In the mornings, Lorenzo de’ Medici would rise from bed and conduct business from within his family’s palace. He devoted the mornings of his adult life to the petty concerns of petition-seekers, bankers, ambassadors, artists, and hacks, each waiting in the corridors of his fortress-like home to beg a favor. The head of the Florentine state might make them wait there for hours while he played with his children, bickered with his wife, or played with the mechanical animals and precious cameos in his collection of rare objects. And then, just as it seemed that he might not appear, Lorenzo would emerge from his private world into the public one and look the entire panorama of the Italian Renaissance in the face. Squinting and smiling, he would rearrange this living tableau according to his whims, manipulating powerful men and women as if they were outsized toys from his marvelous collection.

What was it like — one has to wonder — to think up the Renaissance?  Not so much to live in it, but to be one of the few human beings in fifteenth-century Italy (Lorenzo and some other princes, some painters and Neoplatonic philosophers) who inherited the fictions of the dying medieval and classical worlds, and used them to dream up an unexpected, self-conscious future whose image (itself the fantasy of still later dreamers) would mold the next five hundred years of Western culture.  What could have been the sensation that accompanied the birth of thinking — or rather, the grandiose delusion of the birth of thinking, the conviction that true enlightenment was emerging after ten centuries of sleep?  Ciriaco of Ancona wandered Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century making sketches of ruins and antiquities.  When asked why he bothered, he replied “To wake the dead!”  And they — Lorenzo, Ciriaco, Leonardo — must have also thought that way about what was happening in their internal lives: as if  their minds had been streaked with sunlight, as if something dormant in the human spirit had been newly illuminated.

It is hard not to be seduced by the fantasy of a successful delusion: here were a few thousand men and women who believed so strongly in their role in history that they actually willed it to be fulfilled.  The myth of rebirth is rebirth; the word was made flesh — the flesh of marble, canvas, parchment.  This was certainly the fantasy that seduced Walter Pater into studying the Renaissance, and led him to write these words in 1873: “what is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:”

It is an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized, complete.  Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.  There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment, in which all alike communicate.

The thinking of the Quattrocento, says Pater, was both fuel and fire; its confidence and exuberance re-shaped the world in its own image.  To be convinced that you can create the world, and to live in a society where such conviction is everywhere, is to live like a god — or at least to join a new pantheon, a group of artists and statesmen stamping and re-shaping culture, all under the guidance of their Magnificent Prince, the new Pericles, Lorenzo de’ Medici. 

And what of this Lorenzo, the de facto but untitled ruler of Florence from 1469 to 1492, at the height of the Renaissance? “It may be better to renounce the attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent had in the life of Lorenzo il Magnifico,” says Burckhardt a little idolatrously in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860.  Hero, poet, patron, businessman and reflective princeling, Lorenzo towers over the fictions of the Renaissance, one of the most spectacular embodiments of its humanist aspirations.  His delicate negotiations and tact shaped the spirit of the most influential city of one of the most influential periods in Western history.  He might have been the greatest of all the self-fulfilling fantasists of the era; and because of that, Burckhardt might be right in suggesting that we can only understand him through the grandeur and mystique of the identity he made for himself.

The journalist Miles J. Unger does not share this opinion, however.  Sober estimation is precisely what Magnifico, his new biography of the Medici despot, is all about.  Here he is writing about Lorenzo’s poetry:

The explanation for this transformation from patron to artist is complex, involving factors that were both personal and political.  In writing poetry, Lorenzo not only gave vent to his most private thoughts but also constructed his public persona; however much his poetry seems to offer an intimate autobiography of a private man, it was also an important factor in shaping his public image.

Unger’s Lorenzo does not breathe in Pater’s mystical atmosphere of genius.  Instead, he is driven by a set of personal motivations taken from common-sense psychology.  He expressed himself through his poetry because he was a sensitive man; but he also expressed what other people expected of him because he was an important man.  Even though such an observation seems grounded in context — Lorenzo ruled Florence, therefore his poetry was partially determined by this peculiar situation — it is stripped of what seems important or unique about that context.  Unger excises the spirit of the time and the place, and leaves only the bare causality.  And it is a nebulous kind of reasoning: too general to be really considered historical, but too biographical to be considered merely a universal assumption.

Magnifico, however, is not a nineteenth-century book, and it would be unfair to hold it solely to Pater’s eccentrically aesthetic standard.  Magnifico is a work intended for a popular audience, meant to be engaging and interesting to read.  It has no larger philosophical point to make beyond the desire to paint the portrait of a crucial and fascinating figure in European history.  And, of course, it makes good (if understandably simplified) use of a century of good research that has debunked much of the fantasy of genius that the Renaissance once inspired — research that has shown that historical forces have perhaps as much to do with this “rebirth” as the mysteries of genius.

But if Magnifico’s Spiritless-ness would have been its Victorian sin, the related phenomenon of its straightforward and impersonal psychologizing is its postmodern crime.  There is no analysis of cultural forms or patriarchal prejudice here (a few gossipy and tentative speculations on Lorenzo’s homosexuality and chauvinism toward women aside); there is only a sober sense of causality true to the life of any human, slightly re-arranged in order to better capture the thinking of a man who happens to be burdened by fame, power, and superior intelligence.  What strikes the reader is the predictability of the outcome: that the leader of a country might be motivated both by political and personal concerns is the kind of truism that fills dead airtime on political talk-shows; it could be equally as vague a reference to a presidential candidate as to this melancholic banker of the late Middle Ages.   

Worst of all for the aesthetes and the post-modernists, however, is the fact that Unger might in some measure be right.  Even if this is a book written for a general audience, he is a serious scholar; and even if his reasoning might be general, his research seems thorough and his method logical.  Take, as a counter-example to his sobriety, Pater’s captivating description of Renaissance spectacles: “It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amusements: Leonardo [Da Vinci] became a celebrated designer of pageants; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed, in almost equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.”  And now, Unger’s description of practically the same event:

For the vulgar masses, on whom much of the symbolism was lost, the sheer extravagance of Lorenzo’s costume conveyed a similar message.  From his velvet beret encrusted with pearls, diamonds, and rubies, to the silver harness sculpted by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, to his shield, sporting at its center the famous Medici diamond known as il Libro (said to be worth at least 8,000 ducats), Lorenzo was a walking — or riding — advertisement for his family’s magnificence.

Political symbolism and the conspicuous outlay of wealth are exactly what they seem to be, says Unger.  The political motives of this parade rise quickly to the surface: first and foremost, such spectacles were about the pretentions of the new banker-class.  Whether or not they were also a deep source of the sensibilities of Renaissance artists, Unger lays out the transparently pragmatic concerns that trumped all other considerations in the creation and organization of these pageants.

His book teaches an important lesson, although perhaps not the one that its self-proclaimed colorfulness (the subtitle is “the Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de’ Medici”) would have us believe.  It is the lesson of the insidious persistence of the ordinary through time and space.  Pithy and pedestrian motivations do actually explain the actions of many individuals and — historical fantasies to the contrary — often contribute to seismic changes in culture and society.  Even when Unger does write about larger philosophical concerns it is with a disappointing, but unfortunately compelling, clarity: Lorenzo believed that “the man at the head of a well-ordered state should strive to achieve the same qualities of measure and serenity in his own residence,” Unger says regarding the legendary design of Lorenzo’s villa at Poggio a Caiano,

Standing serene and white upon its lofty perch, the villa’s elegant classical forms are a monument to reason and harmonious proportion that seem to defy even the possibility of violent passion.

Leonardo wanted to project stability, and he also wanted to be tranquil when he visited the countryside.  It certainly makes sense, but the sense it makes is disappointing.  Are there really no dark codes hidden within the building’s proportions?  No secret Neo-Platonic allegory in its design scheme?  No deep, fluctuating dream-world of a Classical culture re-imagined after ten centuries of obscurity?  The pleasure of history lies in its closeness to conspiracy; the reality, suggests Unger, is much closer to common sense. 

And yet, fortunately for those of us who prefer our fantasies to endure intact, there are some holes in Unger’s method.  If his analysis rings true for some things, it seems completely inadequate for others:

Lorenzo’s passion for small objects, particularly if they were ancient and exquisitely wrought, is well known, perhaps because his nearsightedness made it easier to appreciate things he could hold in his hands.

While it may indeed be the case that the First Prince of the Renaissance did take particular pleasure in the art-objects that he could see without glasses, Unger’s strictly biographical account misses the sophisticated and insidious role played by precious objects in the Renaissance.  The burgeoning material culture of the era meant that the smallest things became charged with significance. If art historian Malcolm Bull is to be believed, it is through such small decorative objects that the new aesthetic vocabulary we associate with the Renaissance made its way into European consciousness.  “It is a useful reminder,” he writes in his stunning book, The Mirror of the Gods,

that the diffusion of classical mythology came about through an accumulation of expensive yet trivial exchanges: the distribution of pornography and wedding presents, and the acquisition of things such as picnic dishes and jewellery, and garden ornaments for people’s holiday homes.  It may not sound like a cultural revolution, but that is what it turned out to be.

The sneaking advance of ideas is the most important fact of history, and it is what Unger in his dutifulness completely misses.  Lorenzo lived in a world where the toys of prosperity were leaking the possibility of radical intellectual and moral reorientation.  On the painted panels of wedding chests and in the chiseled faces of engravings, a new secular Europe was already beginning to make itself known.  Did Lorenzo have any idea what would happen to the enlightenment he contemplated through esoteric conversation and beautiful trinkets?  Did he know that the brilliance of his art collection would help bring the fanatical, reactionary monk Savanarola to power immediately following his death?  Did he know that the luxuries of his humanism would become vanities on a bonfire in the Piazza della Signoria?  Might he have been able to imagine that his princely aspirations and growing ostentation would shortly lead to his family’s expulsion from the city they had ruled for over a hundred years? 

Almost certainly not.  The merit of studying history is not to study great men’s minds or brilliant works of art — those projects are better achieved with the tools of psychology, philosophy, or criticism.  Rather, the work of history should be to study the indefinable presence of time within objects and places — the way in which the future and past are immanent in the peripheries of the present, but can only be teased out with the passing of time.  Malcolm Bull’s thesis about the role that expensive trinkets played in the dissemination of pagan imagery is only one example of this pervasive phenomenon — but it is a telling one.  Leonardo’s son Giovanni inherited his father’s love of pagan gods and expensive ornaments, much preferring them to the tedious duties of religious observance or governance.  Little could anyone have guessed that this jovial man would become the last pope to rule over a united Christendom, or that his seal would authorize the Bull condemning Martin Luther.  Much less could anyone have thought that seven years after that Bull — under another Medici pope, this time Lorenzo’s nephew — the Emperor Charles V would enter Rome at the head of an army and burn it to the ground.   Lorenzo had successfully vaulted his family into the highest spheres of the European social and cultural order. But the writing was already on the wall, hiding among the cabinets, wall-hangings and everyday comings and goings that accompanied his ascent to power.  Perhaps Unger’s image of Lorenzo’s near-sightedness is a deeper description of his condition than might first be apparent.

History is the process of piecing together what it means to live surrounded by the radical traces of the future, traces which bleed out from the tapestries and tableware and into the life of human beings and nations.  This is the shared project of aesthetic historians and postmodern ones, for all of their differences: both have a careful eye for the way the changing tendrils of culture curl around human beings.  Where they differ is in their interpretation of the relationship: human beings are either the stewards of this garden, or its prisoners.  To understand a period in history is to understand the potential treason or benevolence of its everyday world — a world which broadcasts the reversals of the future at an indistinguishable frequency.  In this way, reading about the past is really the process of becoming aware of this undetectable and possibly sinister pulsation in the present, and knowing that there is no way to know what it is saying. 

Matthew Spellberg ’09 is what you might call a Renaissance duck.