The Ugly Renaissance (26 page)

This was no small matter. Officially, Cosimo was nothing more than a private citizen. It had been years since he had last held any public office. Yet it was nevertheless an accepted fact that he was the dominant force in Florentine political life. Like a spider sitting at the center of a gigantic web, he manipulated a network of clients, contacts, and friends into doing his bidding in the
Signoria and used a mixture of bribery and coercion to ensure that his word was law. As
Pope Pius II noted,

Cosimo was refused nothing. In matters of war and peace his decisions were final and his word was regarded as law, not so much a citizen as master of his city. Government meetings were held at his house; his candidates were elected to public office; he enjoyed every semblance of royal power except a title and a court.

Although Florence still prided itself on being a republic in 1459, this was little more than a polite fiction. Florence was Cosimo’s. He was king in all but name.

The
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
was part of a gigantic publicity campaign aimed at endowing Cosimo and his heirs with an aura of political legitimacy, and it was primarily for this reason that the Medici had taken such tremendous care to discuss every last detail of the frescoes with Gozzoli. On the one hand, the Medici were implicitly pointing to the “heavyweights” who were backing them up.
By surrounding themselves with portraits of the great and the good, the Medici not only projected an image of a fully functioning political network but also provided a model for the networks they wished to create in future. And on the other hand, the dynamics of visual role-playing were an unabashed assertion of the Medici’s political status. In being cast in the role of Caspar, the young Lorenzo de’ Medici was being placed on a par with Emperor John VIII Palaeologus and Patriarch Joseph II. Cosimo’s family, in other words, “
presented themselves as worthy companions of kings, prince-like in honour and rank if not in name.” Taken as a whole, the frescoes were an unambiguous affirmation of Cosimo’s boundless confidence and ambition and an unmistakable statement of the Medici’s intention to remain the masters of a powerful and dynamic city that saw itself as the center of the cultural and political universe.

By virtue of the subtle political message embedded within the imagery, Gozzoli’s frescoes reveal a rather different side to the “
rise of the patron.” The
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
points to the fact that patrons knew that as a form of PR that could be manipulated and shaped at will, art was power.

This had grown out of the same dynamics that had stimulated the nicer, more refined aspects of the “rise of the patron.” It was all a matter of legitimacy. There was a pressing need for a sense of authority in the political sphere.
The collapse of imperial authority had led northern Italy to crumble into a patchwork quilt of competing city-states between
the Alps and the Patrimony of St. Peter. In some, like Florence, Siena, Perugia, and Bologna, bourgeois tradesmen succeeded in dislodging the remnants of the nobility and establishing
republics in which “citizens” were nominally supreme. In others, like Milan, Padua, and Mantua, the cities subjected themselves (willingly or unwillingly) to the rule of an all-powerful
signore
, or lord. Despite their differences, however, both the city-republics and the “despotisms” faced a common challenge. Confronted with the constant threat of external domination and the persistent dangers of factionalism and civil strife, the cities needed to come up with some method of defending both their right to exist as autonomous states and the legitimacy of their system of government.

But there was also an equally pressing need for a sense of moral rectitude in the economic sphere. Made rich by the expansion of trade, merchant banking, and the
cloth industry, the communes and despotisms were packed with newly wealthy oligarchies that struggled to justify their importance in government, as well as the colossal wealth they had acquired.

The emergence of humanism offered a range of different means of addressing this double-headed need for legitimacy, and the highly educated notaries and bureaucrats who increasingly kept the city-states running devoted their knowledge of classical thought to providing the wealthy and powerful with much-needed intellectual support.

Yet however important literature and political philosophy may have been in investing the city-states with a sense of legitimacy, they only went so far. The audience for works of this variety was highly restricted, and given that it was most frequently composed either by bureaucrats and officials (rather than oligarchs and despots) or by literary hacks desperate to curry favor, it is even tempting to ask whether such works ever went beyond self-congratulatory backslapping.

An alternative route to legitimacy was to substitute confident affirmation for literary defense. Coupled with broad-based economic growth and the gradual development of artistic techniques, the new learning exposed those seeking to bolster their positions to the potential value of architecture and the visual arts as an instrument in the games of power. Indeed, equipped with a profound knowledge of the liberal arts, the rich and the powerful were conscious that painting and sculpture opened up possibilities that were all but inaccessible to literary—and even oral—culture. Retaining a close grip on the design
and composition of artworks and architectural projects, patrons recognized that visual representations of power could employ a much more varied, flexible, and subtle vocabulary than could ever be expressed in writing and were capable of addressing issues that were virtually impossible to defend on paper. Political relationships could be discreetly modeled, wealth could be celebrated, and bonds could be forged with other groups and individuals through the arrangement and use of a vast array of iconographical features. What was more, through art or architecture, it became possible for patrons to communicate highly sophisticated and elaborate images of legitimacy and authority to broad sections of a society that was still preponderantly illiterate or semiliterate at best. Thus, although there is no denying the “rise of the artist,” patrons simultaneously found that the need for legitimacy transformed them into “
sophisticated and, in some cases, highly professional image makers.”

From the late thirteenth century on, art’s unique power to confer legitimacy on cities, institutions, and individuals led to an explosion in what might be called the “image market.” The emergent city-states were among the most obvious patrons pouring money into art. Public buildings began to be constructed that reflected their grandeur.
The town halls of
Florence (1299–1314) and
Siena (1298–1310) were conceived as testimonies to the stability and endurance of the communes, while fortresslike palaces such as the Palazzo Ducale in
Mantua and the Castello Sforzesco in
Milan (begun ca. 1310–20) served to emphasize that precisely the same qualities applied to the
signori
who dominated the “despotic” states. So, too, art was commissioned for public spaces that glorified either the independence of the communes or the relentless brilliance of the despots. In communal Siena, for example,
the Council of the Nine called in
Ambrogio Lorenzetti to paint the monumental
Allegory of Good and Bad Government
(1338–39) on the walls of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico as a visual demonstration of the merits of republican government. And later, between 1465 and 1474,
Andrea Mantegna was commissioned to decorate the Camera degli Sposi in the Mantuan Palazzo Ducale with frescoes depicting the
signore
Ludovico Gonzaga surrounded by his family and meeting with his son
Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, the emperor Frederick III, and Christian I of Denmark at Bozzolo on January 1, 1462. After a stuttering start to the Renaissance, even the papacy grabbed hold of patronage with both
hands, and by the mid-fifteenth century the popes had become some of Italy’s most powerful and influential
patrons of the arts.

Institutions were also prepared to draw on the new learning to collaborate with artists in creating sophisticated and “acceptable”
public images. Religious confraternities and guilds invested heavily in patronage, and there is perhaps no better illustration of this than the richly decorated exterior of Orsanmichele in Florence, which was adorned with statues by virtually all of the leading artists of the day. Private citizens, too, got involved. Whether as obscenely wealthy merchants, powerful oligarchs, or warlike courtiers, individuals followed both the communes and the despotisms in using painting and sculpture to legitimate their dominance of governance, counsel, and wealth. Everyone who was anyone, in fact, was clamoring for art as a form of power.

So successful was art at communicating legitimacy that it was perhaps inevitable that learned patrons should have used their clout to push painting and sculpture in new and ever more innovative directions aimed at the same objective. Before long, the logic of this process led not only to the increasing “secularization” of religious themes in the service of patrons’ ambitions, but also to the blurring of the distinction between “public” and “private” and to the expansion of the iconography of status. Cosimo de’ Medici, his immediate heirs, and his more adventurous contemporaries were at the forefront of this development and, armed with an impressive arsenal of intellectual resources, successfully railroaded artists into embracing new forms that reflected their own aspirations. A rich combination of visual exuberance, artistic brilliance, and overarching ambition, Gozzoli’s
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
is perhaps the first and fullest expression of this willingness to encourage artistic innovation in the pursuit of legitimacy.

Although there is always a temptation to conflate the character of patrons with the beauty of the paintings and sculptures they commissioned, the “power of art” demonstrates that patronage—particularly large-scale patronage—was habitually used to serve very cynical, real-world purposes and testifies not to the culture and learning of those holding the purse strings but to the deep-seated illegitimacy of those who cultivated the arts most strenuously. Lurking beneath the surface of every major painting or fresco was another, much darker story of patronage and raw power. But even this only begins to hint at the true ugliness of the Renaissance patron.

T
HE
A
RT OF
P
OWER

Young though he may have been, Galeazzo Maria Sforza would have been able to see that Cosimo de’ Medici had worked with Gozzoli to produce a potent illustration of the legitimacy of his rule in Florence. But he would also have been able to see that Cosimo had a greater need than most for precisely this form of artistic legitimacy. What was more, it would have been obvious that he was being shown Gozzoli’s frescoes for a very specific reason.

Far from being an unusually successful, self-made man whose manifest abilities had obliged him to assume the burdens of power unwillingly, Cosimo de’ Medici had not risen to the top by his wealth and good sense alone. Though he was rich and sophisticated, Cosimo was little more than a moneygrubbing, power-hungry megalomaniac who had achieved his position of ascendancy through a combination of corruption, violence, and brutality.

Having made huge profits from lending money at interest and speculating on highly volatile markets, Cosimo had deployed his vast resources in the service of his unbounded ambitions. Although he rarely deigned to hold public office, he was not ashamed to buy the influence he craved, and he openly purchased votes when he had to. Working behind the scenes, he had a ruthless attitude toward opposition. In the early years of his political adventurism, he simply threw his financial weight around until he got his way. After being exiled by the faction headed by
Palla Strozzi and
Rinaldo degli Albizzi in 1433, he effectively blackmailed Florence into recalling him by starving the city of much-needed cash. Immediately upon reentering Florence in 1434, he had Strozzi and Albizzi exiled for life. And that was just the beginning.

Only a year before Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s arrival, Cosimo had embarked on a ferocious and uncompromising coup. Posting armed men around the square, he forced a public
parlamento
to rubber-stamp a new constitution that would give him absolute control over the
Signoria, and made sure that any dissenting voices would be squashed by securing the support of foreign mercenaries. What was more, he had no qualms about embarking on a campaign of persecutions. His remaining enemies—dyed-in-the-wool republicans, or Strozzi loyalists—were disbarred from political office, and a new council (the Cento) was set up to ensure that his bidding would be done without question.

By 1459, Cosimo was firmly in control of Florence.
But even though he tried to do some good for the city (as the merchant
Marco Parenti observed), the stain of illegitimacy and illegality clung to him indelibly. As Pius II recorded in his
Commentaries
, Cosimo remained the
“illegitimate lord” of the city and would always be guilty of keeping “its people in cruel servitude.” And no matter how hard he tried to suppress opposition, a certain segment of the population would always strain against the ties with which he had bound them.

Cosimo had sacrificed any chance of enjoying lawful authority and had to work doubly hard to craft an artificial aura of legitimacy. With the same ruthlessness that had driven him to hack his way to the pinnacle of power, he looked to the arts for something more than a vague, sentimental form of respectability. The peak of a lengthy campaign of careful patronage, the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
was designed to cover up his many vices. With a genuine sense of cunning, Cosimo had harnessed Gozzoli’s artistic ability to help remove the horrible taint of tyranny and to present him as a benevolent
pater patriae
with whom all right-thinking (that is, credulous) citizens could sympathize.

Given the means by which Cosimo had seized control of Florence, it would have been vitally important that Galeazzo Maria Sforza recognize the frescoes as a powerful illustration of the Medici’s power. In revealing the stability and strength of his family’s (ultimately illegitimate) position, Cosimo was making a decisive power play through pictures. It all boiled down to a question of mutual benefit, and Gozzoli’s frescoes were a visual component in a broader game of horse-trading that would not be out of place in a Mafia drama.