PART TWO
6
ON THE AFTERNOON of April 17, 1459, the fifteen-year-old Galeazzo Maria Sforza arrived at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi accompanied by a large retinue of magnificently attired horsemen. A handsome and eloquent young man, he had the dignity and good sense of a prince twice his age, and despite his youth he had been sent to Florence on an important diplomatic mission by his father, the duke of Milan. Having been greeted by the priors earlier that day, he had come to the home of Cosimo de’ Medici—the city’s de facto ruler—to begin negotiations.
An old hand at the game of international politics, the sixty-nine-year-old Cosimo would have given great thought to where in the palazzo to meet his young guest. First impressions mattered, and no more so than where diplomacy was concerned. But while courtly convention would have recommended one of the grand public rooms on the piano nobile as the most fitting place to receive so aristocratic a visitor, the nature of the deal they were to discuss may well have persuaded Cosimo to wait for Galeazzo Maria in the smaller and more intimate setting of the palace’s private chapel. It would have been a shrewd choice.
Having come from the ducal court of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was used to magnificence. But what he would have seen as he crossed the threshold would have surprised the son of even the most lavish prince. The tiny chapel—which would have barely been big enough to contain his entourage—exploded with life and color. Three entire walls were given over to the rich, exuberant frescoes of the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem (Fig. 18), and although they would have been incomplete at the time of Galeazzo Maria’s visit, they would have inspired awe in any man of taste and refinement. Set in a “fairy world of gaiety and charm,” the scenes showed the three kings traveling “in truly royal state through a smiling landscape.” Packing his images with realistic details, the artist—Benozzo Gozzoli—had perfectly captured the opulence and excitement of the biblical procession. Absolutely no expense had been spared. In obedience to his patron’s wishes, Gozzoli had adorned the figures with the most radiant, dazzling clothes possible and had certainly not skimped on the most expensive gold and ultramarine paints.
But if Galeazzo Maria’s first reaction would have been one of amazement, Cosimo would have wanted him to look beyond mere surface beauty. There was much more to the chapel than first met the eye. For all their richness and vibrancy, Gozzoli’s frescoes weren’t just telling the story of the Magi. They were doing something else entirely.
Although there was a deliberate echo of the spectacular processions held in Florence every Epiphany, the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem was transforming a biblical story into a glorification of the Medici’s wealth and power. Each of the characters in Gozzoli’s frescoes was a portrait of one of the participants at the Council of Florence, which had met in 1439 in an attempt to reconcile the Eastern and Western Churches. And naturally, the Medici were given the starring roles.
There, on the south wall, dressed in fine, oriental robes, and wearing a turbaned crown, was the former Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus, playing the role of Balthazar. Next to him, playing the part of Melchior on the west wall, was Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople, riding a donkey and wearing a long white beard. And on the east—but still unfinished—wall, there appeared the crucial scene. Caspar, the third and youngest of the Magi, was played by a handsome young man dressed in a magnificent golden cloak and could only be an idealized representation of Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo “il Magnifico,” then a boy of ten. Behind him appeared Cosimo himself, accompanied by his son Piero—the Gouty—and a host of exotic servants. And in the crowd of figures following them, Galeazzo Maria would have glimpsed the heads of prelates, including Isidore of Kiev and Cardinal Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (who was to become Pope Pius II), notable scholars—such as the Greeks Argyropoulos and Plethon—and artists, including Gozzoli himself. At the far left of the scene were two unfinished figures, but it was clear from the horses alone that they were destined to be portraits of powerful nobles. In fact, one was already recognizable as a portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, while the other would shortly depict Galeazzo Maria himself.
It was a remarkable conceit. Although it was not unusual for patrons to be included as “participants in, or witnesses to, sacred dramas,” what made the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem unique was the fact that the biblical story had been infused with echoes of civic ritualism before being totally annexed to the Medici’s sense of pride. Indeed, “never before had an entire family integrated itself so explicitly into sacred history.” And not for a long time afterward would any family dare to use art so obviously to display such a powerful sense of self-confidence and ambition.
THE RISE OF THE PATRON
On looking more closely at Gozzoli’s frescoes, Galeazzo Maria Sforza could not have helped recognizing that in Cosimo de’ Medici he had met a man of supreme culture and refinement. Not only had he had the good taste to commission a truly breathtaking series of paintings from one of Florence’s most brilliant artists, but he had also had himself depicted in the company of some of the foremost intellects of the day. There was no doubt that he was a very sophisticated human being, and there was little question that he was exactly the sort of person whom anyone would trust with money or political power.
This was precisely what Cosimo had intended. It was an image he had worked hard to cultivate. Having made an absolute fortune out of banking, he took immense pleasure in acquiring a thorough knowledge of the arts and in employing the very best artists. Having commissioned Michelozzo to redesign the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, he had enthusiastically bestowed his patronage on the most talented artists of the day. Works in their dozens were sought from Donatello, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, and Fra Filippo Lippi, and the family palazzo thronged with the constant buzz of artistic debate. Cosimo was always welcoming new talent into his house, befriending those of particular ability, considering new commissions, and discussing models and sketches for future projects.
Cosimo had endeavored to foster a reputation not merely as a patron but also as a learned connoisseur in his own right. Supported by his seemingly endless reserves of cash, artists, poets, and musicians competed with one another to celebrate his learning in the most extravagant terms and—in keeping with Cosimo’s image of himself—lost no time in equating his cultural sophistication with public virtue. As his great friend the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci put it:
When giving an audience to a scholar, he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians, he showed his acquaintance with theology, a branch of learning always studied by him with delight. So also with regard to philosophy … Musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he took great pleasure. The same was true about sculpture and painting; both of these arts he understood completely, and showed much favour to all worthy craftsmen. In architecture he was a worthy judge; and without his opinion and advice no public building of any importance was begun or carried to completion.
By virtue of his learning and patronage, Cosimo had succeeded in appearing to be all things to all men. His discernment was not only laudable in its own right but deserved particular praise because of his willingness to place it at the disposal of his city. Who, Vespasiano seemed to ask, could possibly dislike such a man? Enamored with his patronage and learning, a contemporary later mused, “Ah, how much discretion he showed in uncertain things, how much love of country filled his waking thoughts!”
The Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem was just the latest installment in a lengthy campaign to project a dazzlingly impressive image of Cosimo’s sophistication and wealth, and testified to the tremendous lengths he was prepared to go to ensure this impression was communicated to maximum effect. Far from having simply paid Gozzoli to get on with the decoration of the chapel, Cosimo and Piero de’ Medici had worked closely with the artist. They had, in fact, been actively involved in the creation of the frescoes themselves and had good cause to think of themselves as co-creators. Drawing on their appreciation of the character and power of art, they had exercised a palpable control over the content and design of the work itself both by imposing specific contractual obligations on Gozzoli and by maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the artist. In this way, Cosimo and his son had succeeded in harnessing Gozzoli’s skill to their own cultural aspirations and had ensured that they would be perceived as laudable, public-spirited connoisseurs of the most impeccable learning. Binding the artist to their will, they had effectively given their status a big boost.
As a manifestation of Cosimo’s efforts to better his standing through art and culture, the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem illustrates the importance of patronage to the development of Renaissance culture and represents the culmination of what might be called the “rise of the patron.” Paralleling—and fueling—the “rise of the artist,” this process of development had involved a transformation not just of the social and intellectual background of patrons but also of the manner in which patrons interacted with artists. And as a result it was to have monumental effects on the manner in which art itself was produced.
Insofar as Renaissance patronage revolved around spending money on works of art, two main factors contributed to the “rise of the patron.” On the one hand, the Renaissance had witnessed the socioeconomic transformation of the “culture business.” Artistic patronage was, of course, nothing new. Since the earliest times, the patronage of art had been acknowledged to be a sure indicator of wealth and status, and powerful figures from Augustus and Maecenas to Charlemagne and Frederick II had augmented their public standing through lavish spending on the arts. But as a result of the radical political and economic changes of the Renaissance, there had been an explosion in the number and range of patrons who were actively involved in commissioning works of art. With the expansion of trade and the fragmentation of political authority from the mid-thirteenth century on, those who had the money and the motivation to commission artworks that testified to their power and status became dramatically more numerous.
By the early fifteenth century, it was not merely emperors, kings, and popes who were investing in architecture, painting, and sculpture; local lords (signori), communes, guilds, merchants, notaries, and even humble tradesmen were also getting in on the act. From small devotional works to enormous secular paintings and elaborate bequests to mendicant churches, everybody who could afford to was buying art, eager to bask in the glory of their purchasing power. The Medici—who had risen from very obscure origins in the Mugello—were just one of the more striking examples of patrons who had suddenly become extremely wealthy and wanted to cloak themselves in the splendor that had previously only belonged to the truly great.
On the other hand, the political and economic changes of the early Renaissance had occasioned a shift in the value that this new class of patrons attached to the learning on which art depended, and thus also in the appetite for culture in itself. At least as early as the mid-thirteenth century, it had become clear that it was impossible to manage the affairs of a territorial state without a body of people who had a good grasp of Latin and the liberal arts. Laws needed drafting, records needed to be kept, embassies needed to be dispatched, and people both high and low needed to be persuaded. The study and emulation of classical literature—which historians have recognized as one of the defining characteristics of humanism—thus became an essential prerequisite not only for the growing class of professional bureaucrats (such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni) but also for mercantile oligarchies and noble signori.
But as learning became more and more essential to the practice of government, it also became an essential status symbol and a mark of the “virtues” necessary for public life. Anybody who wished to be thought well suited to political power rapidly realized it was vital to gain a thorough acquaintance with the latest cultural and intellectual trends. It was typical, for example, not only that Petrarch advised Francesco “il Vecchio” da Carrara to cultivate his appreciation of the liberal arts so that he might rule justly and wisely, but also that Machiavelli viewed the true prince as a man of learning as well as a man of action. But it was also no surprise that before long the repertoire of “necessary” skills had expanded to include an acquaintance with the visual arts and vernacular literature as well as with the ancient classics. In The Book of the Courtier, for example, Baldassare Castiglione argued, “I should like our courtier to be a more than average scholar at least in those studies which we call the humanities.” “And,” Castiglione continued,
he should have a knowledge of Greek as well as Latin, because of the very different things that are so beautifully written in that language. He should be very well acquainted with the poets, and no less with the orators and historians, and also skilled at writing both verse and prose, especially in our own language.
The same was no less true of painting and sculpture. For Castiglione, it behooved the courtier to acquire a good knowledge of these arts, not only because they could confer “many useful skills … not least for military purposes,” but also because they could give him a full understanding of the complexity and majesty of the world he would help to govern.
As the liberal arts came to be seen as integral markers of status, the new class of patrons wished to display their learning by patronizing artists and litterateurs to as great an extent as possible. A household, court, or city that thronged with painters, sculptors, poets, and philosophers was, by definition, worthy of respect and esteem. It was for this reason that the “mirrors of princes” written during this period stressed the importance of patronizing the arts, and everyone who engaged in patronage—especially Cosimo de’ Medici—learned that lesson well.
As a result of the significance that art had assumed both as a status symbol and as a display of learning, the new class of clever, knowledgeable patrons fostered ever closer relationships with the artists they employed. Used to the practicalities of business and government, they understood the importance of contracts and wanted to make sure they would get the best value for their money. Just as Michelangelo would later see when Piero Soderini offered his “advice” on the David, patrons—whether private individuals or representatives of institutions—were keen to suggest little changes and even to demand sweeping revisions. Cosimo and Piero de’ Medici in particular were constantly engaged in dialogue with the artists they commissioned. Around the time of Galeazzo Maria’s visit, for example, Piero asked Gozzoli to remove the angels from his frescoes on the grounds that he found their presence disturbing and contrary to the contractual agreement. But while Gozzoli was generally happy to listen (although he did not, in fact, remove the angels), the Medici’s interventions were not always popular. Having devoted tremendous effort to making a “large and very beautiful model” of his design for the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, for example, Filippo Brunelleschi was horrified when Cosimo rejected it as being too ostentatious and was, in fact, so enraged that he smashed the model to smithereens.
By the time Galeazzo Maria Sforza arrived in Florence to meet Cosimo de’ Medici, the patronage of art had reached extraordinary heights not only due to the growing number of people who wanted to demonstrate that they had “arrived,” but also as a result of the remarkable value that had come to be placed on learning and the arts. For “new men” and emergent institutions, works like Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem represented a sure way of expressing their status through patronage and of revealing their public merits through discernment. And to ensure that they would get exactly what they wanted, they were not afraid to bind artists ever more closely to their will with contracts and ongoing negotiations.
With this in mind, it is perhaps no coincidence that Renaissance patrons of the arts are today often seen as cultural supermen in their own right. Given their stated devotion to the cultivation of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature, and the huge amount of effort they devoted to employing the very best talent, it is often easy to view them as paragons of good taste and to regard them with the awe that is commonly inspired by the works they commissioned. Given the closeness of the relationship between artists and patrons, it is difficult not to succumb to the temptation to view the latter as harbingers of a golden age whose importance is equal to that of those who worked for them. If we stand in Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s place and look up at the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, Cosimo de’ Medici and his ilk do indeed seem to be bathed in an aura of supreme culture that carries with it a sense of public virtue and decency. What man of taste could possibly be bad?
THE POWER OF ART
But this was only part of the story. Just as there is good reason to resist the temptation to view artists as near-perfect beings endowed with superhuman brilliance, so a deeper look at the social world of the Renaissance patron and the ends that patronage was intended to serve cautions against looking at such men through rose-tinted spectacles. It all stems from the fact that art wasn’t just art.
As Galeazzo Maria Sforza peered closer at the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, he would have become conscious that the Medici had contrived to use the frescoes to communicate a specific political message that went well beyond a simplistic celebration of their status and learning. Surveying the figures portrayed in the paintings—from artists and philosophers to prelates, signori, emperors, and patriarchs—and decoding their hidden meaning, he would gradually have seen that the whole point of the chapel was to “legitimate [the Medici’s] domination of Florentine politics” through art.
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.
THE ART OF POWER
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.
Long experience had taught the Sforza and the Medici that they needed each other. In 1440, Galeazzo Maria’s father, Francesco, had seized control of Milan from the Visconti with Florentine backing, backing that Cosimo had been instrumental in arranging. And only the year before, in 1458, Cosimo’s coup had been made possible by a cast-iron guarantee of military support from Francesco. The alliance had served not only to unite the two states in peace but also to keep the two families in power in the face of internal and external threats. If it was to last, each side needed to be sure of the other. Knowing he relied on Florentine support, Francesco could easily dump the Medici if he suspected that another family was better placed to ensure the money and diplomatic ties he needed. By underlining the towering strength and stability of Medici power in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, Cosimo was subtly pointing out that his family was firmly in control of the city and still more than capable of keeping up its end of the bargain. The frescoes were, in other words, intended to make Francesco and Galeazzo Maria an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Having given Galeazzo Maria the opportunity to appreciate the full meaning of the chapel’s decorations, Cosimo would have been sure that, despite his dirty and disgraceful past, the Sforza-Medici axis would remain solid. In fact, despite minor fluctuations, it would remain the mainstay of Italian politics for the next two decades. And, most important of all, Cosimo knew that he had got his way not through complex and tedious negotiations but through art.
The lesson appears not to have been lost on Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Upon acceding to the ducal title in 1466, he swiftly earned a reputation for his patronage of the arts and, striving to outdo the Medici in all ways, was recognized by many of his contemporaries as the very image of the dashing, cultured prince. As one put it,
He was most magnificent in furnishings, and in his way of life, and splendid beyond measure in his court. He presented very rich gifts to his attendants … and with great salaries he attracted men skilled in whichever science.
He was renowned for his love of painting. Having patronized artists such as Bonifacio Bembo and Vincenzo Foppa, and having poured money into enormous projects such as the imposing frescoes of the Portinari Chapel, he would periodically indulge excited flights of fancy and would reward those who answered his call with a legendarily openhanded generosity. On one occasion, for example, Galeazzo Maria took it into his head to have a room decorated with elaborate paintings of “noble figures” in a single night and spared absolutely no expense in pursuit of the whim. His first love was, however, music. Filled always with the sound of the most innovative and enchanting melodies, his court became famed for the plethora of talented musicians (mostly from the Low Countries) whom he summoned to Milan at enormous cost.
Galeazzo Maria’s lavish patronage of the arts ensured that his prestige in Milan was colossally high in the early years of his reign, and even his father’s usurpation seemed to recede from the popular memory as his court became famed as the most glittering in Europe. Thanks to his growing reputation as a cultural leviathan, he earned the respect and admiration of the kings, popes, signori, and oligarchs who were privileged enough to see or hear the works he had commissioned. Indeed, so close was the link between art and perceptions of power that Lorenzo de’ Medici even kept Pollaiuolo’s portrait of Galeazzo Maria in his bedroom.
But like Cosimo de’ Medici’s, Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s patronage of the arts was designed to conceal much darker and nefarious realities. It was all just a smoke screen. Without his strong-willed and disciplinarian father around to hold him in check, Galeazzo Maria rapidly became a sadistic and sexually incontinent sociopath. Suspecting him (not without reason) of murdering his mother, Bianca Maria, the people of Milan came to fear him for his wanton savagery and heinously bad temper, which was so bad as to attract the criticism of Machiavelli himself. He delighted in seeing men tortured—occasionally even inflicting the worst pain himself—and even had a priest starved to death. None, however, had more reason to be afraid than the women of the duchy. Although he was also thought to have had a homosexual relationship with the Mantuan ambassador Zaccaria Saggi, he had no qualms about coercing any woman who took his fancy into succumbing to his violent sexual tastes. Neither age, nor status, nor the bond of matrimony could stop him. Even nuns were not safe, and he seems to have developed a particular fondness for breaking into nunneries to have his way with the sisters. Indeed, it was no surprise that when Galeazzo Maria was eventually assassinated at the age of only thirty-two on December 26, 1476, his three murderers had all suffered from the duke’s excesses: both Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani’s wife and Carlo Visconti’s sister had been raped by their liege lord, while the more bookish Girolamo Olgiati’s tutor, Cola Montano, had been whipped through the streets of Milan on a trumped-up charge. Short though his reign may have been, it was only through the loyalty of his courtiers and the impact of his patronage that Galeazzo Maria managed to cling to power for quite as long as he did.
In the moment of silent accord between Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Cosimo de’ Medici, and in the forms of patronage it later inspired in Milan, the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem illustrated the full implications of the “rise of the patron.” On the one hand, it represented the fulfillment of the intricate processes that had transformed the relationship between artists and patrons. On the back of a series of radical political and economic changes that had their origins in the collapse of the old Empire, a new breed of patrons had emerged who not only placed an increasingly high value on learning as a symbol of status but who were also willing and able to use patronage as a means of endowing themselves with a highly focused air of legitimacy. Working in ever closer partnership with the artists they commissioned, they became the “co-creators” of Renaissance art and contrived to direct the arts toward ever new flights of innovation in the service of their needs.
On the other hand, the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem also demonstrated that this new breed of patrons was often composed of deeply unpleasant and highly dangerous individuals who were spurred on to ever more ruthless flights of ambition by the opportunities created by the same forces from which the “rise of the patron” had emerged. Although they certainly sought to project an image of legitimacy through art, their need for legitimacy was all the more acute by virtue of the illegal, immoral, and frequently violent means by which they had risen to prominence, and by extension their need to indulge in patronage was all the more extreme. It was this most devilish class of men (and occasionally women) who were the epitomes of the “rise of the patron,” and though they remained “co-creators,” the art they commissioned was often designed to cover up the most heinous of crimes. Indeed, the more remarkable and beautiful the art such a patron commissioned, the more heinous his offenses, and the more cynical his intentions. So, while Cosimo de’ Medici and Galeazzo Maria Sforza were renowned as the greatest patrons of their age, they were also among the most ghastly people of the entire period, and the arts they fostered are as much a testimony to their moral turpitude as they are to the skills of the artists themselves.
The implications of this are significant. If patrons were every bit as important as artists in shaping the form and direction of Renaissance art, it is impossible fully to understand the art of the period without uncovering the social world they inhabited and peering into the dark and dastardly details of their private lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be seduced by the splendor of the works they commissioned, it is essential to uncover the world behind the paintings, a world populated not by the perfect mastery of color and harmony that is usually associated with the Renaissance but by ambition, greed, rape, and murder.
Hidden among the multitude of faces in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem are the portraits of three men who are emblematic of the three most important types of patrons in the Renaissance. When the lives and careers of bankers, mercenaries, and popes are traced, a new and utterly different Renaissance becomes clear: a Renaissance in which nothing is what it seems, and which is uglier still.