Sixtus was infuriated, borrowed the money from another Florentine family, the Pazzi, and decided to destroy Lorenzo the Magnificent. He encouraged his seventeen-year-old nephew Cardinal Raffaele Riario, along with the young banker Francesco Pazzi and the embittered archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, to murder the Medici and seize Florence. Sixtus tried to cover himself: if Lorenzo were to be killed, Girolamo Riario asked, ‘will Your Holiness pardon who did it?’
‘You’re a beast,’ replied Sixtus. ‘I don’t want anyone killed, just regime change,’ adding, ‘Lorenzo’s a villain.’ The Riarios decided that a visit by the youngest cardinal would lure the Medici to their deaths.
As the sacristy bell rang, a priestly hitman stabbed Lorenzo in the neck but the fit Medici jerked free, swung his sword at the assassins and vaulted the altar rail just as another assassin, shouting, ‘Take that traitor,’ raised his dagger and shattered the skull of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano. The assassins stabbed him nineteen times, so frenziedly that Francesco Pazzi cut himself.
Lorenzo, escorted by his retainers, ran back to the Medici Palace. ‘Giuliano? Is he safe?’ asked Lorenzo as his friends sucked his wound clean, in case the dagger was poisoned. At the Palazzo della Signoria nearby, Archbishop Salviati stormed the seat of government with a posse of Perugian mercenaries, but as the Vacco bell tolled, Medici henchmen ran in and slaughtered them, parading their heads on lances as they hunted for the assassins. Francesco Pazzi’s uncle Jacopo was caught, tortured and hanged, then propped up at the door of the Pazzi Palace where his head was used as a doorknob, while the two murderous priests were castrated. A rope was tied around the neck of the archbishop, who was stripped naked, then tossed out the window where he hung beside the naked Pazzi. As they wriggled and struggled to survive, the nude archbishop sank his teeth into Pazzi’s thigh. A young artist, living at the Medici palace, was fascinated by this: Leonardo da Vinci sketched one of these bodies.
The coup made Lorenzo even more powerful. Sixtus excommunicated him and invited the sinister King Ferrante of Naples, who liked to mummify his enemies and keep them fully dressed in a macabre museum, to overthrow the Medici, but Lorenzo set off for Naples. There was a risk he would end up in Ferrante’s museum. ‘My desire is that by my life or my death, my misfortune or my prosperity, I may contribute to the wealth of our city.’ He returned, hailed as the Magnificent, having delivered peace.
‘If Florence was to have a tyrant, she could never have found a better or more delightful one,’ a Florentine writer later commented. Neglecting his bank – it had lent far too much to the English king Edward IV, who was mired in a civil war between different lines of royal family – Il Magnifico devoted himself to politics. Married to a Roman Orsini,* he adored his children, writing plays for them to perform, but he was realistic about their talents. ‘I have three sons,’ he said, ‘one good, one shrewd, one fool.’ The fool was the eldest Piero, clumsy and tactless, lined up to succeed to his role in Florence. The good one was the second son Giuliano, but the shrewd one was Giovanni, fat, genial, sybaritic. Sensing that the key to Florence was Rome, Lorenzo married his daughter to a natural son of Pope Innocent VIII, whom he persuaded to make Giovanni a cardinal. ‘You’re the youngest cardinal not only today but at any time in the past,’ he wrote to the boy. ‘Show your gratitude by a holy, exemplary and chaste life in Rome, which is a sink of iniquity.’ The son of his murdered brother, Giuliano, joined the household, also destined for Rome.
Lorenzo founded a neo-Platonic school in the San Marco gardens next to the Medici Palace where young artists lived in an atmosphere of artistic freedom and erotic exploration. One such young protégé was an illegitimate artisan from the Tuscan village of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci, son of a notary, had been arrested in 1476 for sodomy but then released. ‘Police records,’ writes Catherine Fletcher, ‘show the majority of men in later fifteenth-century Florence had or were accused of having sex with other men on at least one occasion.’ Lorenzo admired a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head that Leonardo had made. When in 1482 the duke of Milan asked for a sculptor, Lorenzo sent him Leonardo, who advertised himself as a military engineer, adding that he could also sculpt. Italy was a battlefield of northern dynasties – the French Valois, the German Habsburgs – and local warlords, who enhanced their power with war and art. War came first. Without victory there was nothing for the artists to celebrate and no spoils to pay them with. These warlords were innovators in military technology, improving the velocity and facility of arquebuses and artillery, and fortifications designed to withstand their bombardment.* Leonardo got the job in Milan – just one of Medici’s protégés.
