Venice in the 15th century remained, despite all, an immensely strong power, able to preserve its republican constitution unimpaired. In both these matters, it contrasted with Florence under the Medici. The foundation of the family’s fortune was laid by Giovanni di Bicci (1360–1429), who founded the Medici bank and in 1422 was appointed as banker to the papacy. His son Cosimo, who dominated the reggimento (principal patrician families) from 1434, united his vast financial resources with a keen intelligence. His natural simplicity of manner and plethora of folksy sayings were well designed to avoid offending (as far as possible) republicans. In a city proud of its traditions of “freedom,” he maintained his claim to be a private citizen, refused all titles of lordship, and held the powerful office of “standard-bearer of justice” for only three two-month periods.

Cosimo gained adherents by giving gifts and loans to all orders in society as well as to churches, confraternities, and religious orders and also by granting patronage to writers and artists. He granted commissions to the sculptor Donatello and the architects Michelozzo (Medici Palace) and Filippo Brunelleschi (the choir and nave of San Lorenzo) and constructed villas in the countryside at Careggi and Cafaggiolo. Founder of a great library, he subsidized the scholarship of the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini, and the collector of antiquities Cyriacus of Ancona. In politics he moved with moderation, gradually and sporadically. In no way could his rule be considered an exercise of despotic power. Cosimo always had to secure the support of a majority among the reggimento, who saw themselves as his allies in retaining their economic and social predominance in the state. By and large the Medici regime was acceptable to the patrician class because it stabilized the conflicts within it that had broken the unity of Florence before 1434.

Certainly, Cosimo’s influence was sufficient to allow his son, Piero, to take over this informal rule at his death in 1464. More remarkably, on the death of Piero in 1469, it passed to his son Lorenzo, then only 20 years old. Lorenzo later earned fame as “the Magnificent” (a title given to anyone of prominence at the time), partly as a tribute to the charm of his personality, partly by a careful projection of his own image, and partly through the perceptions of Florentines of a later generation who, looking back through the dark years that followed his death, tended to think of his era as a golden age. Yet in some respects that appellation is exaggerated. In foreign politics Lorenzo made a disastrous error in the 1470s when he attempted to prevent Pope Sixtus IV from establishing a power base in the Romagna. This led to the Medici bank’s loss of the papal account and a conspiracy between members of the pope’s family and the Florentine Pazzi family to overthrow Medici rule. In April 1478 the Pazzi assassinated Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano but failed to kill Lorenzo, and the insurgents, denied support by the citizens, were captured and executed. Yet the “War of the Pazzi” (1478–80) that followed, with Florence pitted against a papacy allied to Naples, proved dangerous and expensive, and Lorenzo emerged from it only with great difficulty.

Thereafter Lorenzo pursued a more cautious and successful path in foreign affairs. On the death of Sixtus in 1484, he made a friend of the successor, Innocent VIII, and through this intimacy Lorenzo acquired a cardinalship for his son Giovanni. (And it was Giovanni, as Pope Leo X, who was to ensure the triumph of the Medici throughout Tuscany in the 16th century.) But the claims made for Lorenzo as “the peacemaker” of Italy, even as a “constructor of a balance of power,” have no substance—except insofar as he, as ruler of a militarily weak state in his last years, inevitably took part in a balance of weak states from which only Venice stood out. In addition, Lorenzo—a man of genuine intellectual and aesthetic interests, who had been educated as a humanist rather than as a merchant—can be criticized as a businessman. Even acknowledging that the Medici bank had to meet political as well as strictly economic ends, with loans to political allies who might be poor risks financially, it remains true that it was inadequately supervised and, for this reason, close to failure by 1492.

In the subject territories of the contado, Lorenzo was able to suppress any rebellion. An attempt by Arezzo to free itself from Florentine commercial exploitation in 1471 led to the sack of the town by mercenary troops in Florentine pay (though whether or not this was at Lorenzo’s express will is uncertain). In Florence itself during his predominance, the patriciate pursued a more aristocratic lifestyle, expressed among other ways by a revival of jousting and lavish expenditure on clothes, palaces, and the arts—all of which were at odds with older traditions of republicanism. Yet, in public patronage of the arts, Lorenzo—perhaps because he had less money, perhaps because the family’s houses were already filled with works of art—did less than his father. Lorenzo preferred small, private pieces, as found in his collection of antique cameos, medals, and gems and in the pastiche-antique model statuettes produced for him by Bertoldo di Giovanni. He also had a creative interest in architecture. Lorenzo read Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (promulgated 1452, published 1485; Ten Books on Architecture), wrote to the duke of Urbino asking to see the plans of his new palace, and entered his own design in the competition for a new facade of the Florence cathedral. Only his death (in April 1492) at the age of 43 saved the judges from what might have been a particularly difficult decision.