Magnifico by Miles J. Unger

continued to add after his father’s death. Gone is Piero’s private study, whose walls were covered floor to ceiling in elaborate patterns of inlaid wood and whose collection of objets d’art so impressed visitors, including the architect Filarete, who has left us a vivid description of the master at his ease:
    He has himself carried into a studio…. When he arrives, he looks at his books. They seem like nothing but solid pieces of gold…. Sometimes he reads one or the other or has them read. He has so many different kinds that not one day but more than a month would be required to see and understand their dignity…. He has effigies and portraits of all the emperors and noble men who have ever lived made in gold, silver, bronze, jewels, marble, or other materials…. Another day he looks at his jewels and precious stones. He has a marvelous quantity of them of great value and cut in different ways. He takes pleasure and delight in looking at them and in talking about the virtue and value of those he has. Another day [he looks] at vases of gold, silver, and other materials made nobly and at great expense and brought from different places. He delights greatly in these, praising their dignity and the mastery of their fabricators. Then another day [he looks at] other noble things that have come from different parts of the world, various strange arms for offense and defense.
    It is impossible to overestimate the impact such an environment had on the formation of Lorenzo’s tastes and his character. Even among Florentines, accustomed to being surrounded by works of art and architecture of the highest quality, his circumstances were unique. The immense Medici fortune was harnessed to acquire work from the greatest artists and artisans of Europe; from their branches in northern Europe employees were told to be on the lookout for the finest tapestries and the latest works in oil by masters like Jan van Eyck; * agents in Rome and southern Italy sought out antiquities, and scholars on the Medici payroll rummaged through the monastic libraries of Europe seeking lost works by the ancients. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who as son of the duke of Milan was a youth not easily impressed, was awed by the Medici’s fabled treasures. “[T]he aforesaid count,” noted his chief counselor,
    together with the company, went on a tour of this palace, and especially of its noblest parts, such as some studies, little chapels, living rooms, bedchambers and gardens, all of which are constructed with admirable skill, embellished on every side with gold and fine marbles, with carvings and sculptures in relief, with pictures and inlays done in perspective by the most accomplished and perfect of masters, down to the benches and all the floors of the house; tapestries and household ornaments of gold and silk; silverware and bookcases that are endless and innumerable; then the vaults or rather ceilings of the chambers and salons, which are for the most part done in fine gold with diverse and various forms; then a garden all created of the most beautiful polished marbles with various plants, which seems a thing not natural but painted.
    Sforza’s visit highlights an important function of the palace: it was an essential tool of Medici statecraft. As private citizens, Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo possessed none of the titles needed to impress those with whom they negotiated on behalf of the republic. But by building this grand residence and furnishing it with famous works of ancient and modern art they showed that they belonged in the company of the greatest feudal lords. * So successful was this strategy that close acquaintance with the Medici lifestyle could foster a not altogether unintended sense of cultural inferiority. On a later visit Galeazzo Maria Sforza admitted its collections far outshone his own, and when his brother, Lodovico, lured Leonardo da Vinci away from Florence it was partly in an attempt to redress the cultural deficit.
    Ordinary