Word: machiavellis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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King, an art historian and the author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, portrays a Machiavelli who lived by more than cunning and reason. He consulted astrologers and believed that the heavens influenced political events. Although he championed dissimulation, he was incapable of it: he refused to flatter fools and regularly mouthed off to superiors. He understood suffering, once urging his son to release a mule from its halter so that it might "regain its own way of life." And he inspired not fear, but affection. During his long trips abroad, friends wrote him letters professing that they were...
Other women missed him, too: one friend wrote to inform him that a particular prostitute was also yearning for his return. Yet the amoral tone of Machiavelli's work seems to reflect his age more than his temperament. In the 16th century, gore and tragedy dominated the Italian peninsula, a hodgepodge of warring city-states, kingdoms and republics. Machiavelli roamed this minefield of intrigue on horseback as Florence's diplomatic envoy from the age of 29. In an early mission, he failed to resolve a long-standing feud between two families, and King describes the result: "The heads...
Italy's ongoing wars provide King's book with its narrative structure, but Machiavelli's personal struggles give it drive. After 15 years of service - representing Florence abroad, raising and training its first citizen militia, and collaborating with Leonardo da Vinci on engineering projects - Machiavelli watched his beloved city-state fall to the Spanish in 1512. Under the subsequently installed Medici family, he was imprisoned, tortured by having his shoulders dislocated, and banned from his former offices. He retreated to the countryside with his wife, then pregnant with their seventh child. King doesn't miss the irony: "He understood better...
They were the darkest years of Machiavelli's life, and King poignantly captures his anguish as he became a broken man, haunted by a sense of defeat and inadequacy. "Physically I feel well, but ill in every other respect," he wrote to a friend in 1513. Subsequent missives grew increasingly plaintive as he worried about "rotting away ... unable to find any man who recalls my service or believes I might be good for anything." The man who had once graced the courts of Louis XII and Ferdinand II now trapped birds for dinner and passed his afternoons in a tavern...
Political philosophers will find little new in King's sound, if predictable, analysis of Machiavelli's later writings, which show an evolution in his thinking. In Discourses, Machiavelli demonstrated a more idealistic outlook, embracing personal liberty, republicanism and good government. King's real achievement comes in his careful appraisal of Machiavelli's lesser-known works - the poems and bawdy plays that provided an outlet for his lascivious imagination and wit. In the play Clizia he mocked the folly of an older man pursuing a younger woman. In the novella The Fable of Belfagor, he speared matrimony by having the protagonist...