In 1489, Lorenzo invited Ghirlandaio to send gifted pupils from among his apprentices. Ghirlandaio sent a boy of thirteen whose talents in sculpture were so striking that he exclaimed, ‘Why, this boy knows more than I do.’ Raised in a small Tuscan town, son of an official appointed by the Medici but descended from impoverished nobility, Michelangelo di Buonarroti bristled with family pride yet was attracted to the rough workmanship of marble: ‘Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.’ He was an irrepressible, obstreperous youth, short-fused and often impossible, yet also passionate and witty; his shoulders and chest were muscular from the physical labour of sculpture, his body sinewy and strong, ‘his eyes brown the colour of horn but changeable and flecked with yellow and blue’. In Lorenzo’s school, he was involved in homosexual love affairs with older men, an ephebophilic relationship being a rite of passage in Italy at that time. These sometimes led to fights, one of which saw him getting his nose broken. But he focused on his art, and enjoyed choosing his marble from the quarries. When he crafted a faun’s head in classical style, Il Magnifico was dazzled, asking the boy’s father if the boy could stay. Invited to dine with the Medici family daily, Michelangelo grew up knowing the children, particularly the future pope Giovanni. He was also encouraged to show ‘the results of his labours to Il Magnifico each day’.
The magnificence of Lorenzo impressed Europe, even the Muscovites. When Ivan the Great wished to create a fitting citadel for the newest power in Europe, he and Sophia, raised in Italy, turned to the Medici.
SOPHIA’S KREMLIN; SCANDERBEG’S ALBANIA; BELLINI’S PORTRAIT
The tsars hired one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s architects, Aristotele Fioravanti, who travelled to Moscow and started the Dormition Cathedral, while also serving as an artillery engineer for Ivan’s sieges. When Fioravanti wanted to go home, Ivan arrested him and he perished in prison. But all tsars down to Nicholas II were crowned in the Dormition Cathedral.*
As befitting a Byzantine, Sophia proved adept at Kremlin intrigue. Her eldest son, Vasili, was half Rurikovich, half Palaiologos, but in 1497 Ivan crowned his grandson Dmitri as grand prince, which drove Vasili, backed by Sophia, to attempt a coup. When it failed, Sophia and son fell from favour, but they somehow destroyed their rivals and Vasili returned to power, crowned as co-ruler, while Dmitri and his mother were arrested. Dynasties have always set women against women and pitted mothers against mothers. Here, Sophia was triumphant. Elena was probably poisoned; Dmitri died in prison. ‘I’ll give the principality to whoever I like,’ said the dying Ivan handing over to Vasili III,* who would be the father of Ivan the Terrible.
Across the Balkans, Mehmed enforced Ottoman control, incorporating Serbia and Bosnia; only the Lord of Albania, indomitable mountain warrior Scanderbeg held out, backed by Venice until his death when Albania too was subjugated. Mehmed then built a Mediterranean navy to confront Venice, which faced the prospect of losing its empire. When the Venetians made peace, they sent Mehmed a special present in the form of Gentile Bellini, official artist of the doge who, with his brother Giovanni, were Venice’s most famous. Artists, like everything else, existed in dynasties: their father Jacopo had trained the boys alongside the Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna, who then married their sister Nicolosia. Once in Constantinople, Bellini painted the sultan, catching his alert, foxy intelligence – an intelligence crudely demonstrated when Mehmed was said to have won a debate with the artist on the anatomical perspective of his
Having taken the Second Rome, Mehmed turned to attack the first, in 1480 dispatching his fleet from Albania to take Otranto, causing panic in Italy and encouraging a new holy war against Islam that was to earn its first success in Spain.* There Queen Isabella of Castile created an Inquisition to investigate and purge secret Jews poisoning the purity of Christians and launched a war to eliminate the Muslim kingdom of Granada.
