Drawing on his Machiavelli (2013) and its updated Italian translation (2022), Robert Black here joins Machiavelli experts who offer recent biographies of the Florentine aimed at nonspecialist Anglophones, his writings treated as expressions of his personality and Sitz am Leben. Black's Machiavelli has a distinctive look. He was not an ideologue of any stripe, or a political realist—indeed, he was not even a realist as a careerist, often misjudging the effects of his self-promotion and unwanted advice on his addressees. He was not just an economically strapped job seeker, or a patriot whatever the cost. He was not a witty, ironic man of letters who kept his sense of humor, come what may. Rather, Black's Machiavelli had a single, unswerving goal undergirding the shifts argued for in the first four chapters of this book: owing to his illegitimate birth, Machiavelli's father Bernard was excluded from public service, thereby interrupting a longstanding family tradition. Machiavelli's quest for political office and patronage, whatever regime governed Florence between 1498 and 1527, was thus motivated by the compulsion to remove this blot from the family escutcheon.
Hanging this thesis on the paternal illegitimacy idea is problematic, given that it was disproved some time ago. Instead, Black could have capitalized on a key point he makes about a well-documented situation affecting Machiavelli's actual and would-be activities post res perditas, one involving a stigma imposed on Machiavelli himself. The false accusation of plotting against the restored Medici rule in 1512 that led to his torture and incarceration pending trial did not give Machiavelli his day in court; he was released thanks to the amnesty occasioned by Pope Leo X's election. While Machiavelli was neither condemned nor exonerated, the Medici prudently replaced him in the second chancery and required his internal exile. That The Prince and the hoped-for intervention of his friends failed to yield favor with the Medici is no surprise. When Machiavelli did gain their patronage in the 1520s, it was largely as an accomplished littérateur and erstwhile republican functionary, one of several whose views on the polity could be invited as a means of scoping out the opposition. This is not the version of Machiavelli's story that Black chooses to develop.
Machiavelli's transition from radicalism to conservatism as Black presents it reads as opportunistic pivoting, consistency be damned. The Prince, for Black, is a post-humanist work, although sharing with the Discourses, the Art of War, and the Florentine Histories the humanists’ tactics of fast and loose appeal to sources, examples ancient and modern, and a malleable connection to historical truth. Black's Machiavelli waffles in the Discourses, where he is both “an unequivocal republican” (101) and “a political, sociological, geographical, and historical relativist, . . . not a monochromatic champion of any particular political regime” (119). But in the 1520s, terminally disillusioned with governo largo republicanism, he arrives at a governo stretto position in line with that of Francesco Guicciardini, if less disabused than the latter on the constitutional difference his opinion could actually make.
There is one major way in which Black's Machiavelli did not pivot. Throughout his life he was and remained a virulent anti-Christian, a devotee of “atheism or Lucretian proto-atheism” (183). So important to Black is this claim that he sees anti-Christian blasphemy as the main point of Mandragola, Clizia, and Belfagor. Black deals with Machiavelli's confraternity membership, his Exhortation to Penitence, and his burial without ecclesiastical demur in the family tomb in Santa Croce by omitting any reference to them. With respect to the selective and manipulative use of evidence in support of his desired conclusions, Black appears to have taken a leaf from Machiavelli's own book. There are also some selective omissions in his slender bibliography of English titles and, in his fifth and last chapter, on Machiavelli's legacy. There we meet many of the usual suspects, from the amoral Old Nick to the proponent of raison d’état to the godfather of modern republicanism. Absent are Machiavelli the proto-democrat and Machiavelli the consigliere of the wily business executive. In all, RQ readers looking for an introductory biography of Machiavelli to recommend to undergraduates may well prefer another of the available alternatives.
