The Medici Season Three: Lorenzo the Magnificent and Morality

 

Lorenzo the Magnificent

The Reluctant Wife and I watched the first two seasons of the Netflix Medici series out of curiosity after discovering Florence last year when we visited the Reluctant Daughter as she spent a semester abroad (something that, in the days of COVID-19 seems a very long time ago, and related to a world very far away, indeed).  While there we discovered, much to my surprise, the dawning of the renaissance.  This intimate, walled city was home to a myriad of figures who moved us from the middle ages to the age of reason – Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci at the head of the parade in the arts, but Da Vinci joining Copernicus in Science and Machiavelli in Political Science.  But as we wandered the streets of this town, the force that had clearly held these minds in place was plastered above the door of every prominent church and building in town – it was the crest of the Medici – the powerful family that was the political leader of this place symbolized by both Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s sculpture of David – the small powerful kid with a sling who downed the giant (nearby Rome) to rule the world.

Michelangelo's David

 So we watched the Netflix series first two seasons and were mildly disappointed.  The drama that we expected seemed to be mostly wasted, especially in the second season, on the intrigue of marriages and family alliances within a small town – one that had not yet hit the big time, but contained all of the drama of a daytime soap opera.  We learned a great deal (especially as we fact checked) about the origins of the Medici dynasty, but we didn’t get the sweep of history that we were really hungry for.  So we were pleasantly surprised when the third season dropped and ours hopes for a history of the place and the renaissance itself were realized.  Lorenzo the Magnificent (Daniel Sharman) was, indeed, magnificent – and, at least in this tale which I am certain has been varnished, also quite maleficent.  He is both a figure of great good and great evil.

So I was surprised, when I was teaching a class this week on the very modern term of self-esteem, to find Lorenzo coming to mind.  It seemed almost an insult to his greatness – a reduction to the arc of his tremendous life – to use a term as simple and prosaic – and so modern – as self-esteem to understand the psychology of this great and terrible man, but there it was.

Self-esteem catapulted to the top of the things that parents should care about supporting for their children in the last half of the twentieth century.  As Nancy McWilliams points out in her book “Case Formulation”, this is related to many factors, including our becoming, especially for the upper middle class, an increasingly mobile society, both in terms of moving to get jobs, but also in terms of being able to pursue professions that had to do with our own interests and aptitudes and not with the family business.  When our neighborhood, our parent’s occupation (which was now ours) and a familiar family role no longer defined us, we began to ask ourselves about out our identity – and looked to define our worth in novel ways.  This was an important thread in our culture’s movement towards wrestling with narcissistic issues more centrally than neurotic ones.  Where before we had been neurotically inhibiting ourselves to fit into prescribed roles, we were now worried that the roles we had defined for ourselves – and that therefore defined ourselves – were lacking.

Now Lorenzo is not a modern kid who was raised to believe that every little thing he did was great and should be enshrined on a bulletin board of blue and red and yellow ribbons.  Well, OK, he was woven into a tapestry with gold thread that showed him leading the family into the future.  But he was primarily neurotic, not narcissistic, in the sense that he had to bend his life to fit the mold of what the family had in mind for him.  He married the woman that his father chose as his political mate despite his various passionate wishes.  He became the leader of the family reluctantly – that was his role as eldest child.  And yet he took to it like a duck to water.

 

Now, you may think that the man who had a vision of himself as the unifier of Italy, the person who made Florence the beating heart of a new Europe, and the person who had no empathy for any enemy who crossed his path would qualify as a narcissist.  And I think the third season of the show suggests that he went off the tracks and became not just narcissistic but psychopathic.  And I certainly think we could look through that lens.  But we might look through a different lens – that of self-esteem – a construct that is central to narcissism, to discover that his character his really neurotic, and thus learn something about our own narcissistic age.

 

What was most surprising to me about reading about narcissism and teaching the material is how central morality becomes to self-esteem and thus to identity.  That which we value – that which we hold as an ideal – our moral compass – becomes a powerful motivator for our behavior.  If we value being highly esteemed – as the narcissist does – we will work very, very hard to receive kudos from others.  Psychoanalytically, the superego – the part of our mind that begins to develop at a very early age and that is built in part on incorporating the perceived values of parental figures – has a hand in determining many of our actions.  We say, “I will do this versus that,” because this is consistent with my values – this is consistent with who I am – and these kinds of actions are, therefore, what I will build my life around.

 

Lorenzo’s moral compass was built concentrically around valuing family first, then Florence.  And these two frequently became one in his mind – Florence was an extension of his family.  He also valued art and science and saw Florence and the family as a means towards achieving a world that had greater beauty and was built on scientific principles.  But he was raised by his mother to have a different moral compass than the family had always relied on – his great-grandfather’s motto was: “To achieve a good end, it is sometimes necessary to engage in bad deeds”.  His mother would substitute “Good deeds can secure good ends.” Of course, Machiavelli, who appears in the third season but whom we didn’t recognize until the reveal at the end (even though we were looking for him), summarizes his great-grandfather’s position succinctly as: “the end justifies the means”.  This is the hallmark of psychopathic functioning and it was based in no small part on Machiavelli’s observations from quite close at hand of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s functioning.  How can I maintain that Lorenzo was neurotic and not psychopathic (and thus narcissistic)?

The difference between Lorenzo’s functioning and that of, say, the Tiger King, the Howard Ratner character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, or the current President of the United States, is  that Lorenzo’s basic values are clear to him and are not primarily about himself as a lone wolf – as a an individual in a world of individuals who are either out to get him (though that is manifestly the case for Lorenzo) or able to give him what he wants, but rather that he is so deeply and powerfully connected with his family and with his city that they are foundational to his values, and he sees himself as serving those entities, not acting as a free agent.

O.K., the last paragraph is, I think, true, and highlights the central difference between neurosis and narcissism that I will return to in a moment, but it is not what I intended to point out.  The weird thing is that what orients Lorenzo throughout the film is what he thinks is in the best interests of the family and the city and these entities – as values – and organizing his actions around these values leads him to be able to think clearly and strategically when others who are focused simply on what will be self-aggrandizing, do not.  Those who are in it for themselves, when push comes to shove, take their eye off the ball of what the next best move is.  

Lorenzo has other core values.  He is also concerned about leaving the world to be a more beautiful place, and finally, but in a tertiary place, he wants to live up to his mother’s value of doing good in the world. 

In thinking about values and self-esteem, it becomes apparent how our values hold a central place in our behavioral identity.  It is what we hold dear that drives our behaviors.  We do what we think will allow us to achieve what we want to.  And this, in turn, highlights that, to make changes in our personality – to go through the personal transformations that are part and parcel of the analytic undertaking – we will shift our values.

When we shift our values, we are unstable.  We feel on shifting ground, even if we are moving from a position of having poorly articulated values to having “better” values (hopefully what happens in the analytic process).  The shift in values that provides the dramatic tension at the conclusion of this series is the loosening of the “by doing good” part of the moral imperative that Lorenzo received from his mother.  This is portrayed as being fueled by his “anti-therapist”, Bruno Bernardi (Johnny Harris), a person who presents himself as a clerk, but who turns out to be the brother of the ruler of Sarzana, a rival Italian town.  Bruno is called Lorenzo’s “shadow” by Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice (Synnøve Karlsen), and he functions to erode the peripheral values – those espoused by Lorenzo’s mother to do good to achieve good ends, while supporting the importance of the central values of family, Florence, and the achievement of a unified Italy that will support the arts.  Bruno does this by embodying clarity, subservience, but most importantly solidity.  He is the constant and trusted advisor who provides the feel of solid ground as Lorenzo slides towards a much more slippery spot.

I can find no evidence of this darker angel Bruno Bernardi as an historical figure in my quick internet search.  He functions much as previous bad guys allied with the Medici have in this series.  The bad guys do the dirty work so that the Medici can maintain plausible deniability – to the courts, to their consciences, but, I think for the writers and directors, in the minds of the audience.  The production wants us to be able to maintain our image of the Medici as the good guys in this complex saga – as if it were possible to be good and powerful in the midst of a system – both political and religious – that is rife with corruption.  But, if that was their motivation, I think it serves a nice psychoanalytic function.  It illustrates how the mind works.  We develop defenses to buffer us from actions that we find reprehensible.  This doesn’t just lead us to be able to deny that we did something, we can rationalize or use other means to come to believe that objectively reprehensible actions are, in fact, virtuous.  These defenses are a hallmark of neurotic functioning.

Lorenzo is a neurotic character because he continues to believe that what he is doing is just and virtuous, even as he murders not just his enemies, but his countrymen; even his best friend, and plots the murder of a priest.  He does not forget these deeds, nor does he lie about having done them – these would be the hallmark of the narcissist/psychopath.  A narcissist defends against the knowledge that he is not all that he imagines himself to be not by deluding himself, but by replacing those fears with evidence that he is good – or has done something estimable.  Janus faced, he looks away from the evil components of himself and part of his driven quality is the insatiable need to earn rewards from others – as if he could prove to himself and everyone around him that he actually is good.  Of course these attempts are doomed.  He is trying to escape a part of himself that disdains himself for being reprehensible – for not being deserving of those accolades.

The neurotic, on the other hand, chafes under the restrictions that lead him to be good.  And he remembers when he has done bad things and, instead of feeling shame about what he has done (shame is an inescapable and unwashable sense of being essentially bad), he feels guilty.  So when Lorenzo confesses to his wife and to his son that he has harmed them, he feels genuine remorse – a sense of having done harm to someone that he loves.  When he confesses to a priest, he acknowledges his sins – the actions he has done that are reprehensible – but he does not feel the least bit guilty about the accomplishments that his sins have allowed him – and Italy – and, indeed, the continent of Europe, to attain.  And his smirk is one that we share.  We know that there is glory in his accomplishments – and, by neurotically identifying with him – we either forgive him his sins, blame them on his darker angel, or acknowledge them and agree with him that, despite their gravity, on balance we live in a better world because of them.

When Lorenzo looks at the world that he has helped midwife, he does not take credit for the work of Michelangelo, he praises it.  He sees himself as the person who created the political climate, the intellectual climate, and the educational climate in which that genius could be recognized, supported, and flourish, but he does not see the work as his creation.  Despite the fact that Florence is littered with Medici crests, homes, art collections, and examples of what it means to have been rich and powerful, the story of Florence is the story of the Renaissance, and we go there to learn about the artists and thinkers who created it.  We have to come home to piece together the story – in whatever form we find it – of those who crafted the space in which it could happen.  

 

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