Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence

Dale Kent

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780674249219
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

The question of whether true friendship could exist in an era of patronage occupied Renaissance Florentines as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern notions of disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, in this book Dale Kent explores the meaning of love and friendship as they were represented in the fifteenth century, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.She documents the elements of shared experience in friendships between Florentines of various occupations and ranks, observing how these were shaped and played out in the physical spaces of the city: the streets, street corners, outdoor benches and loggias, family palaces, churches, confraternal meeting places, workshops of artisans and artists, taverns, dinner tables, and the baptismal font.Finally, Kent examines the betrayal of trust, focusing on friends at moments of crisis or trial in which friendships were tested, and failed or endured. The exile of Cosimo de' Medici in 1433 and his recall in 1434, the attempt in 1466 of the Medici family's closest friends to take over their patronage network, and the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici in 1478 expose the complexity and ambivalence of Florentine friendship, a combination of patronage with mutual intellectual passion and love—erotic, platonic, and Christian—sublimely expressed in the poetry and art of Michelangelo.

ONE

What Did Friendship Mean?

ON October 22, 1441, a competition for the best popular poem on the subject of friendship, organized by the brilliant humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti, and sponsored by Piero de’ Medici, elder son of Florence’s leading citizen and patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, was held in the cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore (Figure 1.1). Events of major significance to Florentines, civic as well as religious, were accommodated within its enormous space, under Filippo Brunelleschi’s newly completed cupola, which to Alberti (Figure 1.2) seemed “vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow.” Men “of every rank,” described as “the whole of the city of Florence,” gathered to listen to the recital of eight lengthy entries describing friendship (amicizia) in a contest called the “certame coronario” in imitation of similar competitions held in ancient Rome.¹

Almost all the participants took as their point of departure the classical debate on friendship, most memorably and accessibly presented by the Roman republican statesman and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero. In his De Amicitia, Cicero argued that while the term “friendship” commonly referred to relations involving three main elements or motives—profit, pleasure and virtue—only the love of virtuous men indifferent to gain could be considered true or ideal friendship, and this relation was rare.² At the certame coronario, the learned cleric Leonardo Dati considered that proposition and observed that men of every Florentine estate and rank were disabled in some way from forging true friendships: patricians by envy and calumny, the fortunate rich by ambition and indulgence, merchants by avarice and suspicion, the vulgar by ignorance, and scholars by poverty and hypocrisy.³

Anselmo Calderoni, herald and entertainer to the Signoria, the city’s governing magistracy, appealed to Cicero’s authority in stressing the importance of the underlying motive for making friends. Honor and profit are benefits that flow naturally from the association of the virtuous, but friendship should be contracted in pure love.

I begin with Tulio ...he would say that friendship exists only

when with the purest good faith

one loves another with profit and honor

1.1. Cathedral of Florence (Santa Maria del Fiore).

1.2. Leon Battista Alberti, Self-portrait, bronze plaque.

and one is like the other, without vice,

never separated in joy or in sorrow; this is his gist.

So he says that a friend who appears to contract

a friendship solely for his own ends (per trarre alle sue gueffe),

is a travesty of a friend (questo è amico da beffe).⁴

The discussion based on the classical Ciceronian definition of friendship tended to dead end in the conclusion that true friendship was almost impossible to achieve. Renaissance Florentines, however, had a way out of the impasse unavailable to the men of antiquity. There was one ideal friend, and He was God, or his son, Jesus Christ. Mariotto Davanzati, a distinguished patrician poet, declared His mercy to be the true function of amicizia:

A friend helps us...by bearing the punishment for our faults

as the Majesty serene created Love

and the angels, and arranged for man

to make Mary full of grace,

for our sins: . . . and to expiate such crimes

put his Son on the cross as our friend.⁵

In keeping with his plebeian origins and his profession as an entertainer, the herald Calderoni had begun his recitation with a self-deprecating joke: “I know that among the dates, the fig must be my fruit.” But he continued in high seriousness:

I say that we are made of flesh and bone and frail, turning like the leaves

as the whim strikes us,

sometimes for desire and sometimes for disdain,

and anger deprives us of the capacity for virtue,

and turns us to vice, more’s the pity,

and strips friendship bare,

and creates hatred unworthy of heaven.

Of all friends, he said:

the truest I would say, without a doubt,

is Almighty God,

who is truly loving to all his friends

...I conclude in effect

that the friendship of God is perfect,

and never false; and yes, all else is partisanship (ogn’altra [è] setta).⁶

The nature of friendship had long been a favorite subject for reflection in the private diaries and chapbooks (zibaldoni) particular to the Florentine tradition of record keeping. These had evolved from commercial account books and records of political office holding to include familial histories and literary texts, serving as compilations of experience and wisdom for the benefit of descendants. The certame coronario brought friendship to the very forefront of Florentines’ attention. Alberti boasted that “already within ten days more than ten times twenty copies of the entire contest were transcribed, and flew around Italy to all the princes, and were requested by all educated men, praised by all worthy ones.”⁷

Compilers of zibaldoni, intended for the owner’s “pleasure and profit” (diletto et utilitade), or dedicated to “all my friends,” prefaced the poems with eyewitness accounts of the contest. Several suggested that the recitations begun in the cathedral on October 22 continued for a second day and that verses were performed elsewhere that week. Certainly, the corpus of poems associated with the contest is much larger than the number of those actually recited, and over the following decades a steady stream of poets aired their reflections on the subject of friendship.⁸

The contributions to the certame coronario of 1441 dramatize an essential enterprise of early Renaissance Florentines: to integrate and reconcile classical writings with Christian wisdom and to apply the insights of both cultural traditions to real issues arising in the daily life of their city. By the early fifteenth century, ancient Roman writings—Quintilian’s handbook on the orator’s education (Institutiones oratoriae) and Cicero’s Orator and On Oratory—were added to vernacular proverbs and clerical injunctions as authorities on social behavior, including friendship. Many zibaldoni contained aphorisms and summaries of the arguments of these authors, and quite a few Florentines owned complete copies of Cicero’s writings. Of three dozen volumes in the library of the statesman Dietisalvi Neroni, whose defection from the ranks of Medici friends will be discussed in Chapter 3, nine were works of Cicero, including a copy of De Amicitia, which he lent to his brother Giovanni.⁹

Leon Battista Alberti was the illegitimate son of an old and distinguished family exiled from Florence in 1401 for its opposition to the prevailing political regime. After a humanist education and studies in law at the University of Bologna, he spent the early years of his professional life working for the bureaucracy attached to the papal court. In 1428 the Florentine government lifted the ban of exile against the Alberti, and in the mid-1430s, Leon Battista moved with Pope Eugenius IV to Florence. Alberti’s own contribution to the certame coronario was a short and mordant verse suggesting that amicizia dwelt in heaven and seldom descended to earth for fear of the envy that was her evil enemy. Envy was also a major theme of the recorded obiter dicta of Cosimo de’ Medici; in 1433 he too was exiled by his political opponents but repatriated only a year later when his fellow Florentines acknowledged that his enormous wealth and decisive leadership were indispensable to the city’s welfare.¹⁰

In the fourth book of his treatise Della Famiglia (On the Family), written in 1434 and entitled “On Friendship,” Alberti offered a critical reassessment of Cicero’s characterization of friendship in the light of his own experience. Although much of what he said accorded with popular wisdom expressed in the ricordi or diaries of merchants like Giovanni Morelli and Paolo di Messer Pace da Certaldo, Alberti’s view of friendship also reflects his personal experience, which had been particularly harsh.¹¹ Clearly, he felt estranged from his native land, abandoned by his family, and unsuccessful in obtaining aid from expected allies at the courts he had served. After his return to Florence, Alberti turned increasingly to friends of choice from humanist and artistic circles. These included the group of groundbreaking artists whose achievements he praised in dedicating his treatise On Painting to the architect Brunelleschi, singling out “our great friend the sculptor Donatello . . . and the others,” the sculptors Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia, and the painter Masaccio.¹²

In his description of friendship, Alberti emphasized the tension between learning and experience and between virtue, pleasure, and utility as bases for friendship. He presented friendship as a defensive strategy for survival in a world “so full of diverse talents, differences of opinion, such uncertainty of desire, perversity of customs, ambiguity, variety and obscurity of judgments, with such an abundance of fraudulent, false, perfidious, bold, audacious and rapacious men . . . [that] one has to be far-seeing, alert, and cautious in the face of fraud, traps and betrayals . . . one must oppose these with constancy, moderation, and inner strength. I would want to be expert in these matters any man with whom I hoped to forge a friendship and profit from it.” This passage represents a beleaguered vision, and a not uncommon one, of friendship in the world of Cosimo de’ Medici and his friends—and enemies.¹³

In the wake of Petrarch’s intense personal admiration in the 1340s and 1350s for the Roman republican statesman and orator, Cicero became the classical hero of the early Florentine Renaissance. Aristotle was scarcely mentioned at the certame coronario, although his Politics were well known and his Ethics had been available to Florentines since 1416 in a translation by Leonardo Bruni, the city’s humanist chancellor and leading publicist of Florentine republicanism. In fact, Aristotle’s view that the perfect friendship is between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue, but that relationships based on pleasure and utility—however contingent and transient, however unequal the status of the parties and the benefits offered and received—are nevertheless friendships, accords much more closely with Florentine reality than Cicero’s idealized demands of this relationship (Figure 1.3).¹⁴

Aristotle’s view of the civic uses of friendship, popularized by Dante and his contemporaries at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, had been an essential foundation of the ethos of the early commune, which drew heavily on the example of the Greek polis as the ideal political unit, emphasizing cooperation for the common good, which was also “the good of the commune.”¹⁵ Dante remained high on the list of fifteenth-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. What Did Friendship Mean?
• 2. Where Did Friends Meet?
• 3. Could Friends Be Trusted?
• Dramatis Personae
• Notes
• Index