Lorenzo would not have been the full man that he was had he not enjoyed some humor with his philosophy, some doubt with his faith, some license with his loves. As his son would welcome jesters and smile at risqué comedies at the papal court, so the banker prince of Florence invited to his friendship and his table Luigi Pulci, and relished the rough satire of the Morgante maggiore. That famous poem, so admired by Byron, was read aloud, canto by canto, to Lorenzo and his household guests. Luigi was a man of robust and uninhibited wit, who convulsed a palace and a nation by applying the language, idioms, and views of the bourgeoisie to the romances of chivalry. The legends of Charlemagne’s adventures in France, Spain, and Palestine had entered Italy in the twelfth century or before, and had been spread through the peninsula by minstrels and improvisatori to the delight of every class. But there has always been, in the common male of the species, a bluff and lusty self-ridiculing realism, accompanying and checking the romantic spirit given to literature and art by woman and youth. Pulci combined all these qualities, and put together—from popular legends, from the manuscripts in the Laurentian Library, and from the conversation at Lorenzo’s table—an epic that laughs at the giants, demons, and battles of chivalric tales, and recounts, in sometimes serious, sometimes mocking verse, the adventures of the Christian knight Orlando and the Saracen giant who gives the poem half its name.*
Attacked by Orlando, Morgante saves himself by announcing his sudden conversion to Christianity. Orlando teaches him theology; explains to him that his two brothers, just slain, are now in hell as infidels; promises him heaven if he becomes a good Christian; but warns him that in heaven he will be required to look without pity upon his burning relatives. “The doctors of our Church,” says the Christian knight, “are agreed that if those who are glorified in heaven were to feel pity for their miserable kindred, who lie in such horrible confusion in hell, their beatitude would come to nothing.” Morgante is not disturbed. “You shall see,” he assures Orlando, “if I grieve for my brethren, and whether or no I submit to the will of God and behave myself like an angel… I will cut off the hands of my brothers, and take the hands to these holy monks, that they may be sure that their enemies are dead.”
In the eighteenth canto Pulci introduces another giant, Margute, a jolly thief and mild murderer, who ascribes to himself every vice but that of betraying a friend. To Morgante’s question whether he believes in Christ or prefers Mohammed, Margute answers:
I don’t believe in black more than in blue,
But in fat capons, boiled or maybe roasted;
And I believe sometimes in butter, too,
In beer and must, where bobs a pippin toasted;…
But mostly to old wine my faith I pin,
And hold him saved who firmly trusts therein….
Faith, like the itch, is catching;…
Faith is as man gets it—this, that, or another.
See then what sort of creed I’m bound to follow:
For you must know a Greek nun was my mother,
My sire, at Brusa mid the Turks, a mullah.21
Margute dies of laughter after rollicking through two cantos; Pulci wastes no tear over him, but pulls from his magic fancy a demon of the first order, Astarotte, who rebelled with Lucifer. Summoned from hell by the sorcerer Malagigi to bring Rinaldo swiftly from Egypt to Roncesvalles, he accomplishes the matter deftly, and wins such affection from Rinaldo that the Christian knight proposes to beg God to free Astarotte from hell. But the courteous devil is an excellent theologian, and points out that rebellion against infinite Justice was an infinite crime, requiring eternal punishment. Malagigi wonders why a God who foresaw everything, including Lucifer’s disobedience and everlasting damnation, proceeded to create him; Astarotte confesses that this is a mystery which even a wise devil cannot resolve.22
He was in truth a wise devil, for Pulci, writing in 1483, puts into his mouth an astonishing anticipation of Columbus. Referring to the old warning, at the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), ne plus ultra—“go no further”—Astarotte says to Rinaldo:
Know that this theory is false; his bark
The daring mariner shall urge far o’er
The western wave, a smooth and level plain
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel.
Man was in ancient days of grosser mold,
And Hercules might blush to learn how far
Beyond the limits he had vainly set
The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way,
Men shall descry another hemisphere.
Since to one common center all things tend,
So earth, by curious mystery divine
Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres.
At our antipodes are cities, states,
And thronged empires, ne’er divined of yore.
But see, the Sun speeds on his western path
To glad the nations with expected light.23
It was part of Pulci’s method to introduce each canto, however full of buffoonery, with a pious invocation of God and the saints; the more profane the matter, the more solemn the prologue. The poem ends with a declaration of faith in the goodness of all religions—a proposition sure to offend every true believer. Now and then Pulci allows himself a timid heresy, as when he quotes Scripture to argue that Christ’s foreknowledge did not equal that of God the Father, or when he allows himself to hope that all souls, even Lucifer, will in the end be saved. But like a good Florentine, and the other members of Lorenzo’s circle, he remained externally faithful to a Church inextricably bound up with Italian life. Ecclesiastics were not deceived by his obeisance; when he died (1484) his body was refused burial in consecrated ground.
If Lorenzo’s group could produce so varied a literature in one generation, we may reasonably suppose—and shall find—a like awakening in other cities—Milan, Ferrara, Naples, Rome. In the century between Cosimo’s birth and Lorenzo’s death Italy had accomplished and transcended the first stage in her Renaissance. She had rediscovered ancient Greece and Rome, had established the essentials of classical scholarship, and had made Latin again a language of masculine splendor and pithy force. But more: in the generation between Cosimo’s death and Lorenzo’s, Italy rediscovered her own language and soul, applied the new standards of diction and form to the vernacular, and composed poetry classical in spirit, but indigenous and “modern” in tongue and thought, rooted in the affairs and problems of its own day, or in the scenes and persons of the countryside. And again: Italy in one generation, through Pulci, had lifted the humorous romance into literature, had prepared the way for Boiardo and Ariosto, had even anticipated Cervantes’ smiles at chivalric fustian and pretense. The age of the scholars receded, imitation gave way to creation; Italian literature, which had languished after Petrarch’s choice of Latin for his epic, was reborn. Soon the revival of antiquity would be almost forgotten in the exuberance of an Italian culture leading the world in letters, and flooding it with art.
V. ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE: THE AGE OF VERROCCHIO
Lorenzo continued enthusiastically the Medicean tradition of supporting art. “He was such an admirer of all the remains of antiquity,” wrote his contemporary Valor, “that there was nothing with which he was more delighted. Those who wished to oblige him were accustomed to collect, from every part of the world, medals, coins… statues, busts, and whatever else bore the stamp” of ancient Greece or Rome.24 Uniting his architectural and sculptural collections with those left by Cosimo and Piero, he placed them in a garden between the Medici palace and the monastery of San Marco, and admitted to them all responsible scholars and visitors. To students who showed application and promise—among whom was the young Michelangelo—he gave a stipend for their maintenance, and awards for special proficiency. Says Vasari: “It is highly deserving of notice that all those who studied in the gardens of the Medici, and were favored by Lorenzo, became excellent artists. This can only be ascribed to the exquisite judgment of this great patron… who could not merely distinguish men of genius, but had the will and power to reward them.”25