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ALTHOUGH HE WOULD have been thoroughly acquainted with the hustle and bustle of city life in 1491, Michelangelo was as yet comparatively unconscious of the social, political, and economic forces that were influencing his life behind the scenes. An honored guest of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a friend of leading humanists, and a pupil of Bertoldo di Giovanni, he would have had little reason to worry about money or to trouble about such distasteful subjects as politics and religion.
But all that was to change. On April 8, 1492, Lorenzo de’ Medici died. He was succeeded by his son Piero. An unstable and intemperate young man, Piero lacked his father’s political skill. As Francesco Guicciardini put it, “He was not only hated by his enemies, but also disliked by his friends, who found him almost intolerable: proud and bestial, preferring to be hated rather than loved, fierce, and cruel.” He rapidly alienated the majority of the political elite. Tensions rose, and on November 9, 1494, Piero was expelled from Florence. In his wake, the fiery Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola gradually asserted his control over the Republic.
Sensing the danger, Michelangelo fled Florence in mid-October 1493. Without a patron, without money, and without any clear plans, he traveled first to Bologna and then to Rome, where he determined to make a go of things as best he could. Although he had some notable successes—especially the Pietà—several of his projects misfired badly, and he experienced no end of troubles with materials and payment. He struggled.
By late 1500, Michelangelo’s situation was dire. On December 19, he received a heartfelt letter from his father, Lodovico. Lodovico was worried. His third son, Buonarroto, had just returned from visiting Michelangelo in Rome, and what he had heard had given him cause for concern. “Buonarroto tells me that you live with great thrift,” Lodovico wrote, “or rather, in true misery.” He was, as Lodovico warned him, in danger of falling into poverty. Indeed, Buonarroto had reported that Michelangelo was already suffering from a painful swelling on his side, brought on by impecunity and overwork. Now that Savonarola was gone and the old Republic had been restored, Lodovico begged his son to return to Florence. There, his fortunes might improve.
Michelangelo seldom took much heed of his father’s advice, but on this occasion he relented. Putting his affairs in order, and taking out a loan from Jacopo Gallo to pay for the journey, he set out for Florence in the spring of 1501.
It was money that persuaded Michelangelo to return. He needed cash badly. From family and friends, he had learned that the Opera del Duomo—the four-man committee responsible for managing the affairs of the cathedral—was looking for someone to take on a project that had been in the air for more than thirty-five years. Back in 1464, a huge block of marble had been bought with a view to having a statue carved for one of the cathedral buttresses. Two artists had previously been given the task, and both had failed. Now the operai were keen to find someone new. Arriving back in Florence, dusty and dirty from his journey, Michelangelo had high hopes. Bankrolled by the Arte della Lana—which controlled the Opera—it promised to be a lucrative project.
He was in luck. After briefly considering Leonardo da Vinci, the operai finally commissioned Michelangelo to carve the statue of David that would ultimately become one of his most famous works. Initially, the remuneration was modest. When the committee granted the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo the contract on August 16, 1501, it agreed to pay him 6 large gold florins each month for a fixed period of two years. Given the scale of the project, it was hardly generous. The best weavers in Florence were then being paid up to 100 florins each year—in other words, more than 38 percent more than Michelangelo was getting. Given that he would have had overheads to cover, he would probably have been left quite tight for cash. By February 1502, however, the statue was already “half finished,” and the operai were sufficiently impressed not only to up Michelangelo’s pay to 400 florins, but also to discuss, less than two years later, transferring the completed work to a more suitable—and public—location. This would easily have put him on a par with a well-paid manager at one of the branches of the city’s major merchant banks. His financial position was now secure.
He never looked back: from this moment on, he stopped being a struggling sculptor who counted the coppers and became a man of means. More than that, he became a person to be reckoned with. With money behind him and with the operai in his pocket, he could count on the support of some of Florence’s most powerful figures—including the gonfaloniere di giustizia (standard-bearer of justice; effectively the city’s chief executive), Piero Soderini, and the businessmen Jacopo Salviati, Taddeo Taddei, Bartolomeo Pitti, and Agnolo Doni—and the backing of the city’s major institutions: the guilds, the priors, and the Church. In the years that followed, he would go from success to success. The pieces he subsequently undertook—including the unfinished (and now lost)Battle of Cascina and the Doni Tondo—would cement his fame and bring him offers of employment from both Pope Julius II in Rome in 1505 and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II in Constantinople in 1506.
There is no doubt that the eight years between his flight from Florence in 1493 and his return in 1501 marked a critical period in Michelangelo’s development. Navigating the storms of poverty and uncertainty while still in the first flush of youth, he had transformed himself from an up-and-coming young trailblazer into an artist of international repute, as the David amply demonstrated even before its completion. Yet the course of Michelangelo’s life during this period had been determined not by his own interests and preferences but by the shifting currents of politics, business, and religion. Dominating contemporary Florentine life and providing the context for everyday existence, the interaction and influence of each of these streams of activity had not only induced him to return to Florence but also prompted his hasty flight in the first place. What was more, the David itself was a product—whether direct or indirect—of all three.
In this, Michelangelo was not untypical. Still tied to the will of patrons, artists of all stripes were aware that their capacity to live, thrive, and survive in an unstable and unpredictable world depended on their ability to adapt to the changing demands of business, politics, and religion. Yet this is not to say that the role played by each of these spheres of activity in early-sixteenth-century urban life was as beautiful as the artworks to which they contributed. Indeed, quite the opposite. Just as the physical landscape of Florence revealed a hidden underside to the realities of the Renaissance, so the worlds of business, politics, and religion concealed an altogether uglier side to the art of the period.
If we look at the personalities and the backgrounds of three of the figures whose influence helped shape Michelangelo’s work, Jacopo Salviati, Piero Soderini, and Archbishop Rinaldo Orsini, the image of the world in which the David came to fruition is one of inequalities marked by vigorous exclusion, fierce rebellions, pitched battles, and tormented souls.
JACOPO SALVIATI: ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES
Jacopo Salviati was one of Florence’s richest and most powerful men. A son-in-law of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he was a bastion of the government, a towering personality in communal affairs, and a mainspring in the machine of the Florentine economy. The owner of the magnificent Palazzo Gondi, he was a man upon whom countless hundreds depended for their livelihoods and whose favor artists courted.
It was perhaps inevitable that a man with such enormous financial reserves at his disposal should have been a character in the life of the David. Michelangelo quite simply needed men like him. An artist’s capacity to pursue his craft was reliant on his ability to make a decent living. This was not always easy. Although Raphael is reported to have “lived more like a prince than a painter” and Luca della Robbia became rich in the service of Francis I of France, many often had difficulty in making ends meet. Correggio was forced to become something of a miser in his old age, while Andrea del Sarto had to content himself “with very little.” Indeed, Piero Lorentino d’Angelo, a pupil of Piero della Francesca’s, experienced a poverty that was almost Dickensian. On one occasion, his sons begged him to slaughter a pig for the carnival celebrations, as was traditional. Having not even two pennies to rub together, Lorentino could do little more than pray, and his poor children went without. Their tears were, however, saved when Lorentino agreed to paint a picture for an impecunious patron in return for the much-hoped-for pig.
Reliant on the wealth and willingness of patrons, Michelangelo—like all other Renaissance artists—was unwittingly tied to the fortunes of the Renaissance economy and, most of all, to the wealth of men like Salviati.
Salviati’s wealth had grown out of his involvement in merchant banking. He had entered the business at exactly the right time. As will be explained more fully in a later chapter, Florentine merchant banking had originally emerged out of the massive explosion in trade that had occurred at the dawn of the fourteenth century as a means of facilitating commercial transactions across large distances. Within decades, super-companies had been formed that not only used branches scattered across the continent to engage in speculation but also operated as full-scale banks. The profits that could be made were already staggering even at this formative stage in the sector’s development. As early as 1318, for example, the Bardi had a working capital of 875,000 florins. That was more than the king of France had to run his entire country. By the end of the fifteenth century, the money Salviati was able to make from merchant banking was on a whole new level.
But while Salviati had made a fortune out of lending and exchanging money, what had really allowed him to join the ranks of Florence’s wealthiest men had been his willingness to invest so much of his cash in the city’s second, and most characteristic, industry—the cloth trade. Consistently generating profits far in excess of those earned by the merchant banks, the wool and silk industry was the real engine of Florence’s prosperity, and it was emblematic of the sector’s immense importance that Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the David by a committee controlled by the Arte della Lana.
Salviati had chosen his investment well. Although the Salviati family’s interests have been poorly studied, it is evident that their entry into the cloth industry (particularly the trade in silk)—which appears to date at least to the lifetime of Jacopo’s pioneering kinsman, Alamanno di Iacopo (d. 1456)—was even better timed then their role in merchant banking. In the beginning, Florence’s role in the cloth trade was limited simply to working up ready-made cloth that was imported from elsewhere in Europe. Before long, however, the city’s merchants realized there was more money to be made from importing the very best wools from Spain and England and producing their own high-quality cloth for sale on the international market. Buoyed by capital investment from the new merchant banks and aided by the gradual decline of the cloth industry in Flanders, Florence weathered the shocks of the mid-fourteenth century to achieve a dominant position in European trade by ca. 1370.
The industry was fragmented. By the end of the fourteenth century, there were around a hundred competing woolen companies in Florence, each of which controlled no more than 1–2 percent of the total output. But the profits were enormous. In the period 1346–50, the company founded by Antonio di Lando degli Albizzi—which managed every aspect of woolen production, ran two workshops and a distribution workshop in Florence, and benefited from close links with Antonio’s merchant bank in Venice—earned an annual profit of more than 22 percent, a figure that any company would envy today. So great was the growth of the wool trade, in fact, that toward the middle of the fifteenth century the merchant Giovanni Rucellai estimated that the city was worth around 1.5 million florins (about $270.5 million when measured against the price of gold today and approximately $739.5 million gauged against wage rates in 1450) in money and goods, and almost certainly underestimated its true value.
As it diversified into superlative silks and affordable cotton, the Florentine cloth trade entered its greatest period of growth in around 1501, that is, at about the time that Salviati was throwing himself into the business with full vigor. When Michelangelo started work on the David, annual sales of woolen cloth and silk were worth in the region of 3 million lire and continued to rise for the greater part of the century. Even the Buonarroti family couldn’t resist the temptation to try their luck in the trade, and a few years later, in 1514, Michelangelo provided 1,000 florins to start a family wool business headed by Buonarroto. Veritable rivers of gold flowed into the city, and it was the wealth of men like Salviati that went to pay for major civic projects like Il Gigante.
As he proudly proclaimed to virtually anyone who would listen, Salviati was certainly one of Florence’s richest men, riding high on the tide of commercial expansion. Yet his prosperity—and that of Florence as a whole—concealed some very ugly truths. His wealth relied on running his cloth business in such a way that appalling economic inequalities were inevitable and endemic poverty was unavoidable.
The overwhelming majority of the city’s inhabitants were colossally poor. In 1427, roughly 25 percent of the city’s total wealth was owned by 1 percent of households. Even more surprisingly, little more than 5 percent of the city’s capital was owned by the poorest 60 percent of the population. Most people listed in the commune’s tax records actually owned nothing at all.
This was a function of how Salviati’s business worked. Like many other large-scale manufacturing industries, the cloth trade—which paid for the David and which accounted for the employment of 21 percent of the heads of all Florentine households in 1427—demanded a high level of specialization. In order to produce the cloths and silks, Salviati was obliged to break the entire process of production into a mass of small tasks, such as spinning, carding, dyeing, and weaving. Although some firms—such as Antonio di Lando degli Albizzi’s company—managed to control most of the stages in cloth production, it was far more common that firms like Salviati’s contracted out particular tasks to smaller workshops or individuals. Specialized workshops tended to operate out of cramped, rented premises—often part of a house in which one of the partners lived—clustered in particular quarters of the city. Individual artisans, such as weavers or spinners, almost always worked from home.
The “putting-out” system, as this is known, was commercially versatile and responsive. Salviati could react to fluctuating circumstances in an instant by changing whom he contracted to work on specific aspects of production, without risking the profitability of his venture as a whole. But by the system’s very nature, Salviati had dozens of workshops and artisans at his mercy. His word was law, and he could make or break hundreds of individuals in a heartbeat. At the very least, it was in his interests to keep the people in his employ as poor as possible, and he had the bargaining power to ensure that he would always pay the lowest rates. In this, he was certainly not untypical. Niccolò Strozzi and Giovanni di Credi, for example, ran a highly successful cloth workshop together between 1386 and 1390, and the bulk of their costs went toward paying their various subcontractors on a piecework basis. The disparity in wages was huge. The carder Fruosino and the German weavers Anichino and Gherardo of Cologne were paid well, even handsomely, but others were not so lucky. Worse paid even than Giovanni di Neri, the shop boy, and Antonio di Bonsignore, an apprentice, were the twenty or so women who worked from home as spinners. But even here there seems little evidence of fairness. Whereas a certain Margherita received 2 lire for ten pounds of spun wool, Nicolosa was paid 2 lire 13 soldi for forty-three pounds. We can only guess at the reasons for this arbitrary behavior, but it does at least illustrate how piecework laborers—especially women, who accounted for a growing percentage of the cloth workforce—were entirely at the mercy of their employers.
Yet however frightening Salviati’s phenomenal power over his employees may have been, cloth workers of all stripes were still at the better end of the scale. In 1344, two carpenters wrote to a friend in Avignon asking for work because “the condition of the artisans and lower classes in Florence today is miserable, for they can earn nothing.” Although this was written at a particularly low moment in the labor market’s history, the sentiment was not untypical of the position of both skilled and unskilled laborers more generally. Many of those with whom Michelangelo was most closely acquainted—and whom he actually employed—were at the very bottom of the economic pile in Renaissance Florence. Michelangelo’s stone-carver friends Topolino and Michele di Piero Pippo were skilled artisans, and most likely worked for cash for between ten and twelve hours a day, five days a week, but their wages consistently failed to keep pace with prices. For semiskilled or unskilled construction workers—such as the laborers known as “Stumpy” and “Knobby” whom Michelangelo employed on work at San Lorenzo years later—the situation was worse. They were generally employed either on an entirely piecework basis or on a day-by-day basis and were always paid worse in winter. Even in summer, construction workers’ wages were so low that modern historians use them as a measure of poverty in Renaissance Florence.
JACOPO SALVIATI: STRUCTURING INEQUALITY
What made Jacopo Salviati so powerful a member of Florentine society and so important to the creation of the David, however, was not merely his wealth but his dominant position within the city’s guilds (arti). The operai who commissioned Michelangelo to carveIl Gigante were, after all, drawn from the wool guild—the Arte della Lana—and their responsibility for this most important of projects reflects the broader importance of both guilds and their members to urban society. It was the guilds that were the real puppet masters of the Florentine economy, and having served as the prior of the entire guild system (that is, its representative in government) in 1499, Salviati was, in a sense, the master of them all.
The Arte della Lana was just one of Florence’s twenty-one guilds. At its most basic, the guild was a highly exclusive self-preservation society for tradesmen. Within a particular trade, the guild regulated standards of workmanship, proficiency, and training and represented the interests of its members to the commune. But it was also much more than this. Possessed of wide-ranging powers, the guild performed a variety of other functions, including crisis management, arbitration, and discipline. In the event of a slump, it could limit the output of particular workshops or move the labor force around to avoid unnecessary disruptions. Similarly, if a quarrel arose between members, or between a member and someone outside, the guild could step in as a mediator. Perhaps most important, the guilds’ emphasis on standards meant that a large proportion of their energies were spent ensuring obedience to regulations. Those who dared to pay their laborers too much or whose work was of an inadequate quality would find themselves prosecuted.
Florence’s twenty-one guilds covered virtually every aspect of skilled or specialized trade. There were guilds for butchers (Beccai), bakers (Fornai), woodworkers and furniture makers (Legnaioli), lawyers and notaries (Giudici e Notai), stoneworkers, carpenters, and brick makers (Maestri di Pietra e Legname), traders in leather, skins, and fur (Vaiai e Pellicciai), and blacksmiths and toolmakers (Fabbri).
Not all of the guilds were, however, equal. The guilds were divided into fourteen “minor” and seven “major” guilds. The reasons for this were principally political, but the division reflected the comparative importance attributed to different trades within the Florentine economy. Those for local bankers (Cambio), international merchants (Calimala), and silk workers (Seta; Por Santa Maria) were, for example, accorded a higher status than those for hostelers (Albergatori) or locksmiths (Chiavaioli).
The highly exclusive and rigidly hierarchical Arte della Lana—the wool guild—was by far the most important and influential of all the Florentine guilds, and its activities are emblematic of the kind of business environment within which Michelangelo undertook his commission.
Insofar as it regulated the activities of the Florentine wool industry, the Arte della Lana was largely responsible for ensuring that the city remained at the absolute pinnacle of the European cloth trade. With its headquarters (the imposing Palazzo dell’Arte della Lana) opposite Orsanmichele and a stone’s throw from the Piazza della Signoria, the guild was dominated by the wealthiest manufacturers in Florence and persistently strove to prioritize their concerns. Humbler workers, such as fullers, stretchers, and carders, were consistently excluded from the ranks of the Arte della Lana and were precluded from forming their own trade organization. As a result, they were at the mercy of the merchants and were in constant tension with the guild.
For those whose roles gave them some limited economic clout, strike action was always a possibility when conditions proved particularly difficult, and in 1370 the dyers used this as a means of demanding higher prices for colored cloths. But for the more menial laborers whose work involved only a limited amount of specialized skills and who possessed almost no economic leverage, the options were more limited. Beaters (who used willow branches to beat impurities out of recently washed raw wool and to help disentangle the fibers) and carders (who used flat combs to separate woolen fibers ready for spinning), for example, were crucial to the production of woolen cloth but were paid the bare minimum and constantly hovered on the threshold of destitution, especially when times were tough. Despite numbering around fifteen thousand in the 1370s and 1380s, these occupants of the lowest rung on the economic ladder—known as the popolo minuto—were categorically denied the chance to form the organizations that would have allowed them to bargain collectively and lacked the weight to have any effect in small numbers.
The persistent inequalities of the guild system were a recipe for conflict, especially in the wool industry. Early signs began to appear in the mid-fourteenth century, when the depletion of the population contrived to empower the dispossessed. In 1345, a certainCiuto Brandini was convicted of organizing a guild for the popolo minuto of the wool industry. As the court records reported,
Together with many others who were seduced by him, he planned to organize an association … of carders, combers, and other laborers in the woolen cloth industry, in the largest number possible. In order that they might have the means to congregate and to elect consuls and leaders of their association … he organized meetings on several occasions and on various days of many persons of lowly condition. And among other things done in these meetings, Ciuto ordered that there should be a collection of money from those who attended these assemblies … so that they would be stronger and more durable.
Manifestly designed for collective bargaining, Ciuto’s organization seems comparatively harmless to modern eyes. But to contemporary merchants, it was anathema. Ciuto’s proto-guild was denigrated by the court as “wicked” and its objectives decried as aiming at committing “outrages … [against] those citizens of good condition who wished to prevent Ciuto … from accomplishing those objectives.” For “outrages” read “reasonable pay,” and for “citizens of good condition” read “greedy merchants.”
This was just a taste of things to come. In the summer of 1378, these lingering resentments burst forth into new mutiny in the Ciompi Revolt. Still angry at being excluded from the guilds and distressed by the apparent impotence of civic government, the popolo minuto met in much the same way as in 1345 and drew up a list of grievances that they presented to the priors on July 21. Although the demands included clauses relating to debt and forced loans, the principal clauses sought to establish a separate guild for the “combers, carders, trimmers, washers, and other cloth workers” who had until that point been under the thumb of the Arte della Lana. Their demands were summarily dismissed by the priors.
Furious, the popolo minuto stormed the Palazzo Vecchio. There, they “threw out and burned … every document which they found” and refused to budge. The next morning, they elected Michele di Lando, “a wool-comber … who sold provisions to the prisoners in the Stinche,” as the gonfaloniere di giustizia and began electing a completely new set of priors from their own ranks. After the bells were rung in jubilation, the freshly installed Signoria immediately set about enacting an even more dramatic reorganization of the guild structure than they had originally demanded.
Despite attracting support from some other quarters, it was a popular government, and in more ways than one it was truly revolutionary. But it couldn’t last. The collective bargaining power of Michele di Lando’s new guilds was simply not up to resisting the accumulated wealth of the Florentine merchant elite. Members of the Arte della Lana ceased trading, thus preventing Ciompi from the wool industry from earning their bread and butter. The coalition of interests that had underpinned the revolt shattered. A last-ditch effort was made by the Ciompi, but that too was smashed by the assembled might of bankers, merchants, and artisans in a violent pitched battle on August 31, 1378. The revolution was over, and the bitter inequalities of the guild system, baptized with the tears of the dispossessed, were consecrated as a permanent feature of the Florentine economy until the arti were finally—and totally—reorganized by Duke Alessandro de’ Medici in 1534.
As one of the dominant forces within the guild structure, Jacopo Salviati wielded colossal influence not only over the workings of the Florentine economy as a whole but also over every stage of the David’s creation. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, as he worked on the statue, Michelangelo was every bit in thrall to the Florentine guilds as if he had been an active member of one himself. His monumental statue was commissioned by the city’s most powerful arte; his other patrons were key players in the major guilds; his skilled assistants had their lives confined by guild regulations; and his unskilled workers were kept close to poverty by the guild structure. As an artist—even a free (non-guild) artist—Michelangelo was subject to the guilds and tacitly obliged to perpetuate the norms that they laid down for Florence’s economic life.
PIERO SODERINI: POLITICAL INEQUALITIES
If Jacopo Salviati embodied the economic conditions on which the David depended, his good friend and colleague Piero Soderini encapsulated the political influences that were brought to bear on Michelangelo during the completion of the project.
A wizened and grim-faced figure, Soderini was the head of the Florentine state. Having spent much of his life in government service, he had been seen as a safe pair of hands after Savonarola’s fall and had been appointed gonfaloniere di giustizia for life as a means of bringing some semblance of stability to the shattered city. Although far from perfect, he ruled wisely and justly and appears to have let a strong sense of public morality guide his judgment in all things. He had seen the vicissitudes of the last Medici and the Savonarolan regime and was determined to ensure that the city would enjoy what would be its last taste of “popular” government as fully as possible.
Acutely aware of the propagandistic potential of art, Soderini saw that commissions such as the David could play a vital role in fostering the civic spirit that he wished to serve as a bastion of public life for generations to come. This was certainly not a new idea. Almost two centuries earlier, comparable circumstances had been made visible in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A rich and complex allegorical celebration of republican virtues, Lorenzetti’s frescoes testify to his acute awareness of the tenor of contemporary political thought and to an ongoing dialogue between artist and communal officials. But given the political situation he had inherited, Soderini was keen to take special care with theDavid and involved himself closely with Michelangelo’s project from the very beginning. Although originally commissioned by the Opera del Duomo, the statue was ultimately to serve as a celebration of republican “liberty.” In its final position, outside the main doors of the Palazzo Vecchio, it was intended to be a potent symbol not merely of Florence’s independence from external aggressors but also of the city’s capacity for autonomous self-government. In Soderini’s eyes, the David was an emblem of the strength and resilience of a city unified under the banner of republican freedom.
Like modern democracies, the Republic over which Soderini presided was divided into two parts. The executive was headed by the Signoria, which comprised eight priors—each of whom served a single two-month term—and Soderini himself, the gonfaloniere di giustizia—who usually served for a similarly brief tenure, but, in Soderini’s case, for life. Thus constituted, the nine-man committee was invested with tremendous clout. As Gregorio Dati observed some seventy years earlier, the Signoria was normally entrusted simply with the execution of the laws but had “unlimited power and authority” and could do whatever it thought fit in times of emergency.
Soderini’s Signoria was, however, neither the sole repository of executive authority nor an organ of centralized policy formation. There were a host of other bodies that made up the executive. In addition to the sixteen gonfalonieri who advised the Signoria, there was the Dodici buoni uomini; the Dieci di balìa, which handled defense in times of war; the Otto di guardia, which oversaw the internal security of the republic; and a multitude of other magistracies that dealt with more highly specific needs, such as the supply of grain and the maintenance of bridges.
Supporting the Signoria and the other executive committees was a burgeoning bureaucracy of highly educated humanists. Heading this growing body of professional administrators was the office of chancellor—previously filled by luminaries such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni—but there were also a vast number of other posts, many of them filled by men who had an active hand in civic art, several of whom rose to quite spectacular prominence. Particularly prized by Soderini was the second chancellor, a rising young man by the name of Niccolò Machiavelli.
Legislation, on the other hand, was handled differently. In Soderini’s time, the power to pass laws belonged to the Consiglio Maggiore. Consisting of a staggering three thousand members, the consiglio comprised roughly 20 percent of the adult male population over twenty-nine and was responsible for all decisions regarding the levying of taxes, the imposition of forced loans, and the conduct of foreign relations.
At the time he took Michelangelo under his wing, Soderini was proud to boast that Florence had the most “popular” government it had ever experienced. To modern eyes, it has an almost democratic feel to it. The sheer size of the Consiglio Maggiore appeared to guarantee a measure of popular participation, while the short periods for which executive offices were held ensured a high turnover of personnel that theoretically opened government up to the population at large. It was perhaps no surprise that speaking with regard to the reforms which paved the way for the early-sixteenth-century constitution, Leonardo Bruni had earlier declared:
Equal liberty exists for all … ; the hope of winning public honors and ascending [to office] is the same for all, provided they possess industry and natural gifts and lead a serious-minded and respected way of life; for our commonwealth requires virtusandprobitas in its citizens. Whoever has these qualifications is thought to be of sufficiently noble birth to participate in the government of the republic … This, then, is true liberty, this equality in a commonwealth: not to fear violence or wrong-doing from anybody, and to enjoy equality among citizens before the law and in the participation in public office.
By the same token, the decentralized, almost byzantine character of Florentine government seemed to bristle with checks and balances.
In contrast to the city’s past, there is little doubt that the Florentine government was exceptionally open and broad-based in 1501, and there is good reason to see the David as an expression of a genuine commitment to liberty.
For much of the fourteenth century, Florence’s constitutional history had been characterized by long-standing tensions between “popular” and “oligarchic” tendencies that manifested stark socioeconomic inequalities and often had the effect of worsening the broader position of the popolo minuto. Government had been the exclusive preserve of the guilds. Every officeholder was chosen both by and from among the guild hierarchy, with significantly more influence given to the major guilds. This automatically excluded the thousands of laborers and artisans whose economic function debarred them from guild membership. Even then, being a member of an important guild was no guarantee of being able to take part in communal government. Elections as we know them today simply did not exist. Within each guild, a committee of scrutiny determined who was eligible to be considered for office, and the members who passed muster were subsequently put forward for election by sortition (choice by lot). Of the five to six thousand men who were theoretically eligible to take part in communal government in the late fourteenth century, perhaps as few as 30 percent ever held office. Given that the priors, the buonuomini, and the gonfalonieri were elected for two, three, and four months, respectively, the number of people who held these positions was remarkably small.
With scrutiny and sortition in the hands of a very narrow mercantile elite, not only was government the plaything of the wealthy, but politics was also exposed to endemic corruption. Manipulating networks of business and patronage, ultra-wealthy guildsmen worked behind the scenes to influence the selection of officeholders by using a mixture of bribery, nepotism, and threats. In 1361, eight people were convicted of offering bribes, while four were found guilty of accepting backhanders, and the whiff of comparable scandals was scented again in 1364 and 1367. In their chronicle, Matteo and Filippo Villani frequently complained of bribes being offered to committee members for favor at the scrutiny itself, and this in turn had a damaging effect on attitudes toward public office. As Matteo Villani wrote,
Citizens of simple mind and newly acquired citizenship, through bribery, gifts, and great expense, manage to get their names regularly included in the bags at the triennial scrutinies. There are so many of this sort that the good, wise, and prudent citizens of long-standing reputation are rarely able to attend to the affairs of the commune and can never support them fully … Now each person regards the two months that he spends in the high office in terms of his own advantage, to favor his friends or harm his enemies with the influence of the government.
With its narrow social basis and in-built tendency toward corruption, the government of early-Renaissance Florence was inevitably vulnerable to internal weaknesses. The city was rent by factional conflict and violence, a fact that is attested to most eloquently byDante’s exile at the hands of his factional rivals, the Black Guelfs, in 1302. But most important, the oligarchic nature of Florentine government aroused resentment from those whose occupation or status precluded them from taking part in the political process. It is no surprise that the greatest unrest was found among the propertyless wage laborers who were so systematically excluded from the guilds. In addition to being a protest against the appalling conditions in which semi- and unskilled cloth workers were forced to work, the Ciompi Revolt was also a struggle for political representation. The Ciompi sought to establish a more equitable distribution of political power through a broad-based regime, albeit unsuccessfully.
Reform was inevitable. In 1382, a more overtly “popular” regime was instituted that would lay the foundations for the political world familiar to Michelangelo. The guilds were removed from the picture, eligibility for political office was widened dramatically, scrutinies were handled by a centralized body, and a conscious effort to cultivate a “civic” spirit emerged. In the decades that followed, parlamenti—large, public gatherings of the whole citizen body—were occasionally summoned to make major political decisions, and the Consiglio Maggiore was eventually established as an alternative to the smaller, more restricted councils that had gone before. The “people” (if one can speak in such terms) seemed finally to have achieved a share of power.
But appearances were deceptive. Far from being designed to broaden participation in a truly “republican” government, the reforms of 1382 were intended merely to secure the interests of the same narrow mercantile elites and to limit the incidence of unrest by creating the illusion of popular consent. The same small group of exceptionally rich individuals continued to dominate the course of Florentine politics—although seldom in the public view—while the poor and the unskilled remained on the very fringes of the political process.
Far from being an independent legislative body, the Consiglio Maggiore was heavily constrained. Not only was it permitted to vote only on measures introduced by the Signoria, but it was also forbidden to debate motions except in extremely specific, and very rare, circumstances. So too, the parlamenti were susceptible to open demagoguery, rabble-rousing, and bribery. More important, while the number of people eligible for executive office expanded, new—and much more nefariously inventive—restrictions were introduced to limit the freedom of the centralized committee of scrutiny. A whole slew of electoral controls (accoppiatori, balìe, and borsellini) were brought in to ensure that the “right” people were selected for office.
The Republic retained its tendency toward oligarchy throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although they seldom held office in person, the Medici family came to overshadow Florentine politics from 1434 until the 1492 expulsion of Piero de’ Medici by manipulating both networks of patronage and the electoral controls that had been created at the end of the previous century. As Michelangelo would have witnessed during his time in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household, this one family decided who was in and who was out and succeeded in establishing itself as the head of a ruthlessly powerful oligarchy. Indeed, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) observed that Lorenzo’s father, Cosimo, was “not so much a citizen as the master of his city.” “Political councils,” Piccolomini noted, “were held at his house; the magistrates he nominated were elected; he was king in all but name.”
This is not to say that such a reggimento (regime) was without its critics. On the one hand, the Medici oligarchy inevitably generated enmities from families envious of their influence. It was precisely this that catalyzed the bloody but abortive Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, in the course of which Lorenzo’s brother, the rather handsome Giuliano, was stabbed to death in Santa Maria del Fiore and the ringleader, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, was defenestrated by an angry mob. On the other hand, there were those who were ideologically opposed to the dominance of so limited an oligarchy and equated the Medici reggimento with tyranny. In his Memorie, Marco Parenti reported that Cosimo de’ Medici had imposed “a sort of servitude” on the city that was contrary to liberty, and later the former Medici loyalist Alamanno Rinuccini launched a vitriolic attack on Lorenzo for precisely the same reasons in his Dialogus de libertate. This line of attack was subsequently pursued by Girolamo Savonarola. Outlining his views in the Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze (1498), Savonarola inveighed against the “tyranny” of individual rulers who have regard only for their own interests, and contrasted this strongly with the “civil government” that Florence had (he believed) enjoyed in the period 1382–1434.
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’sTrattato 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.
RINALDO ORSINI: RELIGION
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 Davidbegins 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.
Just as the Papal States played a vitally important role in the politics of the Italian peninsula, the Church loomed large in Florence’s domestic affairs. At one level, the richness of ecclesiastical benefices not only made the battle for preferment a key issue in the rivalry between families and factions but also made the taxation of Church properties a major point of friction between the archbishop and the constantly cash-strapped Florentine government. Whether successive prelates and priors liked it or not, they were locked in a never-ending and rather dirty exchange. At another level, however, the Church’s wider economic and political importance made it essential to the functioning of Florentine business and a key consideration in the struggle for control of government. On the one hand, not only did the city’s banks rely on the papacy’s money, but the city often found that its very survival depended on its ties to the Papal States. Good relations were essential. On the other hand, the Church also needed to ensure that the Florentine government—like the Florentine banks—was onside. This necessitated active involvement in day-to-day politics. After falling out with the Medici, Pope Sixtus IV actively supported the Pazzi Conspiracy, and it was telling that Archbishop Francesco Salviati of Pisa was a key player in the abortive coup.
This dimension of the crossover between religion, business, and politics also catalyzed another, more dangerous form of tension. A certain element within the Church was always uncomfortable both with the seamy world of contemporary business and with the worldliness of priests and prelates. The practice of usury, for example, was consistently condemned by priests throughout the period, and the avariciousness of the financial sector was a constant target for attacks from preachers fired with the message of poverty and simplicity propounded by the mendicant orders. But to say that such attitudes informed criticisms of ecclesiastical vices is something of an understatement.
For purists, the Church should be a bastion of purity and simplicity, politics should be a branch of theology, and business should be moderated by Christian charity. In the eyes of a number of priests, the relentless pursuit of wealth, the constant competition for benefices, and the politicization of ecclesiastical affairs gradually came to symbolize not only the degradation of the faith but also the corruption of what should have been a godly republic. As early as the first decade of the fifteenth century, the Dominican friarGiovanni Dominici strongly defended the idea that government should be guided by virtue and that the service of the state was a Christian obligation, but at the same time he also inveighed violently against the greed and ambition of those who strove for power (“all the miseries of the world begin from ambition, pride of this world,” he affirmed). Attacking factions and struggles, he lamented that “there is no justice but deception, power, money, friendships, or parents.” To change this, Christian rebirth was necessary.
Toward the end of the century the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola struck out at the rich, concentrating on their luxurious palaces, extravagant clothing, and lavish private chapels. He was appalled by the competition for ecclesiastical offices and lambasted the willingness with which churches had been turned into dens of thieves, intent on defrauding the poor and the dispossessed. Not only had public morals and the Church been torn away from Christ’s teachings, he asserted, but government itself had become a playground for tyranny. Giving voice to the resentments engendered by socioeconomic and political inequalities, he affirmed that the good of the people—the popolo minuto, the ill-paid laborers, the struggling pieceworkers, the elderly, and the young—had been forgotten in the pursuit of money. The whole of Florence needed to be reformed in keeping with a purist reading of Scripture. Government would be reorganized with virtue and charity at its heart; the Church would be purified; and business would be taught modesty and restraint. “Florence,” Savonarola declared, “Christ is your king!” Within weeks of Piero de’ Medici’s fall, the friar had begun a veritable revolution. Thousands of young boys ran through the streets destroying anything that seemed to be an arrogant display of wealth; the Signoria was purged; and the whole of Florence was, as his critics observed, transformed into a convent. It was extreme, bloody, and violent, but it was perhaps nothing more than the natural outcome of the tensions arising from the interaction of business, politics, and religion.
By the time Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1501, Savonarola was dead, and the tides of religious extremism had all but vanished. Religion was still an integral part of Florentine life, and the links that bound it to the institutional worlds of business and politics were as strong as ever. They were alive and well in the person of Rinaldo Or- sini. As the David testified, the language of religion was still central to the formation of civic identity and stood at the very core of Florence’s self-image. Indeed, religion—as the deeply pious Michelangelo would have known all too well—still structured everyday life. But the sexual deviancy, the competition for benefices, the political intrigues, and the zeal for reform still simmered beneath the surface.
WHAT DAVID SAW
When the completed David was finally unveiled in the Piazza della Signoria on September 8, 1504, the statue gazed out at a snapshot of city life.
Everyone had come out for the great event. Arrayed on the ringhiera—the raised, stepped platform outside the main doors of the palazzo—were the doughty citizens who embodied the worlds of politics, business, and religion: the august Piero Soderini, dressed in fine red robes and glittering with jewels; the pudgy Jacopo Salviati, in his ridiculously overpriced clothes; and the proud Rinaldo Orsini, adorned in rich golden vestments. Yet in the square itself stood a swirling crowd of people, citizens and noncitizens, men and women, old and young, laity and clergy. Most were dressed in poor clothes, many purchased secondhand, and a good number went barefoot; some were carrying tools of their trade, having snuck out of the workshop for a few stolen moments.
It was a sight that encapsulated the influences that had brought Michelangelo to that moment. Beneath the statue’s gaze was proof positive that Florence was a republican city, made rich by trade and ordered according to the ways of the faith, uniting all in admiration for Michelangelo’s new statue. But it was also a city of profound socioeconomic inequalities fostered by guilds, a city of political exclusion concealed under a mantle of liberty, and a city torn between religious fervor and ecclesiastical abuses. Politics, business, and the Church were all there in the square: all deceptive in their appearance; all a source of tension, resentment, and violence; and all very much necessary to the art of the Renaissance.