The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici Read Online Free PDF Page B

or painted in his honour. He had received his early education at the school of the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he had begun to learn German and French as well as Latin and a smattering of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. 8 Later, together with the young sons of other rich Florentine families, he had attended the lectures and lessons of Roberto de’ Rossi, one of the leading scholars of the day and himself a member of an old and wealthy Florentine family. Under Roberto de’ Rossi’s enlightened guidance, and thereafter in discussion groups at the Santa Maria degli Angeli monastery which he continued to attend in his middle age, Cosimo acquired and developed that deep respect for classical learning and classical ideals, combined with an interest in man’s life on earth which was to remain with him for ever. He became, in fact, a humanist.
    He was not as learned as many other humanists in his circle, though Pope Pius II, who had a very low opinion of Florentines in general, condemning them as ‘traders, a sordid populace who can be persuaded to nothing noble’, allowed that Cosimo was a highly cultured, clever and knowledgeable man, ‘more lettered than merchants are wont to be’. Certainly there were few Florentine humanists with a wider knowledge of classical manuscripts which he began to collect at an early age, and there were scarcely any who were more intensely concerned with the importance of humanistic ideals in the conduct of public life. Although he himself never became a master of those arts and disciplines, such as rhetoric, which the humanist was taught to practise, he never questioned the right of those who did master them to occupy the most honoured positions in Florentine society. Most of them, after all, came from the same sort of background as himself. But in one important respect Cosimo was different, as his father had always urged him to be, from most of the humanists of Florence: he seemed anxious to remain, as far as possible, out of the public eye.
    He was rarely to be seen walking the streets of the city, never with more than one servant in attendance, and always quietly dressed, scrupulous in giving the wall to older citizens and ‘showing the utmost deference to the magistrates’. He left it to the scions of other rich families to play the parts of paladins: at a big tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce in 1428, 9 when Lorenzo, son of the great Palla Strozzi, 10 won the victor’s laurels, Cosimo was not even mentioned as having been present, nor was any other member of his family. When people came to him for help or to ask his advice about some business matter, he would listen to them carefully and quietly and then tell them what he thought in a few, short words, almost brusquely, as though unwilling to commit himself to friendship. Ordinary people liked him, though, and trusted him; and, even in later years, when age had withered his sallow features giving them a sardonic twist, when his curt and often ambiguous observations assumed an increasingly sarcastic and derisive note, there was something in his manner that commanded affection rather than awe.
    He was still in his early twenties when he married Contessina de’ Bardi, eldest daughter of Giovanni de’ Bardi, one of his father’spartners in the Rome branch of their bank. The Bardi were an old Florentine family and had once been immensely rich; but, like the Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli families, they had lent far more than was ever repaid to various rulers, including King Edward III of England and Robert, the Angevin King of Naples, so that they had consequently fallen on hard times. The dowry which Contessina was able to bring to her husband was therefore not a large one, although it included the Palazzo Bardi, the family palace in the Via de’ Bardi, a street whose houses had once all belonged to her family. 11 She and Cosimo moved into the palace, whose rooms were soon unobtrusively decorated with the Medici