When Michelangelo was 15 years old, he caught the eye of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who admired his marble statue of a faun. Lorenzo offered to support the boy as an artist, mortifying Michelangelo’s father, an impoverished nobleman who harbored loftier ambitions for his son. The senior Buonarroti was ignorant of the importance of painters and sculptors in Lorenzo’s Florence, so the great patron bought off the old man with the sort of power he could understand—a position in the customs office—and invited Michelangelo to live inside his palace.

While the art historical consequences of Lorenzo’s intervention are as famous as the David, the political significance of Medici patronage remains as obscure to museumgoers today as it was to Michelangelo’s father. Art was the diplomatic currency of the Medici, and the delicate power balance within Florence, as well as the city-state’s tenuous position in Italian politics, gave that currency special value in Lorenzo’s day. In Magnifico, Miles J. Unger provides a remarkably cogent explanation of politics in 15th-century Italy from Lorenzo’s perspective. Unger’s sober, methodical approach and flavorless storytelling can be trying, as can his cursory description of artists on the Medici payroll; Magnifico is a work less of cultural history than of political science. Nevertheless, aficionados of Renaissance art will be fascinated by the political context in which this biography sets the work of Michelangelo, Botticelli and other Florentine masters.

“It is ill living in Florence for the rich unless they rule the state,” Lorenzo observed in his memoirs, acknowledging the corruption underlying his city’s nominally republican government, a web of patronage and graft that could either enrich or ruin his family bank. Yet the Florentine people were notoriously wary of leaders, and the government was carefully structured to prevent any one person from consolidating much power. Administrators were chosen by lottery and granted only a couple of months in office, a system so inefficient that Florence would have collapsed or been annexed had it not been for the behind-the-scenes management of the Medici. The challenge—inherited by Lorenzo at the age of 20 when his father, Piero, died, in 1469—was to rule without claiming to be in charge. Like his forebears, Lorenzo had no official title. (Lacking noble lineage or rank, Piero was called simply “the Great Money-Changer” in the French court of Charles VIII.) To serve as primus inter pares among Florence’s independent merchants required visible wealth without princely ostentation.

That trick was accomplished through the Medici collection of art and antiquities. Lorenzo’s Via Larga palace, where the business of state was unofficially conducted, was laden with great works of all ages, from prime Roman statuary to the latest pictures by Botticelli. “At one time or another, Lorenzo employed most of the finest painters in the city,” notes Unger. “But unlike [in] a royal court, . . . it was not in his interest to monopolize all of the best artists. . . . To be the first citizen of the land, rather than its king, meant that he had to exemplify those civic virtues of patronage without depriving others of their opportunities.” In other words, with his superior resources and connoisseurship, Lorenzo could engage his fellow Florentines in a competition he was bound to dominate.

Lorenzo’s preeminence also mattered on the international stage. “By building this grand residence and furnishing it with famous works of ancient and modern art,” Unger argues, “[the Medici] showed that they belonged in the company of the greatest feudal lords.” And that status benefited not only Florence but also the rest of Italy, a hodgepodge of city-states perpetually in conflict. In the 15th century, Florence maintained a balance of power by brokering alliances.  Crucially, Lorenzo accomplished this without armed might, playing principalities off one another and presenting Florence as an ideal rather than a threat. Unger puts it well when he writes that “Florentines as a whole, and Lorenzo in particular, were far more effective as cultural rather than as military or political imperialists.” This point deserves emphasis: For Florence, the cultural was the political. And because Lorenzo was a poet in his own right—composing courtly sonnets and songs in the Tuscan dialect for festivals—he could claim a collegial relationship with his artists, commanding and inspiring creative figures like a field general.