LORENZO DE' MEDICI, POET AND REPRESENTATIVE

OF THE RENAISSANCE

BY ALBERT E. TROMBLY

The Renaissance in Italy is marked by three distinct features: a renewed interest in the classics, a desire for selfexpression, and an intense physical activity. Their causes need not concern us here; but what I hope to do is to show that these three features found complete embodiment, and a well-nigh perfect expression in a single man; and that man was Lorenzo de' Medici. He was humanist, creative artist, and statesman; and as such, stands without a peer among the great men of his age. And we might well ask where in any age is another such man to be found?

It may prove interesting to compare him with some of his illustrious contemporaries, with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, for example. In Michelangelo we find the great artist and the man of action; but the humanist is completely wanting. In fact, the sculptor of "David" was an illiterate man who knew his native tongue but imperfectly. Leonardo, like Buonarotti, lacks the humanist, though his art and his scientific researches score him. the other two points. The same feature is wanting in Machiavelli, while in Ariosto it is the man of action we fail to find. To be sure, he held political offices and acquitted himself of his duties very creditably; but this was done against grain, and only from a sense of duty. It was the poet in him which dominated, which yearned for seclusion and freedom from the constraint of official duties, and it was only when he got this freedom that the Orlando Furioso was written.

Now, what I am trying to point out is, not that Lorenzo was a greater artist than Leonardo, nor an abler statesman than Machiavelli, but, that as an incarnation of the combined qualities which I spoke of as the essence of the Renaissance, he stands supreme.

It is as poet, I think, that he is greatest; and yet I am convinced that this side of him has never received sufficient attention. What was my surprise, when a professor of history told me recently that he never knew of Lorenzo's having written anything! But it is in literary history that I feel he has not received due consideration, and most of what I shall say now will have to do with Lorenzo the poet. Let me deviate for a moment to consider his activities as humanist and statesman, and having dismissed these, we can then look to the poet.

Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Cosimo de' Medici, who had been patron of learning and letters, Lorenzo welcomed in his household such men as Pulci, Michelangelo, Poliziano, and Ficino, encouraged the study of architecture, founded a Greek academy at Florence, added to the Laurentian and Marcian libraries, which Cosimo had founded, collected antiques, and furthered the study of Plato at the Platonic Academy by taking an active part himself in the debates. His poem in terza rima, called the "Altercazione," sums up Plato's doctrine of happiness as he and Ficino had understood it in one of their discussions. It was at the court of Lorenzo that Pulci's Morgante was written, and some of the cantos are even thought to have been improvised by way of after-dinner entertainment. It was there, too, that the young Michelangelo won his earliest recognition, and without the friendship and assistance of Lorenzo, Poliziano's labors would have been impossible. So much for the humanist.

In political history, Lorenzo will always be remembered as the man who, in a turbulent epoch, managed to give Florence the peace necessary to make her the intellectual center of Italy. He possessed the rare tact and that broad common sense which enabled him to rule with a strong hand without seeming tyrannical. Of a commanding personality, yet easily accessible, he made friends and admirers of his citizens; and what can better testify to their admiration than the epithet which they applied to him of "Il Magnifico"? He shared

in their activities and their pleasures; and this latter has given rise to accusations of his having corrupted them to keep them in submission. Such accusations seem groundless. A state is not ordered nor strengthened by corrupting it, and no one understood this better than did Lorenzo. That he encouraged the carnivals seems to me to speak well for the sanity of the ruler, who preferred having his citizens making merry at home to their intriguing abroad.

Humanist, statesman, poet; such was Lorenzo. And it is because he was great as each, and greater in the combination of them all, in his four-squaredness, if you like, than any of his contemporaries, that I think him the best example and the most complete embodiment of the spirit of what we mean by the Renaissance.

Let us now return to a consideration of Lorenzo's poetry. The amount of it in itself is astounding, especially when we remember that it was the product of the leisure hours of a man so variously occupied. Then, too, it is the work of a comparatively short life, for Lorenzo died at the age of fiftyfour. Yet, it would fill an octavo volume of five hundred pages, and the variety of it is remarkable. Here in brief is a classification of the poems: about 150 sonnets, 8 canzoni, 5 sestine, a ballata, 2 eclogues, 2 capitoli, 14 hymns and sacred pieces, 32 songs for the dance, 11 carnival songs, and various long poems which I can best indicate by giving their titles: "Ambra," "Selve d'Amore,' 'Amore di Marte e Venere," "La Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo." In addition are some twenty-five poems of various types. attributed to Lorenzo.

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In his sonnets, the poet seems to me to have broken away from much of the servile imitation of Petrarch which marked the first half of the 14th century, and to show real spontaneity. In the delightful sonnet beginning, "Vidi madonna sopra un fresco rio," we find a suggestion of Dante's Vita Nuova. At sight of his lady the poet's desire is appeased, and his

love takes the semblance of that of the writers of the "dolce

stil novo."

I saw my lady near a limpid brook,

Among green leaves with charming ladies nigh,
Of such a mien that from my earliest sigh

I saw her ne'er so fair and sweetly look.
Desire then his wonted sway forsook,

Leaving my soul its grief to pacify;

Departing hence I saw my heart stay by;
More fervor too my thought and sorrow took.
Already sloped the sun adown the west,

Leaving the earth all darksome and obscure,
Whence mine own sun escaped to other parts.
How poor!

The first with grief enow me did invest.
How fleeting are the joys of earth!

And yet how slowly memory departs.*

Lorenzo has often employed figures of speech with rare skill, and nowhere more successfully than in the sestette of the following sonnet. It would be difficult even among those of Petrarch to find a sonnet of more delicate beauty than this.

Oft I recall, for ne'er the time can be

When from my memory will glide away

Remembrance of her gown, the hour, and day

When first I gazed upon her fixedly.

And Love, what then she seemed is known to thee,
Who in her company didst ever stay;

How beautiful she was, how sweet and gay

I cannot tell, nor think sufficiently.

When o'er the high and snowy-crested peak
Apollo spreads his glorious golden beam,
So fell about her gown each silky braid

Of neither time nor place I care to speak;

'Tis ever day where such a sun doth gleam,
And paradise where dwells so fair a maid.

Petrarch had described the moods of Nature as corresponding to those of the poet, and here in the next sonnet cited, Lorenzo finds in the varied aspects of wood and mountain the beauty of his beloved.

*Many of the translations used in this essay first appeared in the writer's Springtime of Love and Love's Creed. (Sherman, French & Co., Boston; 1914 and 1915.)

Seek ye who will for pomp and other gains,

In temple, square, and in high-piled mound,
Amid delights and treasures where are found
A thousand grievous thoughts, a thousand pains.
A verdant vale where every flower reigns,

Or brook that bathes the tender grasses round,
Or birds whose murmurings of love resound,
Appeaseth better far whoe'er complains;
As do the wood, the rocks and mountain high,
The darksome caves, the fleet and nimble hind,
The blithe of heart yet ever timid fay.
And I with sweet and ready thought espy

Whate'er of her fair eyes doth me remind;
Yet even that, alas, now fades away.

For a moment the poet's thought has passed from the song of his lady's praise to a reflection on Death. Physical beauty is after all but the tent of a night, and this leads to the conclusion that all earthly things are transient and fleeting.

How all our hopes are futile and in vain,

How fail the plans of which we idly dream,
And how the world in ignorance doth teem,
'Tis Death, the King of all, that maketh plain.
One lives in song and in the joust's domain,

Another doth his life for virtue deem;

One scorns the world and things that worldly seem,
Another hides what in his heart hath lain.

Vain cares and futile thoughts, the diverse fates,
That nature in a varied aspect gives,

Are seen forever on the changing earth.
For all is fleeting here, a moment lives;

How fickle Fortune is, how void of worth!
Alone doth Death abide; he ever waits.

Of Lorenzo's sonnets not one displays a beauty more truly classic in content, and more musical in form than that be ginning, "Lascia l'isola tua tanto diletta." It seems likely that the realm to which the poet here invites the goddess is his own little island of Ambra celebrated in his idyll of the

same name.

Forsake thine isle, thine isle of pleasure rare,
Thy realm forsake all beautiful and still,
Cyprian Goddess; come beside the rill
That bathes the green and tender grasses there.
Come to the shady nook and cooling air,

That doth a murm'ring in the brook instill,
To music of the bird's enamored thrill.