In his early twenties the young man from Vinci was still living in Verrocchio’s house, with Lorenzo di Credi and the other apprentices. Within a very short space of time Leonardo’s prodigious talent had attracted the attention of the city and he became a leading figure on the artistic scene, which included some of the greatest names of the century. Most of them produced Madonnas for the private devotion of rich merchants. The fact that Leonardo completed two Madonnas should in fact be seen as an open challenge to other masters of this most fashionable genre. With a remarkable sense of professional competition, Leonardo identified the topic that was most commonly requested from painters and had the courage to radically transform and renew it, demonstrating his artistic superiority through straightforward confrontation. He could not have chosen a better moment to launch himself professionally, and closeness to his newly acquired family seems to have lessened even the suffering caused by the family he never had. It no longer mattered that his father Piero hardly showed him any affection and refused to acknowledge his legitimacy although he still had no legitimate heirs.
Florence was living its years of greatest splendour under the rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent. It had been a severe city, but during this period Lorenzo was turning it into an elegant and joyful showcase for the Italian humanist revolution. The need to control the accumulated wealth of private families tended to delay the onset of maturity and youths did not reach adulthood and legal emancipation until they were 25; as for marriage, well, there was still time: males from elite households often married when they were around 32 years old.
This was a city where public power lay entirely in male hands and the percentage of orphan girls who died was so much higher than that of male infants that there are grounds for lending an ear to the suspicions raised by many modern scholars regarding the widespread practice of female infanticide. Moreover, women were allowed very limited rights before marriage – and even afterwards. Under the law, the preservation of capital called for a strict imposition of male rights. The clearest sign of the legal marginalization of women was the custom that, if widowed, a woman would return to her father’s house, leaving her children with her husband’s family. Florence was not an easy city for all of its citizens: it was a free city only insofar as it was rich, but the preservation of that wealth called for sacrifices and a rigorous discipline.
This atmosphere appears to have given an advantage to Leonardo, who had little interest in women even at an age when, for many men, they are the sole reason for living. Soon after he first came to this festive city from the countryside, Leonardo attended some of the most fabulous ceremonies staged in Italy during the period, such as the two public ‘jousts’ organized by the Medici. The first, on 12 February 1469, was held in Piazza Santa Croce, with a reluctant Lorenzo as the star performer. Lorenzo’s garments were embroidered with so many pearls that he could barely move and a chronicler with a particularly keen business eye gave a detailed valuation of the cost of these and other jewels on his person; there were 2,000 ducats’ worth of diamonds on his cap alone. In the eyes of a boy newly arrived from the countryside, this was a dreamlike vision.
The second memorable joust in which Leonardo himself might have participated – albeit indirectly, by drawing or designing some of the Medici banners – was held on 29 January 1475. On this occasion the lead role was taken by Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano (1453–78), a man widely known for his extraordinarily good looks. The joust was held as part of the festivities for an alliance with Venice, and the captains of the Parte Guelfa were responsible for the organization. However, in this subtle game of self-celebration, homage was being paid above all to the power of the ruling house. Giuliano entered an enclosure that had been set up at Santa Croce; he was preceded by nine trumpeters wearing rich livery blazoned with his coat of arms and by a page bearing his standard. Another two horsemen followed who were due to joust at his side, together with a retinue of twelve young gentlemen, three pipers and four pages, including Lorenzo’s young son, Piero (1472–1503), who made his first public appearance at the age of three.
Giuliano appeared wearing on his head a garland made of silk and feathers and held in place by a precious balascio gem: a ruby-coloured spinel that was highly sought after at the time. When he arrived in the piazza, the effect was astounding. His trim body did not offer sufficient space to display the wealth of the Medici, and therefore his grey horse Orso, which was at least as famous as its master, especially after this appearance, was decked out with ‘two huge dragon wings, all embroidered with pearls and silver, and in the place of the eyes on those wings were 24 brochette with gems and pearls of great value’. But Giuliano’s true, incomparable refinement was shown through the indifference with which, during the joust, he lost the pearls that had been on his shield. These had been embroidered to form a Medusa head, which clearly petrified the Florentines without any magic or charms but simply through its dazzling wealth: ‘the head of Medusa filled the entire background of the shield. There were pearls weighing about ten ounces, and he jousted with it and lost all of them.’14
Feast days in a republic of bankers offered the opportunity to bolster the communal spirit and were public occasions because, at least in appearance, the republic had no princely court. As tools of propaganda, these Medici ceremonies were focused entirely on the population and created occasions that did not exist in any other parts of the world. This was also true of festivities whose tradition predated the Medici: the feast of Epiphany, for example, with its splendid procession of the Magi, was organized every year by a lay confraternity based at San Marco, but this event, too, became an occasion to celebrate and show off the family’s wealth. Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Lorenzo rose to the highest office in the confraternity and the brethren of the Magi accompanied the corpse at his funeral in 1492.
As the annual procession was leaving San Marco, the precious gems and fabulously rich fabrics worn by the kings with their retinues of servants completely eclipsed the religious significance of the Epiphany and the procession became instead a sanctification of wealth and luxury. The Medici’s fascination with this scene was such that Cosimo asked Benozzo Gozzoli to paint the Journey of the Magi in the chapel of the new palace built by Michelozzo; and naturally Lorenzo, the appointed heir of the dynasty, appeared among the kings in the fresco.
Lorenzo took the family’s reputation for magnificence very seriously and, while his grandfather, Cosimo the Elder, had been very prudent when organizing public festivities and had emphasized the fact that they were held to honour the city and not the family, his grandson could barely curb this desire for self-celebration. The well-oiled system that Cosimo had established in order to keep the city under firm control – namely through the selection of those who were put forward for elective office – seemed all too stable. However, Lorenzo failed to understand that this constant ostentation of power and wealth, which delighted and enslaved the people, fuelled the jealousies of the great rival families, which had competing if not better claims not only to the responsibilities of government but also to the organization of public festivities.
Among the families most opposed to the extraordinary power of Lorenzo and his family circle was that of the Pazzi, who for centuries had been charged with the organization of another ceremony much loved by the Florentines. This was known as the feast of the ‘explosion of the cart’ [scoppio del carro]. A Pazzi ancestor who had been on crusade and present at the conquest of Jerusalem had shown such courage by being the first to scale the walls of the city in 1099 that Godfrey of Bouillon had presented him with some small stones from the Holy Sepulchre. These had been housed ever since in the Florentine palace of the Pazzi family; and every year, at Easter, they were used to strike the spark that lit the flame of the paschal candle in the cathedral. To celebrate the occasion, the flame was carried around the city on a cart, followed by a long procession, up to the church door.
Then there was the feast of Corpus Domini, which was also a great opportunity for self-celebration because the long procession offered a chance for the city’s elite to hang its finest tapestries and embroideries from windows along the route. The feast day of the city’s patron saint, Saint John or San Giovanni, was another, particularly because, in Florence as in many other places, this saint inherited the pagan celebrations for the summer solstice. During these celebrations, which lasted for three days, the city literally went into a frenzy and every male aged 15 and over had to carry to the Baptistery a candle or a cloth banner, all of which were subsequently sold. On San Giovanni’s day the procession wound around the old city walls and, according to the chroniclers, it might well have been a pagan celebration, judging by the magnificence not only of the garments worn by the clergy and of the confraternities in the extremely long procession that carried the relics around the city but also of the precious goods displayed by artisans in front of their shops and by rich families under their loggias or at the entrance to their palaces. It was almost as if the procession intended to invoke the patron saint’s blessing on the prosperity that had accumulated within the city walls. This was the true attraction of the feast: the profusion of wealth, ostentatiously displayed by citizens from all walks of life:
it is worth seeing the paving stones of some streets almost entirely covered by carpets, the walls adorned by hangings; on one side are expanses of silk woven with gold and silver threads, on the other ornaments embellished with gems and silver and gold vessels in a thousand different shapes. Further on are gold spheres and precious stones mounted on gold chains or massive silver ingots. Elsewhere there are bundles of fabrics in different colours and, around the vegetable market known as the Old Market, you will find precious garments for men and women lain on the ground or hanging from ropes.15
The tradition of public festivities celebrating the city’s prosperity clashed and often competed with the Medici’s organization of celebrations – so much so that Lorenzo’s distinct coolness towards traditional urban feasts, which appeared to resist the Medici’s monopoly on taste and wealth, did not escape his most observant friends. Some of them reprimanded him for his scant interest in creating ephemeral architecture to celebrate the patron saint. In 1472 Luigi Pulci sent Lorenzo a letter that has all the hallmarks of a genuine reproach:
and I wondered somewhat at your attitude when you so categorically declined to provide for it [the feast of San Giovanni], given that you are a citizen and an affectionate supporter of the patria, of which the Baptist is also the protector and we must pay him due honour. And if through some mishap we happened not to be on time, you’d see how he could manage without us.16
But Lorenzo did not listen to reason and the general political situation was very favourable to the city, which he was by then regarding as his own. But other leading families harboured discontent, as they understood only too well how this continuous self-representation masked a substantial drop in public participation in government, while it curried favour among the least affluent classes – only to make them even weaker and more obedient.
Exactly at the time of Lorenzo’s rise to power, Florence found itself playing a crucial role on the chessboard of Italian politics, where external threats were urging strong internal cohesion. In 1470, when Leonardo was just 18, the Ottoman ruler Mahomet II conquered from the Venetians the island of Euboea [formerly known as Negroponte in the modern era] and within the space of a few months drew dangerously close to the coast of Italy, becoming a new and terrifying threat to the litigious states of the peninsula. The kingdom of Naples, which, of all European states, was the one most exposed to the Ottoman attacks, promoted a Holy League against the infidels and asked Venice, Milan and Florence to join in order to convince the pope also to take part. This alliance was a major turning point for Florence and for the Medici because it offered security against Venetian meddling and also against the papacy, which was always ready to expand its states at the expense of what was essentially the last republic in Italy (except of course for Venice, which had established bases and possessions throughout the Mediterranean).
In short, Florence, which had close relations with Milan and Naples thanks in large part to the Medici, enjoyed a relative stability and Lorenzo was able to dismiss any concerns prompted by the jealousies of other leading families. The city was living through a golden age. The situation seemed peaceful enough and the 15,000 ducats requested by the king of Naples to arm the League against the Turks were more or less equivalent to the jewels worn by Giuliano and his horse at the legendary joust of Santa Croce.
Lorenzo also took decisive action to quash the occasional rebellion of a subject city, as he did in Volterra, which had tried to rebel, taking with it the valuable alum quarries. Retribution was entrusted to the duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, who was richly compensated for putting the city to the sack. Any internal opposition to the massacre was skilfully silenced, and blame was laid squarely on the duke, who had an impetuous and greedy nature. The Medici family’s tradition of patronage was restored through the establishment of a sort of artistic academy in the gardens of San Marco, a green rectangle in the city centre where Lorenzo displayed the classical statues found by his agents all over Italy and where he brought together poets, philosophers and, above all, artists.
There could not have been a better place for a young artist to enjoy life and Leonardo had no shortage of distractions, in his own way. The picture of unbridled hedonism painted by Florentine chroniclers from the 1470s helps us to understand the freedom with which the young artist, free from any family restraint, launched himself into that frenetic lifestyle, with very risky consequences for his future.