Yet for Florence, as Cosimo had foreseen, the Council had far happier consequences. As well as profiting the trade of the city, it was an important influence on what was already being spoken of as the Rinascimento. The presence of so many Greek scholars in Florence provided an incalculable stimulus to the quickening interest in classical texts and classical history, in classical art and philosophy, and particularly in the study of Plato, that great hero of the humanists, for so long overshadowed by his pupil, Aristotle. Bessarion, whose lodgings had been crowded night after night with Greek and Italian scholars, was prevailed upon to remain in Italy where he was created a cardinal and Archbishop of Siponto. Gemistos Plethon, the great authority on Plato, who had travelled from Constantinople with Bessarion, also agreed to remain in Florence for a time before going home to the in his own country.
Cosimo, who had listened to Plethon’s lectures on Plato with the closest attention, was inspired to found in Florence an academy for Platonic studies and to devote much more time to these studies himself. Plethon’s return home and Cosimo’s subsequent preoccupation with other matters had led to his plans being postponed for a time; but, some years later, when Cosimo adopted the son of one of his physicians, a young medical student named Marsilio Ficino, they were revived. Ficino’s enthusiasm for Plato prompted Cosimo to pay for his further education and afterwards to offer to instal him in the villa known as Montevecchio where, in the peace of the country, the young man was to study Greek and to translate all Plato into Latin.1 Ficino eagerly accepted the offer and, as he grew older and more learned, Cosimo would call him over from Montevecchio to the nearby villa of Careggi, and either alone or with other friends, such as the Greek scholar, John Argyropoulos, whom Cosimo persuaded to come to Florence in 1456, they would discuss philosophical questions far into the night. From these foundations grew the Platonic Academy which was to have so profound an influence upon the development of European thought.
As well as firing Cosimo with the ambition to found a Platonic Academy, the Council of Florence had also enabled him to make several marvellous additions to his library, which was beginning to be recognized as one of the most valuable in the world. For years past, his agents all over Europe and in the Near East had been buying on his instructions rare and important books and manuscripts whenever they became available, particularly in German monasteries where the monks were supposed to have little idea of their worth. In 1437 the death of Niccolò Niccoli, who was deeply in Cosimo’s debt, placed eight hundred more volumes in his hands. The religious books he gave to the monastery of San Marco; the others he kept for himself. Open to all his friends who cared to study there, it was the first library of its kind in Europe, and a generation later served as a model for the Vatican Library in Rome. Constantly increased by Cosimo and his heirs, it was eventually to contain no less than ten thousand codices of Latin and Greek authors, hundreds of priceless manuscripts from the time of Dante and Petrarch as well as others from Florence’s remoter past.2
While spending immense sums on his library, Cosimo also followed his father’s example in lavishing money upon the adornment of Florence. Giovanni di Bicci had never much cared for books. Indeed, according to an inventory of his possessions made in 1418, he only owned three books altogether, a Latin life of St Margaret, a sermon by Fra Giovanni also in Latin, and a copy of the Gospels in Italian. But he had always recognized that the honour of the city, and the personal credit of the rich citizen who cared for honour, demanded donations to public building and to the enrichment of buildings already in existence.
The first important project with which Giovanni may have become involved was the provision of new doors for San Giovanni Battista. The Baptistery, ‘il mio bel Giovanni’ as Dante called it, was already at least two hundred and fifty years old.3 Its southern doors, depicting scenes from the life of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, were made by Andrea Pisano in 1330; and in 1402, a year of plague, it had been decided to provide new doors for the northern front as a votive offering, a plea to God not to repeat that dreadful visitation of 1348 when so many thousands of citizens had died in a fearful epidemic that had swept northwards across Europe from Naples. The doors were to be cast in bronze of the most exquisite workmanship, and seven of the leading artists of the day had each been asked to submit a design for a competition of which Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was probably one of the judges.
The design was to be for a bronze panel representing the sacrifice of Isaac; and, when all the works had been handed in, the judges decided to give special consideration to the submissions of three young artists, all of them in their twenties, Jacopo della Quercia from Siena, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both Florentines. After lengthy deliberations the choice fell upon Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; but when these two were asked to collaborate, the suggestion so annoyed the fiery-tempered Brunelleschi that he stormed out of Florence and went to study architecture in Rome, handing the bronze he had made to Cosimo de’ Medici who afterwards placed it in the old sacristy at San Lorenzo where it was displayed behind the altar.
Ghiberti, to whom the sole responsibility was now entrusted, was highly versatile, as a true Renaissance artist was required to be. Trained as a goldsmith, he was painter and architect as well as sculptor. He designed windows for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as well as golden tiaras for Martin V and Eugenius IV, the gold setting for a cornelian cameo depicting Apollo and Marsyas which belonged to Giovanni de’ Medici, and, for Cosimo, a reliquary for the bones of three now forgotten martyrs. At the time of his first commission for the Baptistery he was twenty-three; he was to be seventy-three before his work there was completed. A most exacting perfectionist, he cast and re-cast panel after panel before he was satisfied that the reliefs were as perfect as he could make them, exasperating his assistants by his exhausting, relentless, wearisome striving ‘to imitate nature to the utmost’. After twenty-two years’ work the doors were finished at last; and, in celebration of so important an event, the Priori came out in procession from the Palazzo della Signoria – an exodus permitted them only upon the most solemn occasions – to pay their respects to the artist and his great work.4 No sooner was the ceremony over, however, than Ghiberti returned to his foundry in the Via Bufalini opposite the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova,5 and immediately began to work on another set of doors for the eastern front of the Baptistery. He settled down to his task with that same determination to produce an unsurpassable masterpiece as he had brought to the earlier commission. After a further twenty-eight years’ work, a frail old man close to death, he was forced reluctantly to conclude that he could make no further improvement. The gilded bronze panels, representing scenes from stories in the Old Testament, were mounted at last, in 1456, in the eastern door of the Baptistery where Michelangelo was later to stand transfixed in wonderment before them and to declare that they were ‘fit to be the gates of Paradise’.6
Giovanni de’ Medici, himself an old man even before Ghiberti’s first doors were finished, had by then, together with his son, Cosimo, arranged for the Baptistery to be provided with another masterpiece, the monument to his friend, Pope John XXIII.7 He had also concerned himself with the building and endowing of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a hospital for the foundlings of Florence built for the Arte di Por Santa Maria,8 and with the restoration and enlargement of San Lorenzo which, consecrated by St Ambrose in 393, was now falling into ruins. Eight of the leading men of the parish of San Lorenzo agreed to pay for the building of a family chapel, Giovanni undertaking to pay not only for a Medici chapel but also for the sacristy. This work, as also the Ospedale degli Innocenti, was entrusted to Brunelleschi, who had now returned from Rome anxious to display his newly acquired talents and to show Ghiberti how much more there was to art than the casting of bronze panels. His church of San Lorenzo, which became the family church of the Medici and was later to be enriched with their tombs, is one of the masterpieces of the early Renaissance.9