The Sistine Secrets by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner

parties, lectures, and intellectual retreats. The Dominicans in Florence and the Vatican in Rome were scandalized, and now had one more reason to want the whole de’ Medici clan dead.
    Jewish wisdom was even sought out by the great Christian painters and sculptors—in spite of the fact that Jews themselves, following the law of the Torah, did not create that kind of art. In a recent prestigious series on art history, Losapevi dell’arte: Simboli e allegorie-prima parte, it is stated in the Introduction: “The symbolic images of the 15th and 16th Centuries were profoundly influenced not only by ancient Greco-Roman myths, but also by the philosophy of Plato and by the hermetic and esoteric traditions derived from the Jewish Kabbalah.” 2 This thrilling, fermenting brew of cultures and ideas became a confluence of art, science, spiritual philosophy, and liberated creative impulses that changed the world. Four centuries later, in 1860, the great historian Jacob Burckhardt would name this amazing period “The Renaissance.”
    LORENZO “THE MAGNIFICENT”
     
    After Cosimo de’ Medici died, his son Piero the Gouty did very little except host great banquets of rich foods. Fortunately for the family’s future, Piero died only five years after Cosimo—of gout, naturally. He left behind the family’s international network of banks and other businesses, all in a state of disorder. The family also had an array of deadly enemies, such as the ancient and wealthy noble Florentine clans of the Strozzi and the Pazzi, who had already attempted in vain to assassinate Cosimo years before. The weight of all these problems and responsibilities fell on the shoulders of Lorenzo, the older of Piero’s two sons.
    Lorenzo was only about twenty years old at the time and would have much preferred to party and write poetry, but he immediately threw himself into the dual roles of family patriarch and unofficial godfather of Florence. He made sure that his door was always open to the common people, granting favors to all who came in friendship. This was a political and security investment that would pay off in the future. He continued in his grandfather Cosimo’s tradition of surrounding himself with great art and artists. Lorenzo had also recently married Clarice Orsini, from an ancient line of Roman nobility, thus raising the House of Medici several rungs on the social ladder and gaining political, commercial, and even military support from the upper class. The wedding, a sumptuous affair fit for a Roman emperor, reinforced the public perception of the de’ Medicis as the “royal family” of Florence. The attractive, cultured, fashionable, and extremely charismatic young couple surrounded themselves with their modern, vivacious, sophisticated family and their “imperial court” of the best and brightest artists, thinkers, and writers in Europe. They gave Florence the feeling of a new golden age, comparable in many ways to the popular spirit in the United States five centuries later when the Kennedy family brought the feeling of “Camelot” to Washington.
    Two groups in Florence, however, were not happy with the rise of the House of Medici. One was its old rivals, the Pazzi clan. The other was the fanatical Dominican monks who ran the Church of San Marco, only a few steps from the liberal, secular, fun-loving palace of the de’ Medicis right in the center of town. Both groups were destined to cast a dark shadow on the lives of Lorenzo and his circle of family and friends.
    In 1471 Lorenzo went on behalf of his family and Florence to pay tribute to the newly elected pope, none other than Sixtus IV, the founder of the Sistine Chapel. There, in the Apostolic Palace, Lorenzo was inspired not by the religious rituals but by the pope’s outstanding collection of ancient pagan Roman sculpture pieces. The pontiff, seeking to impress the rich young “lord of Florence” even more, gave him two Roman statues, both broken but still incomparably