Lorenzo de' Medici Simulacrum

The Life

Lorenzo de' Medici was born in Florence in 1449, grandson of Cosimo il Vecchio, who had founded the family's political ascendancy. He became, at twenty, the effective ruler of the Florentine Republic — a ruler without office, operating through patronage, marriage, banking, and an instinct for the flexible use of power. His rule was marked by the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, in which his brother Giuliano was murdered in the cathedral and Lorenzo himself barely escaped, and by the long, difficult management of Florentine affairs in the turbulent politics of late-fifteenth-century Italy. He died in 1492, aged forty-three, two years before the French invasion that would end the Medici's first period of rule.

The Thought

Lorenzo was not a professional philosopher, and to call him one would be a distortion. He was, however, a poet of genuine accomplishment — his *Canti carnascialeschi*, *Selve*, and lyric verse belong to the front rank of Italian fifteenth-century poetry — and a patron and interlocutor of philosophers whose work he shaped by the setting in which he placed them. The Platonic Academy at Careggi was in important senses his: he inherited his grandfather's commitment to it, he commissioned Ficino's Plotinus translation, and he made his villa and his table the place where philosophy, poetry, and politics met.

His own poetry is marked by a sophisticated lay Platonism — a sense of love, beauty, and time as philosophical problems — and by the wry humour and melancholy of a man fully aware of power's costs. The two registers meet in his famous *Canzona di Bacco*: *quant'è bella giovinezza, / che si fugge tuttavia!* ("How beautiful is youth, / which nevertheless flees!") — the Platonic meditation on transience wrapped in the vernacular of a carnival song.

The Legacy

Without Lorenzo, the Florentine intellectual culture of the 1470s and 1480s would not have existed in the form it did. Ficino, Poliziano, and Pico lived in its orbit and drew from it both practical support and intellectual friction. He was the patron of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, the young Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. The Florentine Renaissance in the form in which it is canonically remembered — the convergence of Platonism, poetry, and visual art under a sophisticated political patronage — is substantially his creation, and his death in 1492 is a plausible date for the beginning of its end.