals like the Papacy, Naples and Venice, keeping a balance of power between the warring city states. When he died aged only 41 in 1492 even the King of Naples, his former enemy, mourned his death as a tragedy for Italy. ‘That man’s life has been long enough for his own deathless fame, but too short for Italy. God grant that now he is dead that may not be attempted which was not ventured in his lifetime’.
He was as skilled and ruthless as any Mafia boss in keeping his dominant position in Florence and seducing or sidelining potential rivals. The 15th-century city was a violent place, given to plotting, uprising and bloody reprisals. It was proud of its democratic history while in fact being an oligarchy dominated for the past three generations by the Medici. The chief threat to the Medici came not from the people but from leading Florentine families jealous of their power and pre-eminence. Lorenzo’s method of staying in charge was to keep the Florentine populace happy with magnificent displays, patronage and distribution of money and offices. Medici power was originally based on the wealth of their banking system with offices in the main commercial centres of Europe. They were the Pope’s bankers (one of the advantages of this being that they could deploy the threat of excommunication to force their clients to pay their debts). Lorenzo, although a brilliant businessman, was a hopeless banker and employed some notable incompetents as managers of his branches. For him, political considerations came before financial ones and, like other autocrats before and since, he was not above embezzling his relatives’ money to support his magnificence. He survived several attempts on his life, notably during the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, which involved the Pope, the King of Naples and the Duke of Urbino, when his brother Giuliano was murdered beside him as they attended mass in the Duomo. Unger’s lurid description of the horrible vengeance exacted on the conspirators makes for gripping reading.
This brilliant book is almost as much the biography of a city as of a man; one of its strengths is an ability to convey the cultural, political and sexual ambience of 15th-century Florence with a rare clarity. The author explains how the passion for pagan classical myth of Lorenzo and the brilliant scholars, poets and artists with whom he liked to surround himself did not involve a rejection of Christianity: the search for God was an important part of Lorenzo’s spiritual life, and, like all Florentines, he was a member of the religious confraternities whose utterances and practices (including flagellation) would not have been out of step with the ferocious preaching of Savonarola. Membership of a confraternity was for Florentines like belonging to branches of political parties with all their opportunities for plotting and ‘networking’.
It was not, however, just religion and politics: Florence was notorious throughout Europe for ‘unnatural sexual acts’. Sodomy was common to Florentines of all classes, and although Lorenzo was predominantly and energetically heterosexual, Unger thinks it likely that he had sexual relations with some of his male friends.
Poetry and love were important to Lorenzo in countering his tendency to depression. Power alone could not bring contentment. His ambition was to make ‘himself and his city great’ Machiavelli wrote. There was a sense in which all this magnficence, this patronage of art and architecture, was fuelled by a desire to be seen as the equal of all the dukes, kings and nobles of his age. The Medici had gone from peasants to powerbrokers in just over three generations, but they remained in their own eyes ‘nouveaux’.
Miles J. Unger has made impressive use of all the latest sources and this rich, well-written book should be essential reading for anyone who is interested in the golden age of the Florentine renaissance, in Italian history of the period and, of course, in Lorenzo himself.
Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description of the method he employed to compile his catalogue, survive today. Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature also tells us that ‘his is the proverbial saying, “mega biblion, mega kakon” ’, which means, if my rusty Greek has not seized up completely, ‘big book, big bad’, a sentiment to which reviewers, confronted by an 800-page biography, may often give wholehearted assent.
The fate of his works reminds us that oblivion is the lot of most books, and that authors who hope for literary immortality are usually disappointed. Publishers often used to employ the back pages of books to advertise their other publications, and few authors can read without a sinking heart the praise accorded to novels which are now quite forgotten and writers of whom they have never heard.
Samuel Johnson took a characteristically robust view:
No Place affords a more striking Conviction of the Vanity of human Hopes, than a publick Library … Of the innumerable Authors whose Performances are thus treasured up in magnificent Obscurity, most are undoubtedly forgotten, because they have never deserved to be remembered, and owed the Honours which they once obtained, not to Judgement or to Genius, to Labour or to Art, but to the Prejudice of Faction, the Stratagems of Intrigue, or the Servility of Adulation.
‘Ouch!’ may be the response to this statement of a melancholy truth, followed by the malicious listing of colleagues and rivals (for all colleagues are also rivals) who owe their success today to just such prejudice, stratagems and servility. Not that there is much comfort in this.
Survival — setting aside the accidents of time which have seen the greater part of the work of ancient authors like Callimachus lost — depends doubtless on merit. Those authors whose works are remembered and read are the few who do not deserve to be forgotten. But how many, even among those who are remembered, are still read, and, of those who are, how much of their output? What of Johnson himself? Belloc thought that you should read Rasselas once a year because there is so much well-expressed wisdom there, but how few of us are likely to do so — how few may have read it even once.
You remember the books you read and enjoyed and learned from when you were young, and you wonder who reads them now. Maybe nobody does. Maybe they linger only in the memory of a ‘Happy Few’, the number diminishing every year. Maybe it would be a mistake to re ad some of them again: Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity, for instance. It was exhilarating to read it at 18. Now, apart from the memory of the enjoyment I got from it, I recall only one line: ‘All trees are oaks to Presidents’. Or perhaps to headmasters and housemasters, I thought then. Ten or so years later, there was a brilliant little novel, a tale of corruption, called Ask Agamemnon. The author’s name was, I think, Hall. Did she? — yes, surely she — write anything else? Other more famous novelists — Snow, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, William Sansom, L. P. Hartley, William Cooper — seem to exist now only in a sort of shadowland; but all in their different ways once gave me pleasure, mattered to me.
Living writers elbow dead ones out of the way, and will themselves be pushed aside in time. Brian Moore, another who has received that elbow in the ribs, has his novelist-hero of An Answer from Limbo say: ‘ “Aschenbach’s whole soul, from the very beginning, was bent on fame.” That sentence from Thomas Mann now strikes me as false. Fame is not the prize; the prize is the doing of the thing itself.’ No doubt, no doubt. Nevertheless, a little later: ‘Kierkegaard and Camus, Dostoevsky and Gide — I spun the circular racks at the bus terminal paperback stand. Would there be room for me?’, he asks. Good question, the sort of one we all put, though today’s novelists may well wonder, enviously, at a bus terminal bookstand where books by Gide and Camus were to be found. Perhaps Callimachus is fortunate that as many as 64 of his epigrams survive. One of them at least does more than just survive in an English version: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead…’ A pleasant voice, a nightingale, still awake, after almost two and a half thousand years. ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’, as Malcolm Lowry put it.
Allan Massie