Authors: Eric Weiner
Under a steady drip of Medici patronage, artists were free to pursue their passions without worrying about money. That was especially true of the family’s favorites, such as Donatello, who kept his cash in a basket above his studio and told his assistants and friends to help themselves. Not many were tempted. The Renaissance heralded the birth of the starving
artist. Michelangelo led an almost monklike existence. Even after achieving extraordinary wealth and fame, he survived on a single crust of bread and jug of wine per day. He rarely washed and often slept in his boots. Forsaking friendship and romantic love, he lived for his art and little else.
“Money, the actual money, possession of money, was meaningless to him,” Eugene tells me between sips of what is now his third espresso. “He didn’t care about money. When he died, they found a box under his bed with enough cash in it to buy Florence.” Michelangelo was the world’s first tortured artist. “My delight is in melancholy,” he said, a statement that would later become the unofficial rallying cry for countless generations of sullen artists dressed entirely in black.
Actually, when it comes to the relationship between personal genius and personal wealth, the Prayer of Agur provides the best guidance: “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” Throughout history, the vast majority of geniuses have come from the middle and upper-middle classes. They had enough money to pursue their passions, but not so much that they lapsed into complacency.
We are at our most innovative when we have something to push against. Creativity does not require perfect conditions. In fact, it thrives in imperfect ones. The block of marble from which Michelangelo carved his masterpiece, the
David
, had been discarded by other artists. They considered it defective, and they were right. But Michelangelo saw that defect as a challenge, not a disqualifier. And while most geniuses grow up not wanting for food or basic necessities, a degree of poverty is helpful; it forces us to flex new mental muscles. Or as the physicist Ernest Rutherford exclaimed, “We have no money so we will have to think!”
Why, though, did the Medicis spend so much of their fortune on art? Were they simply better people than us—or is there another explanation? It’s helpful to think of a golden age as a crime scene. It boils down to opportunity and motive. The Medicis certainly had plenty of opportunity: they were loaded. What was their motive?
The answer, once again, resides in that small gold coin, Eugene says. The Florentines idolized the ancient Greeks but found some of their ideas, well, inconvenient. Plato, for instance, disapproved of usury, as did
Aristotle, who argued that money, being a lifeless object, was not meant to breed. Yet that was exactly how the Medicis amassed their fortune. They bred money. No doubt they felt pangs of guilt about this and worried they might spend eternity in hell. Back then, hell was not an abstract fear, a metaphor for a bad situation or an unseasonably warm day. It was a very real place, and not one you wanted to spend a weekend in, let alone eternity. What to do? Thankfully, the Church helped out with a brand-new arrangement: purgatory. Over espresso number four, Eugene explains.
“It is called an indulgence. One day, the Church announces, ‘We are selling indulgences. We’ll make a deal. Pay for all this beautiful art and architecture and we’ll see what we can do about this eternity-in-hell business. We’ll start working out the math. Let’s see. You built a beautiful altar. By our calculations, we can take eighty thousand years off your term in hell and move you to purgatory.’ ”
“That sounds like a good deal. Where do I sign?”
“Exactly. So purgatory is one of the reasons these things were built.”
To be fair, it wasn’t the only reason—as I said, the Medicis genuinely appreciated beauty for its own sake—but you can’t ignore the pull of purgatory. The wealthiest family in Italy, if not the world, proved expert at “perfuming a fortune with the breath of art,” as historian Will Durant put it so wonderfully. It was art as atonement. The Renaissance, like all great human accomplishments, was propelled in part by that most ancient and powerful of forces: guilt.
The Medici dynasty reached its apex with Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo, better known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. He actually lived up to his over-the-top name. Lorenzo ran Florence’s affairs of state skillfully, but his true loves were art and philosophy. He was a pretty good poet, too, much like the poet-rulers of old Hangzhou. Most of all, though, he was a talent scout bar none.
One day, Lorenzo is observing the craftsmen in the Medici garden, a training ground for new talent, when one young boy, not more than fourteen years old, catches his eye. The boy is sculpting a faun, a Roman god that is half man and half goat.
Lorenzo is stunned by how refined the work is, especially for such a young stonecutter. The boy, working from an ancient model, had created a perfect replica. He even gave the faun a mischievous laugh and opened his mouth to reveal a set of wild teeth.
“You have made this faun very old, and yet left him all his teeth,” teases Lorenzo. “Don’t you know that old men are always missing some?”
The boy is mortified. How could he have overlooked such an important detail? And to be called on it by the most powerful man in Florence no less. As soon as Lorenzo was out of sight, the boy got to work. He removed an upper tooth, drilling the gum to create the illusion of tooth decay.
Lorenzo returned the next day and laughed with delight. He was impressed—not only with the boy’s obvious talent but with his determination to “get it right.” Lorenzo invited the boy to live in his residence, to work and learn alongside his own children. This decision, Eugene explains, was nothing short of extraordinary.
“He is a kid, just a kid. A nobody. And Lorenzo says, ‘Look, kid, I think you’ve got it. What do you want to do? Do you want to be a painter? Okay, here is a tablet and here is the stylus. Draw. You want to be a sculptor? Here is a piece of rock. Here is a hammer and chisel. Here is a Roman sculpture to learn from. And here are the best teachers.’ It was as if the kid had won
The X Factor
.”
Lorenzo’s generosity was repaid manyfold. The kid, Michelangelo Buonarroti, was indeed going places.
What does this story tell us about the genius that was Florence? Today, Michelangelo is better known than his benefactor, but perhaps Lorenzo deserves most of the credit. Had he not stopped to examine the work of a young stonecutter, “a nobody,” had he not spotted the nascent genius in that boy, and had he not acted boldly to cultivate it, we would not know the name Michelangelo.
We’ll never know what would have happened if Lorenzo had chosen some other fourteen-year-old instead of Michelangelo. Genius is like a chemical reaction. Change one molecule and you change everything. What we do know is that the geniuses of Florence did not appear
by accident. They were the natural outcome of a system—an informal, sometimes chaotic system but a system nonetheless—that recognized, cultivated, and, yes, honored talent. That system was not confined to wealthy patrons such as the Medicis. It extended deep into the dusty, messy world of a quintessentially Florentine establishment: the
bottega.
Bottega
means, literally, a workshop, but that word doesn’t do justice to the role it played in the Renaissance. The
bottega
was where new techniques were tested, new art forms developed, and, crucially, new talent nurtured.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of
bottege
cropped up in Renaissance Florence. None, though, was as remarkable as that run by a pudgy, broad-nosed man named Andrea del Verrocchio. A lackluster artist, Verrocchio was nonetheless a superb mentor and businessman. If anyone knew how to convert money into genius it was Andrea del Verrocchio. His workshop counted the top echelons of Florentine society among its clients, including the Medicis themselves. But competition was fierce, and Verrocchio, whose name means “true eye,” was always on the lookout for new techniques and new talent.
Every golden age has its multipliers. These are people whose influence far exceeds their own artistic output. Cézanne influenced scores of Parisian painters, even while his own work remained unloved by the public. Lou Reed is a more contemporary example of a multiplier. The debut album of his band, The Velvet Underground, sold only thirty thousand copies. But, as Brian Eno said, with only slight exaggeration, “everyone who bought one of those thirty thousand albums started a band.” Reed’s influence on the music scene can’t be measured in album sales alone.
Verrocchio was the Lou Reed of the Renaissance. His workshop explains more about this remarkable time than all the artwork in the Uffizi. Inside the workshop’s paint-splattered walls, some of Florence’s greatest artists cut their teeth, including a promising, young, left-handed misfit from the countryside named Leonardo da Vinci.
I ask Eugene to help me find Verrocchio, or at least the site of his old workshop. I’m hoping something of the essence of the place remains. This proves more difficult than I imagined. Verrocchio’s workshop hasn’t
been converted into a boutique museum. Unlike Michelangelo, he doesn’t have a salad or a perfume named after him. Not for the first time, I marvel at how historic cities such as Florence go to such pains to preserve and celebrate the products of their golden ages yet allow the sources of that goldenness to languish, unmarked and unloved.
My map of Florence is useless. Even the great Eugene can’t find Verrocchio’s workshop. We stop at a pizza shop to ask directions. The young woman behind the counter thinks we’re nuts. I can tell by the way her eyes grow big. She’s clearly never heard of Verrocchio or his
bottega
, and judging by the way her saucer eyes are now darting about the room, pleading, she clearly wishes we would take our crazy questions elsewhere. She’s got pizza to move.
Eugene is out of ideas. We’re stuck. Fortunately, a passerby overhears our conversation and, out of altruism or pity, offers to help. Go down that road, then hang a right, he says. That’s where you’ll find Verrocchio’s workshop.
Eugene and I walk down a narrow, cobblestoned street, past vendors selling tripe, a local delicacy, and a clutch of bars and cafés, each more perfect than the next. For once, I do not squint. There is no need. The Florence of today is not all that different from the Florence of Verrocchio’s day. Sure, back then it had more green space and fewer tour buses. No coffee or pizza either. Those two staples of modern Italian life had not yet arrived. There were plenty of wine shops and bars, though. Verrocchio and his apprentices were regulars at these establishments, sometimes downing four or five glasses before breakfast. It’s a wonder they got any work done.
The directions we were given prove useless. We meander for a while longer, turning down one dead end after another, before finally giving up. In a way, Eugene says, the location of the exact building doesn’t matter. Back in the day, Verrocchio’s workshop wouldn’t have stood out. It was just another gritty shop, nestled between butcher and cobbler. A ground-floor premises, it opened directly to the street and the chaos of children playing, dogs barking, sundry livestock roaming freely. The entrance was narrow, but once inside you’d realize how deep the building was. (To this
day, Florentines like to say that their architecture reflects their character—narrow entranceways leading to deep interiors.)
“What was it like inside?” I ask. “What would we see?”
“Can you picture an artist’s studio in Paris or New York?” says Eugene.
“Yep. I’ve got it.”
“Good. Now wipe that image from your mind. Verrocchio’s workshop was nothing like that. It was a factory.”
A factory? I thought these were places of fine art, of genius. Eugene quickly disabuses me of this notion.
The workshops were noisy. The sounds of hammers on wood or on
pietra serena
, the gray stone of Tuscany, mixed with that of clucking chickens, their eggs needed to make the tempera that was used as paint before the advent of oil. The rooms were chockablock with large planks of wood—poplar mainly but also pricey chestnut, for special projects. The wood had to be seasoned so it wouldn’t warp and could later be joined. The glue for that task came from rabbits, so add bunnies to the menagerie. And someone had to clean up after all these animals. That unenviable job fell to newcomers, such as a young apprentice named Leonardo da Vinci.
In truth the
bottega
resembled a sweatshop more than an artist’s studio. What’s worse is that the apprentices were not paid. In fact, they had to pay the
bottega
owners for the privilege of sweating there.
“I can’t believe it,” I tell Eugene. “Isn’t that slave labor?”
“Today, we call them interns.” Like a modern internship, says Eugene, the
bottege
provided a career entrée. “If you demonstrated talent, you worked your way up. You go from cleaning out the chicken cages to collecting the eggs, then cracking the eggs open. Then you might become the guy who mixes the colors.” Those who worked hard and displayed talent moved up.
Ask Verrocchio, though, if he was in the business of producing geniuses and he would no doubt laugh. Genius? He was in the business of business. Whatever his customers wanted—a death mask or yet another Madonna (the ultimate in Church kitsch)—Verrocchio and his minions
would make it. Which is not to say they welcomed every assignment with equal enthusiasm. They much preferred clients with taste, but business was business.
Nothing was taught in Verrocchio’s workshop, but much was learned. It was education through osmosis. Total immersion. The young apprentice often lived in the same building as the master, shared his meals, and sometimes even took his name.
Verrocchio’s charges didn’t learn “creative thinking.” No such thing as genius in the abstract exists, any more than love in the abstract exists. These human inclinations require an object for their attention, something to which they can adhere. “Creativity is not a simple result of special types of thinking,” writes psychologist Richard Ochse. “It requires thinking about special content—it requires thinking about important questions.”