Cosimo de' Medici

Cosimo de' Medici, Pater Patriae

He was not learned, but he had an alert mind and an admirable judgment, together with a real appreciation of beauty. He was quick to recognize merit; poets, philosophers, artists were his natural friends but critics, copyists, teachers, translators, were all recognized and rewarded by him.

But of all the arts, architecture seems to have appealed to Cosimo de' Medici the most, and it was to buildings that he looked for immortality, giving as his reason that he knew the nature of the people, and that in fifty years nothing would remain of him or of his house except the few buildings that he had erected. Among these we may name the Medici (now Medici Riccardi) Palace, San Lorenzo, the Badia at Fiesole, and his villas at Careggi and Cafaggiuolo.

But Cosimo’s greatest gift to Florence was undoubtedly the Convent of San Marco built for the Dominicans, of which Vasari says that "it is the best conceived and the most beautiful and most convenient of any in Italy." Michelozzo was the architect, and the cost was 36000 florins. Cosimo  endowed it with a magnificent library; he also laid out the garden, causing it to be admirably stocked; for horticulture and farming were among his hobbies.

Cosimo de' Medici loved San Marco; he kept a cell there for himself to which he often retired, spending much time in conversation with the Archbishop, Antoninus, and with the painter, Fra Angelico, who was then adorning the Convent with his spiritual masterpieces. Unlike his illustrious grandson, Cosimo de' Medici had no taste for pleasure and amusements, and no appreciation of a jest, although a number of cynical sayings of his that have been preserved to us give evidence that he had a certain caustic wit. Ordinarily he was grave and silent, diligent, and, in his latter years, immensely occupied with religion. Cosimo was no less at home with men of letters than with artists and his second gift to Florence—the Platonic Academy—might almost be said to rival the first in its far-reaching effects.

The origin of this famous foundation is to be found in the visit of Gemistos Plethon to Florence in 1439, when he was over eighty years of age, but full of vigor and enthusiasm. He was the most learned of the Greeks, and his writing was so that it was impossible to distinguish it from that of the best classical time. He was steeped in eastern mysticism, and really knew more of Zoroaster and Pythagoras than of Plato, for whom he had the most profound reverence. He despised western scholasticism, and regarded the Latins as barbarians. Florentines were reading both Aristotle and Plato, but with little discernment; the difficulties of the language prevented this, and far from studying the philosophy, they would only discuss points of grammar.

Fra Angelico - Annunciation, 1449 Fresco, San Marco, Florence

Gemistos inaugurated the dispute between the rival systems of Plato and Aristotle, and, at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, wrote a treatise on the subject, emphasizing the superiority of the former. The discussion which arose from this roused a perfect storm of contention and invective, which Bessarion, the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, eventually succeeded in calming down, leaving Plato victor in the fray. Gemistos, who was occupied with the idea of founding a mystic religion of his own, did not wait for the termination of the controversy, but returned to Mistra, where he gathered a small band of disciples and established his religion with its own liturgy; he died in extreme old age. His name was always revered in Italy, and in 1465, when Sigismundo Malatesta captured Mistra, he brought back the ashes of Gemistos to Rimini to be placed in a sarcophagus outside the church of San Francesco, which Alberti had just built. But the importance of Gemistos to the Florentines lay in the fact that he turned their minds to a branch of study hitherto neglected by them, and that he inspired Cosimo de' Medici with such zeal for philosophy as it resulted in the foundation of the Platonic Academy. Religion, art and literature, all took on a peculiar color from the Neo-Platonic ideas thus disseminated, and their influence has made itself felt through all succeeding centuries.

With that eye for the right man which always distinguished him, Cosimo de' Medici singled out Marsilio Ficino, the son of a physician and himself a doctor, as the future president of his foundation, telling the father that his son was born to minister to minds, not bodies. Ficino therefore devoted himself to the study of Platonic ideas, began to make a translation of Plato into Latin, and subsequently translated Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry. The activities of the Academy belong rather to the days of Lorenzo de' Medici than to those of his grandfather, though Cosimo was consoled on his death bed by listening to Ficino’s rendering of Plato’s Philebus.

Cosimo de' Medici, Pater Patriae (to give him the noble title which his fellow citizens unanimously bestowed upon him), lies beneath a plain slab of marble before the high altar of San Lorenzo, thus preserving in death the simplicity he had loved in life.