Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [15]
Behind this interest of the great and powerful in humanist scholarship was not just the itch to acquire propagandists but the desire to recreate the externals of imperial Rome—the Latin slogans, the designs and insignia—in the expectation that the reality of Roman power would follow. The imitation of antiquity became the fashion. Students at the private academy founded in Rome by Pomponio Leto (1428–98) not only studied ancient history but on occasions wore Roman dress, held Roman feasts, collected inscriptions and staged discussions alla romagna, even tended their gardens according to classical principles gathered from Virgil and Horace. In Florence, the Medici went further, erecting the recovery of classical antiquity almost into a principle of government. Indeed it is important to grasp that their power in Florence in the fifteenth century, though ultimately based on their money— they were a family of doctors turned bankers—was expressed by cultural leadership, for they had no formal authority or legal title until 1537, when Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74) became duke of Florence and ultimately grand duke of Tuscany. It was through their cultural enthusiasm for the new, the perfect and the magnificent that they identified themselves with the fortunes of the city, which by about the year 1400 had become, self-consciously and emotionally, a citadel of the arts.
The pattern was set by Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), who dominated Florentine public life for an entire generation. Of course he was rich: his father’s personal wealth— more than eighty thousand florins in 1427—could have paid, it was estimated, the annual wages of two thousand workers in the wool industry. But he was also an enthusiastic would-be scholar. In 1427 he was in Rome helping Poggio Bracciolini to find antique inscriptions. He commissioned and paid for the translation of Plato by Marsilio Ficino, presented in one of the finest manuscripts of the whole Renaissance. At one point he was employing no fewer than thirty-five professional scribes in copying classics for his library. It was, significantly, his bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, who wrote his Life, in which he asserted: “He had a knowledge of Latin which was astonishing in a man engrossed by public affairs.” He also used his money to add a chapel to the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and build living quarters for the novices and to construct a library for and restore San Lorenzo, the Badia church outside Fiesole—all public projects—as well as building the family palace in Florence, designed by Michelozzo, and patronizing all the leading masters, from Donatello down. This was in addition to subsidizing Florence’s armies and diplomacy to the point where, at the Peace of Lodi in 1454, the city was recognized as one of Italy’s five major powers, alongside Venice, the papacy, Milan and Naples.
Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” (1449–92), while ruling Florence in fact though not in name, and with a rod not so much of iron as of gold and ivory, went one better than Cosimo. He was not only a scholar and patron of scholars, supporting the work of Ficino, like his grandfather, and of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano in the translation and editing of Latin and Greek texts, but he was also a poet of distinction. His model was Petrarch, but his verses are full of original ideas, conceits and forms. They celebrate hunting, the woods, nature, the love of women; they deplore the brevity and transience of life; they exude joy and bawdy humor as well as sadness. They were read widely when first published; some