Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence (review)

Kent's book is a remarkable biography of a remarkable man, and also a biography of fifteenth-century Florence. But does the city's persona reflect off Lorenzo de' Medici as a personification of Florence, or is Lorenzo's persona a condensation of Florence as a Medicean city? Consider such expressions as The Alexandrian Empire or The Augustan Age or Elizabethan England—each a person fused with an era: the whole in a detail, or the other way around. Kent's venture of seeing the desert in a grain of sand is so skillfully performed that I doubt if the reader's naked eyes can make out the risks. At what point in a geological process does a desert make its own grains of sand? Out of what circumstances in the fifteenth century did Florence create Lorenzo? Can one reverse the signifiers?

Kent tries to synthesize Lorenzo with his imago, but Lorenzo as magnifico and Lorenzo as maestro della bottega resist fusion. Even in Lorenzo's time (he became head of the Medici family in 1469), this synthesis was difficult to anneal. Machiavelli, whose opinions were cautious against rhetorical adulation, saw two Lorenzos in one body. Imagine one of them as an ultrarefined patron of the arts, a connoisseur of taste and decorum, a wise and munificent new Solon. Think of the other as a city manager or a trade union boss who distributes jobs and acts as a broker of political influence. As Machiavelli acutely observed: "If in Lorenzo you saw two distinct persons, then they were more or less made one by an impossible fusion."

Intellectual snobs have been unable to tolerate the combination. And since the 1960s, young scholars who could barely differentiate between grain and chaff have been cutting down and harvesting the reputations of great men and great books, finding what every carpenter knows: it is easier to demolish than to build. The mature and renowned art historians Ernest Gombrich and André Chastel led the assault, however—armed with claims that Lorenzo did not demonstrate the active and catholic patronage of the arts with which historians deferentially credit him, his record much less laudable than his grandfather Cosimo's over the previous decades. But hard evidence for justifying demystification is as difficult to come by as hard evidence in support of myths. The Lorenzo myths were appropriate to Lorenzo's time, as was the flattering hyperbole that survived the downfall of the Medici dynasty in the 1490s. And who is to say that the Lorenzo myth is inappropriate for our time? The 1992 observances of the five-hundredth anniversary of Lorenzo's death generated several publications recreating the superman portrayed in Renaissance rhetoric. Kent admits that the myth of Lorenzo as the Magnificent has not lost its seductive allure. My question is, why should it?

Kent comes clean about his own skepticism—his dismissals of the mythological Lorenzo that, he now admits, tainted his earlier scholarship. Following a long paragraph of self-laceration for impulsive judgments now corrected, Kent takes on Asconio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari, who asserted in the mid-sixteenth century that the all-marble library Lorenzo planned to build within the Palazzo Medici was a mythic library. Kent offers "hard evidence" that Lorenzo did indeed love learning and that the library was not mythical. From about 1472, Lorenzo began collecting ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts for this project; and while construction on the library started late in Lorenzo's life, it was half-built when he died at the early age of forty-three.

Efforts to persuade skeptics that the Lorenzo de' Medici persona as fashioned by flattery and adulation was the real Lorenzo is not to justify hero worship or succumb to what Kent calls "florentinitis." Still, the innocent scholar is left to transact moral business with that other person: Lorenzo the shop boss. Lamenting that he had too many holes to fill and not enough money, Lorenzo diverted public funds for himself, making use...