The Ugly Renaissance (11 page)

But criticism was not the same as ideological divergence. Perversely, very few—if any—of the Medici’s critics attacked the underlying structure of Florentine politics. It was more a matter of personnel than principle. The Pazzi conspirators, for example, sought mainly to replace the Medici
reggimento
with their own, and few of the family’s other enemies actually espoused clear constitutional reforms. Neither Parenti nor Rinuccini seems to have shown much interest in substantial political change, and even Savonarola’s
Trattato
left some doubt as to how “civil government” differed from “tyranny” at a structural level. While particular oligarchs were sometimes resented, therefore, the system of politics that facilitated oligarchy remained almost unchallenged. The transition from Medicean oligarchy to Savonarola’s “theocracy” and to the new Florentine Republic was thus little more than a matter of shuffling around the people at the top of the pile without disturbing the underlying structure. Indeed, the shuffling wasn’t even particularly extreme in most cases: Michelangelo’s patron,
Piero Soderini, had served as a prior in 1481 and had been a close friend of
Piero de’ Medici’s before being elected
gonfaloniere a vita
(standard-bearer for life) in 1502.

When Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1501, therefore, he encountered a political world that was alien but also familiar. The Florentine Republic was more committed to “republican” ideals than ever before but was as far from being a “popular” government as it had always been. The same built-in tendencies toward oligarchy that had characterized the Medicean ascendancy (1434–94) were still there. Although much was made of the
introduction of “new” families into the executive, not a single member of the Signoria in 1501 belonged to a family that had not previously held office, and it was something of a miracle that Michelangelo’s brother Buonarroto managed to get himself chosen as a prior in 1516.

Despite the intended symbolism of the
David
, Florence was no
closer to being a city of liberty and equality than it had been in the mid-fourteenth century. Though cloaked in the language of republicanism, profound socioeconomic differences continued to find expression in a culture of relentless political exclusion in which the poorest and least affluent were reduced to a merely passive role in the operation of government, and in which
dissent was treated with uncompromising severity.

Against a historical backdrop of violence, factionalism, and revolt, Michelangelo and the
David
were preparing to take center stage in a political drama designed to deceive and delude the dispossessed and the downtrodden. Although it may have been intended as a symbol of liberty, the city over which the
David
watched was certainly not one dominated by political equality.

R
INALDO
O
RSINI
: R
ELIGION

Yet if Salviati and Soderini both made their presence felt while Michelangelo was at work on the
David
, his statue was every bit as closely informed by another, almost invisible figure. Hiding in the background, but taking an enthusiastic interest in the artist’s work as it progressed just a few meters from the doors of the Duomo, was Rinaldo Orsini, the quiet, unassuming archbishop of Florence.

It was no surprise that Orsini concerned himself with Michelangelo’s sculpture, albeit in a discreet manner. The project was, after all, religious. Although it was to become a powerful political symbol and owed its existence to the money generated by Florentine business, the
David
was cloaked in the language of faith and had for its subject a familiar biblical story. What’s more, the
operai
had commissioned
Il Gigante
as an adornment for one of the cathedral buttresses, and it would have been all but impossible for Orsini not to have been at least mildly interested in the character of a work originally destined for his episcopal seat.

But there was also a more fundamental reason for Orsini—who is often left out of the statue’s story—to have been a subtle presence in the
David
’s history. Orsini was the figurehead of Florence’s religious life, and no matter how hardheaded Soderini and Salviati might have been, there was no getting around the fact that religion was an integral part of daily existence in Michelangelo’s Florence. Although considerably less well-known than many of his predecessors, Orsini was the living embodiment of the glue that held society together.

At its most basic, religion provided a kind of framework into which everything else could be fitted. It was the stuff of time. It structured lives. The milestones of life—baptism, confirmation, marriage, death—all took place in church, while the liturgical calendar provided the framework for the passage of the year. Legal documents and court records were often dated not with reference to a particular day or month but in terms of religious festivals; and rents, too, were frequently collected on feast days. Religion also structured the day. Families worshipped together or separately with piety, often attending Mass or vespers at least once each day, and the chiming of the bells for the various celebrations furnished a largely clockless city with markers for work and leisure. It was, moreover, the stuff of place. The parish remained the basic unit of urban organization, and the local church not only grounded individuals in a locality but also provided a rallying point for communal organization. So, too, religion shaped and defined interpersonal relations of all complexions. Privately, families (especially the rich) cultivated the worship of particular saints in much the same way as the Romans had worshipped household deities (the lares and penates). Individually and collectively, guilds were endowed with a profound religious dimension—as
the competition over the adornment of Orsanmichele demonstrates—while the existence of confraternities ensured that charitable activity remained rooted in the world of religion. Perhaps most important, religion was also the nodal point in the formation of urban identities. The greatest festival in the Florentine civic calendar was, after all, held on the days around the
feast of Saint John the Baptist, while the figure of the Florentine
Saint Zenobius was the source of enormous urban pride, as
Ugolino Verino’s praise testifies. That the
David
expressed a political message through the language of religion was not surprising.

But while the Church provided the warp and the weft for the tapestry of Florentine life, Rinaldo Orsini also presided over an institution that was more than just an abstract framework for daily existence. Even though he himself often remained in the background (perhaps as a consequence of the horrors of Savonarola’s period of ascendancy), Orsini was responsible for binding the Church ever more closely to the conduct of secular life. Like all other archbishops, he had hundreds, if not thousands, of priests, monks, friars, nuns, and tertiaries under his control, and he did his utmost to encourage ever greater numbers of
people to enter the religious life in one form or another. It was his job, in a sense, to make the boundary between the religious and the secular as porous as possible, and, by and large, he succeeded.

Thanks to the campaigning of Orsini and his underlings, sons often found that the religious life offered an attractively secure alternative to a worldly career, particularly in larger families, while poverty frequently made it necessary for dowry-less daughters to be placed in a convent. It would have been of some delight to the shy archbishop that Michelangelo’s older brother, Lionardo, for example, became a Dominican friar, while his niece, Francesca (Buonarroto’s daughter), was put into a convent after her father’s death until her uncle could raise a suitable dowry. This arrangement did not always result in harmony within the home or within the cloister. It was not uncommon for daughters to react very badly to the idea of being shut away in a convent. In 1568, a fourteen-year-old Sienese girl attempted to poison her entire family by grinding up a mirror and mixing the mercurial powder into the salad at dinner as a means of dodging the wimple. Similarly, monks and friars often found that while the religious life made financial sense, it did not lead inevitably to humility and piety. After the death of his mother,
Filippo Lippi’s sister was no longer able to provide for him, and he was placed in a Carmelite convent at the tender age of eight.
On reaching maturity, however, Lippi discovered that his cloistered existence did not sit at all well with his nigh-uncontrollable lust, and both his superiors and his patrons struggled unsuccessfully to keep him in check.

As Orsini was aware, however, the fact that a great many families had members in holy orders meant there was a good deal of crossover between the religious and the secular. This was not merely a matter of conventional exchange, of conversations in the street or chats after Mass. Sex was also a big part of the equation, and in this respect
Boccaccio’s
Decameron
offers some useful insights.
Although monks and friars are sometimes presented as unwitting go-betweens, they more frequently appear in Boccaccio’s tales as extremely active participants in wild sexual games. In one story,
a Tuscan abbot conceives a passionate love for the wife of the pious Ferondo but is only able to extract from her a promise to satisfy his lusts when her sex-averse husband is in Purgatory, where he will realize the errors of his ways. Cleverly, the abbot drugs Ferondo so that he appears dead, then removes him from the tomb where he has been buried and locks him in a vault. When he
awakes, Ferondo is convinced that he is in Purgatory. The abbot, meanwhile, cavorts with Ferondo’s wife to his heart’s content. In another tale,
a Benedictine monk is caught having an affair with a young girl but avoids a severe reprimand by reminding the abbot that he, too, had enjoyed a few moments of pleasure with the same girl.

Predictably, this generated a good deal of criticism. Particularly during the early fifteenth century, Florentine literature had a strong anticlerical strain that concentrated most of all on gluttony and lustfulness among the clergy.
Poggio Bracciolini and
Leonardo Bruni, for example, were eager critics.

Yet the links between the religious and the secular worlds during Orsini’s episcopate went deeper than mere sex. Far from being “merely” a prelate, Rinaldo Orsini was also a businessman. And this is where his shadowy presence in the history of the
David
begins to get really murky.

However firm the commitment to poverty may have been among the monastic and mendicant orders, monks, nuns, and friars all needed cash, and every ecclesiastical institution managed a wide range of financial interests. The Carthusian monastery at Galluzzo, just outside Florence, owned “
a cloth factory in the Via Maggio, a tailor’s shop in the Via del Garbo, a barber shop in the parish of S. Piero Gattolino, [and] a dwelling in the Borgo Ogni Santi.” Equally, some religious houses in the city ran profitable business ventures from within their own walls.
The Umiliati friars, for example, owned and ran a wool-producing factory near the river from the late thirteenth century onward. Convents were especially active in this regard.
Francesco di Marco Datini’s wife once wrote to her husband to tell him about the wonderful tablecloths she had ordered at one convent and the towels she had purchased from another. The secular clergy had the largest investment portfolios. Thanks to bequests and donations, individual churches and ecclesiastical positions possessed parcels of land, buildings, or even entire businesses that generated a steady income stream from rents and revenues. Some could return surprisingly vast amounts of money. Even though there were
no fewer than 263 dioceses in mainland Italy (excluding Sicily and Sardinia), it was rare to find a bishop—and least of all an archbishop of Florence—who did not have a steady stream of gold flowing into his pockets.

While this all made ecclesiastical institutions major players in the Florentine economy, it also tied priests and prelates in particular to the
vicious world of familial ambition. Due to the wealth accruing from benefices, Florence’s most important families were naturally eager to supplement their collective worth by sending some of their members into the Church and by vying constantly for ecclesiastical preferment. In 1364,
Francesco del Bene lobbied the papal secretary,
Francesco Bruni, unremittingly to ensure that the church of Santa Maria Sopra Porta was given to his son, Bene, while
Buonaccorso Pitti later engaged in a long and drawn-out battle with
Niccolò da Uzzano in a vicious competition to obtain the hospital in Altopascio for his nephew.

Rinaldo Orsini was no exception to this. He had been installed as archbishop of Florence as a result of a petition made by Lorenzo de’ Medici to
Pope Sixtus IV in 1474. Although the Medici-hating Sixtus had originally wanted to appoint Jacopo Salviati’s kinsman Francesco to the vacant see, Lorenzo was determined that Orsini get the job. It wasn’t that he had any particular faith in Rinaldo’s commitment to Christian virtue: he was far more interested in the fact that Orsini was his brother-in-law. By having his wife’s brother installed as the next archbishop, Lorenzo hoped to consolidate his family’s hold on power further and to divert the Church’s revenue stream into the coffers of his own family.

That Orsini had been appointed as the result of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s scheming points to a further important dimension of the archbishop’s role in Florentine life. By virtue of the intimate relationship between the religious and the secular spheres in Renaissance Florence, it would have been surprising had the Church’s broader ties with politics and business not been equally incestuous. Indeed, precisely because of the familial and economic links binding the laity to the clergy, considerable crossover between the institutional worlds was inevitable. But while we are accustomed to seeing the archbishop of Canterbury hold forth on political and financial matters today, the relationship was much more intense and much less friendly during the Renaissance.