Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (parts 3)

Continuing on from my previous posts on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". Last time I rejected a common theory that the 'Young King' in the painting is Lorenzo the Magnificent. Instead I made the case for all three kings being specific members of the Byzantine court, since at its core, the painting is a celebration of Cosimo Medici's triumphant diversion of the Ecumenical Council of 1439 to Florence. This time, I would like to focus on the members of the Medici family (including Lorenzo) who are to be found elsewhere in the picture...


The Medici Mosaic
At either end on the three groupings of magi entourage, the procession continues across the landscape, winding to and from the hills. One might note that the castle standing at the highest point of the painting, standing in for Jerusalem from which the wise men have come, bears a strong resemblance to the Medici family seat at Cafaggiolo, which Cosimo had redesigned by Michaelozzo in 1452.

On the west wall at the top of the painting, a group of figures is on the point of departing the picture and entering the chapel where the Adoration of the Child can be found. Most people focus on the camels and the larger group of faces closer to the old king, but close study of that vanguard group reveals something strange. There are five women in the group. The only women to be found in the entire work. 

As with the mis-attribution of Lorenzo and Giuliano into the Byzantine delegation, it is common to see people claim that Piero’s three daughters can be seen in the picture (sometimes as pages to Balthazar, sometimes as pages to Caspar) but I don’t believe that is the case. 

The pages have a uniform, almost clone-like look – they seem like idealised representatives rather than portraits and having gone to such trouble to capture the individual facial details of the other Medici, why include Bianca, Nannina and Maria as uniform non-entities and why ignore the other Medici women – for example Piero’s wife and mother? It’s reasonable to expect to find them in the painting but people miss the top corner and the women leading the entire cavalcade. The women are distinguished from one another by their headgear. Three are grouped together and appear to be young - one wears no head-covering so is presumably unmarried, the other has a red cap on her head and a shawl covering a long braid. We might note that Bianca Medici married in 1459, while Nannina was twelve years old at the time and Maria fifteen. One woman leads the group and I would speculate that this could be Countessa Bardi, the wife of Cosimo. A fifth women behind the gaggle of three looks back at the procession and may be Piero’s wife, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. It’s idle speculation but I find the case for this group of identifiable females as more likely Medici matriarchs than cross-dressing pages.

 

The Medici males are far more easily spotted heading the large group of people following the last of the magi. Giovanni de Medici, eldest son of Cosimo, leads the entourage but perhaps at the behest of his younger brother Piero - who was surprising Gozzoli’s endeavours - Giovanni’s position is on foot and seems almost that of a groom, leading the bridle of his master’s horse. And who is on that horse but Piero. Are we looking at a family joke? 

Beside Piero’s magnificent white horse is Cosimo on a donkey -a rather contrived symbol of his humility. The donkey’s bridle is absolutely festooned with the golden balls of the Medici coat of arms. There is no definitive explanation for the balls on the Medici coat of arms but bezants – Byzantine coins - is one theory, copied from the guild of moneychangers. Cosimo was notorious for having so many fingers in so many pies that one contemporary complained that in San Marco ‘he had even emblazoned the monk’s privies with his balls!’ 

Half obscured between Cosimo and Piero rides Cosimo’s bastard son Carlo de Medici. Carlo was the son of a slave girl (Circassian, the legends say). He was forced into the priesthood and had a hobby of collecting medals. Here we might remark on Carlo’s headgear, which is unremarkable except that it is blue and of a different style to the ubiquitous red cap worn by most of the men in the painting. As we shall see, progressing along the entourage, the Greek humanists are easily spotted by their range of hats in varying styles and colours. There seems to be a pattern where foreigners are marked as exotic via their headgear. Perhaps it is reading too much into a detail, but is it coincidental that Piero’s illegitimate half-brother, born of a foreign slave, should also lack the uniform red cap of the Italian gentry around him? 

The most exotic figure of all is standing in the foreground before Cosimo’s horse. His hose are red and white particolour and his tunic is green (again the Medici tricolours), so we might read him as a servant of that hose, but his face is a detailed study of West African features. Trade with that part of the world was underway already at that time. Henry the Navigator had sent his Portuguese explorers down the African coast and by the 1450s Madeira was a sugar growing colony and cruzeiro coins were being minted using gold brought back from trading with the Mali empire. The age of exploration was well underway. The presence of the African member of the Medici household in the painting is probably a symbol of the far reach of their trading empire. 

To the left of the African, two horsemen are set apart from the cavalcade. These are recognisably Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini and Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan – two important guests of Florence during that April of 1459. Malatesta, known as the Wolf of Rimini, was among the best military strategists of his day. His services as a condottiero had been used by the Medici on several occasions during the turbulent Lombardy wars. In 1459 he was at his peak and about to experience a very bad decade – excommunication in 1460, possibly an attempt to sell Italy out to the Turks in 1461, followed by an ignominious campaign for Venice in Greece against Mehmed in 1464 with nothing to show but the recovered bones of Gemistus Plethon, an aborted plot to murder the Pope and then death in 1468).

The youthful Galeazzo Maria Sforza to his left faired a little better, inheriting the duchy of Milan when his brilliant father died in 1466. He was rather less brilliant and incredibly cruel. His short reign of terror over the nobles of Milan reads like Geoffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones and ended in the much the same manner. Murdered on Saint Stephen’s day in a church in 1476, it is thought that successful assassination was the model for the Pazzi conspiracy which killed Giuliano Medici but not Lorenzo two years later. 

The young brothers Giuliano (6yrs) and Lorenzo (10yrs) hover over Sforza’s left shoulder. Close by is their cousin, Cosimino (5yrs) – Giovanni’s only son. A sickly child, Cosimino was dead by year’s end. The younger generation of Medici are accompanied by their tutor, Gentile Becchi and at their backs is the great host of humanists – some Italian but most Byzantines – who enjoyed in one way or another the patronage of the Medici. We might say these are a multitude of wise men from the east who brought to Italy – and Florence in particular – gifts of learning. The next post will explore these faces.