Machiavelli soon developed a preference for order over anarchy, however it was achieved. The republic of Florence, on the other hand, often seemed to its exasperated servant to specialize in half-measures, harsh and, worse, unpredictable enough to enrage subjects and allies, but not harsh enough to keep them in line. In an era of constant war and failed states, the Borgia territories were spared the random killings, rapes and pillage that racked so many other Italian regions. “This Lord is of such splendid and magnificent bearing…he never rests, nor does he know weariness or fear.”īorgia conquered and ruled cruelly, but effectively. When, as an envoy from the republic, Machiavelli met the great man in 1502, his admiration for Borgia came through in his dispatches home. As a senior civil servant for the Florentine republic between 14, he went on high-level diplomatic missions, oversaw the city’s militia, and watched with fascination the rise and fall of empire-building Cesare Borgia.
He only partially succeeds-Niccolò Machiavelli did possess the intellectual’s fatal attraction to men of action-but the attempt still offers an intriguing portrait of a man marked more by his fervent love for his artistically dazzling city-state than by his political cynicism.īorn in 1469, Machiavelli learned by doing. That’s a reputation Unger sets out to demolish in his lively recap of the Florentine thinker and his tumultuous times. Mostly the former, of course: as an adjective, “Machiavellian” is always a pejorative. But he quickly caught the eye of a hard-partying Borgia pope, Alexander VI, and from there it was mostly uphill, pope to pope, commission to commission.The man whose 1513 work The Prince stands as the foundational document of Western political science has ever since been excoriated for his worship of raw power or praised for his grasp of realpolitik. It was a cardinal who, impressed by the young man’s knack for counterfeiting ancient art, first summoned him to Rome to carve a sensuous statue of Bacchus, god of wine. There the young artist rubbed elbows with future princes and popes, several of whom were to become his most important customers. Renaissance Florence was a city of enlightened and wealthy patrons, none more so than Lorenzo de Medici, Il Magnifico, who spotted and rewarded young talent with a place at his table. He picked the right time, or the right times picked him. And so, put out as an infant to wet-nurse in a village of stonecutters, he set out to raise the art of cutting stone to the level of literature, philosophy and the other liberal arts. He was, in fact, from a proud but impoverished line of Florentine aristocrats for whom working with one’s hands was the ultimate disgrace. “I was never a painter or a sculptor like one who keeps a shop,” he haughtily informed a nephew, one of a numerous family of layabouts and hangers-on who had come to depend on the artist’s earnings.
0 kommentar(er)
