Note 187 — LORENZO DI PIERO DE’ MEDICI

Born in Florence of poor parents named della Badessa, Matteo, as was often done in the fifteenth century, adopted his father’s Christian name and became Matteo Franco. As a lad he entered the church, and some of his first efforts in poetry are sonnets addressed to the Archbishop of Florence begging in the name of S. Peter for a cloak. He made friends with Angelo Poliziano who probably introduced him to the Medici. Witty, clever, kind-hearted, Matteo soon became indispensable to Lorenzo, who speaks of him as “among the first and best-loved creatures of my house.” He repaid Lorenzo’s affection tenfold by his devotion to his daughter Maddalena, whom he accompanied to Rome when she married Francesco Cibo. Even Lorenzo’s wife Clarice, always ill at ease among her husband’s brilliant friends and at first suspicious of Matteo’s tongue, soon discovered his many excellent qualities, and he became her treasurer, her almoner, and at length her attorney. He taught all Lorenzo’s children to read, and in one of his sonnets feelingly describes the trouble they gave him. Until lately it was supposed that Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco were really friends, and only wrote the ferocious and biting sonnets which amused all Florence to each other to amuse Lorenzo, but Signor Volpi proves, I think, that their animosity was real and that Matteo often had the best in the war of words.