Lorenzo il Magnifico: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance.

Melissa Bullard's contribution to the flood of publications on Lorenzo de' Medici, occasioned by the celebrations in 1992 of the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, stands out for its coherence and originality. While new and valuable specialized research has appeared in the many exhibition catalogues and conference proceedings produced for the occasion, it has been surprising how few scholars have sought to grasp Lorenzo whole, or to reexamine him and his life in the light of all the recent research on quattrocento Florence and Italy. Rather, old biographies have been republished, well-worn ideas recycled. Although all of the essays collected here have by now been published separately and treat of a number of different themes, read together they add up to a stimulating and almost always fresh reinterpretation of Lorenzo and his character and career. The essays find their principal source in the Laurentian correspondence for the years 1486-88, the period for which Bullard is responsible as one of the distinguished editors of Lorenzo's epistolario, and the striking and intriguing passages from the letters cited make one eager to see them in print.

A major contribution, already acknowledged in the literature, is Bullard's recognition that Lorenzo is almost inseparable from his myth, in the creation of which he self-consciously played a key role, making a "reasoned use of a politics of personality" (78). Image-conscious in the extreme because he grasped his city's diplomatic and military vulnerability in the Neapolitan and Milanese-dominated power politics of fifteenth-century Italy, Lorenzo's construction and encouragement of his myth may be understood as "shrewd compensation for weakness" (x), a response to the "heightened anxiety" (106) which, in the writer's view, possessed contemporary Italian statesmen. One does not necessarily need to accept Bullard's interesting suggestion that "too much [diplomatic] scrutiny and too much reporting could be inflammatory" (95) - thus contributing to the disorders of the day; but one can agree with her and the other editors of Lorenzo's letters that peninsular politics were less pacific and more angst-ridden than we have been taught, and that Lorenzo's informal presence in Florence depended in part upon his skillfully bolstering his city's comparatively weak external position. That said, I am not sure that Bullard has demonstrated that Italian politics in the 1480s were becoming more dominated by a "psychology of anxiety" (67) and distrust in which ambassadors became "increasingly conscious of the disparity between words and meaning" (71). (In some instances she cites, arte could mean "skill" or "ingenuity" as well as her preferred interpretation, trickery or artifice.) This may well have been the case, but only a thorough comparative study of earlier decades and of other diplomatic letter-collections would clinch an important suggestion.

Lorenzo certainly was, however, on edge and given to swings of mood, and it is good (and encouraging to any would-be biographer) to see Bullard dissect his character with the aid of her new information and novel ideas. Her knowledge of Renaissance Rome and of Italian banking enables her convincingly to portray Lorenzo as an active banker, who, at least by the 1480s, exercised closer supervision over his subordinates than has been argued; one who shrewdly positioned himself, by the strategic dynastic marriage of his daughter Maddalena to Pope Innocent VIII's illegitimate son, to exploit papal patronage and revenues. This emphasis on the significance of the 1487 marriage seems justified and helps make sense of other themes in Lorenzo's life, such as how and why he was able to concentrate so fiercely on his building projects in the late 1480s. There are also telling implications for the subject of Lorenzo's patronage of the arts in Bullard's treatment of his personal finances (e.g. 175-76). Interestingly enough, however, Bullard firmly subscribes to the received view that despite the famous myth of his magnificence, Lorenzo commissioned few works of contemporary art, preferring artistic diplomacy and the collecting of antiquities. In doing so - and despite some passing references to the early revisionist research of Caroline Elam - she overlooks recent work on Lorenzo's art patronage by such scholars as Elam herself, Philip Foster, Linda Pellecchia, James Draper and others. In the light of such research, it will hardly do to say of the patron of Poggio a Caiano and Giuliano da San Gallo that his "love of antiquity was mainly as a collector of rarities, and he seems not to have connected his uses of patronage with any ancient practices" (51), or to write as if the issue of Lorenzo's sculpture-garden is a cut-and-dried one.

The present writer, as interested in the subject of patronage as clientelismo as mecenatismo, would also contend that chapter 4, as bold and thought-provoking as it may be, still offers an idiosyncratic reading of the implications of the relevant literature for our understanding of Lorenzo's position in Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici was many things, and relied much upon his bottega of collaborators, as Bullard points out; but he was hardly a "committee" (127). This is not, however, the place to pursue the point. What matters is that Melissa Bullard has offered us fine essays which help immeasurably with the communal task of discovering who Lorenzo was, give or take a myth or two.

F.W. KENT Monash University