Viewing the Renaissance through the Medicis' eyes

Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and
Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici
By Miles J. Unger
Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $30

The all-important concept of family honor, and the hyper-competitiveness it created, made 15th-century Florence both a breathtakingly beautiful and highly dangerous place. For example, if the wealthy Pazzi family had a marble palace designed and built by the legendary architect Brunelleschi, the very magnificence of this palace would dishonor other wealthy Florentine families, who would inevitably respond in kind. The Medici family, whose massive wealth was based upon its banking empire, might pay men like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo to respond to the Pazzis' artistic challenge.

Miles Unger's highly absorbing "life and times" of Lorenzo de' Medici provides a mesmerizing microscope for viewing the entire Italian Renaissance. As Unger makes clear, Florence was the intellectual and cultural center of the world: "Nowhere ... was the thirst for wealth and honor as intense and as productive." With honor at stake, the realms of culture, religion, business, and politics were all intertwined, triggering rivalries that could be petty and literally cutthroat.

De' Medici came of age during a time of civil war, after his grandfather Cosimo died and several rival Florentine families challenged the dynastic political authority of Lorenzo's father, Piero. Still a teenager, de' Medici helped his father beat back these challengers to Medici rule. Lorenzo himself would assume the role of "first citizen" of the Florentine Republic at age 20.

Unger's book focuses on three main areas. First, the personal development of young Lorenzo from would-be poet and lover of carnal pleasures to leader of Florence. Second, his growth as a brilliant diplomat who built a series of shifting alliances that helped him defeat his many rivals, including an alliance between the Pope in Rome and the Pazzis in Florence. Finally, Unger looks at de' Medici as the world's leading patron of the arts, who funded and befriended greats like da Vinci and Michelangelo.

De' Medici's great enemy and strongest political rival in Italy was Pope Sixtus IV. Unger describes how Sixtus used his position to build the wealth of his own family by providing them with lucrative jobs (from archbishop on down). When de' Medici, whose bank served the Pope, asked Sixtus to make his brother an archbishop, the Pope failed to do so. Sixtus would add insult to injury by switching from the Medici bank to the bank run by the hated Pazzi family.

Unger describes how this rivalry between the Medicis and the Pazzi/papal alliance turned personal, political, and almost led to Lorenzo's assassination. Francesco de' Pazzi and the Pope's nephew (an archbishop) plotted to murder Lorenzo in Florence. The assassination attempt, made in a church, failed when de' Medici fought off his knife-wielding attacker and escaped. During the ensuing war, de' Medici used his diplomatic genius to build a coalition against the Papal States. In the end, this brutal war ended only when a third party hated by all of Christendom, the Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks, attacked Italy and forced her rival city-states to band together.

Unger offers readers a clear, well-researched narrative that follows the shifting rivalries that defined Medici Florence and all of Renaissance Italy. He shows how competition for that rare commodity known as family honor led to both a cultural flowering in the arts and a deadly brand of politics based on family vendettas. Additionally, Unger exposes the brash corruption and backroom, brawling politics of the 15th-century Catholic Church. Unger makes it fairly obvious why the response to the conspicuous consumption of the Medicis and the pope was a generational shift toward simplicity and piety led by reformers like Savonarola and Martin Luther. "Magnifico" is a wonderful feast for lovers of Renaissance history and art.

Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester.