Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli [Paperback]

I shared his frustrations as deep down he knew that his humble beginnings would limit his rise and that fortune, of which he spoke so often, was ultimately against him. The examples of the correspondence between Niccolo and his friends left me with a huge smile on my face. The teasing which went on between them really showed Machiavelli to be a decent human being, blessed with a love of life and an intelligence and insight which is very rare.

If I had lived in Florence during the time of Machiavelli I would have been honoured to have him as a friend and I am grateful to Maurizio Viroli for his honest account which does much to secure the reputation of a great thinker.

For further reading I can recommend ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli and ‘The Life of Cesrae Borgia’ by Rafael Sabatini, which humanises another great figure from that same period of Italian history.

It's a bad start, and one which invites unflattering comparisons with de Grazia's work. Viroli's strategy, unusually for an academic, is to write Machiavelli's life in the populist manner, shorn of footnotes and scholarly references. It's a technique which might usefully be brought to bear upon a subject notorious for provoking disagreement among readers; Viroli, it would seem, sets out to show us the wood that's been hidden behind too many academic trees.

And the technique works, for a while. The early chapters succeed in giving a clearer, more rigidly chronological account of Machiavelli's political career than many other biographers have achieved. The theatre of European politics in the early sixteenth century is more alive here than in some drier, scrupulously historical accounts. And yet Viroli's prose (in Shugaar's translation) never seems fully up to the task of a novelistic biography. The reader feels that if Viroli is going to give us a story stripped of scholarship he should being telling it in rather more interesting language. Stylistically, de Grazia's eccentric, jumpy prose was denser but ultimatey more readable than some of the cliches Viroli serves up.

Worse still, the book's one virtue - it's clear chronology of events - is rendered redundant halfway through when, at the crisis of Machiavelli's life, he loses his job is exiled from political life for good. Frankly, there are no interesting events thereafter, a point Niccolo himself acknowledges in his letters. His life becomes a contemplative one of reading and writing in a sterile rural setting from which he longed to escape. To read Viroli's increasingly desperate attempts to conjure a narrative from this biographical black hole is sometimes painful. Always sentimental, the book descends into outright soupiness when Machiavelli's blokey bawdry on the subject of prostitutes and arses is told as a love story.

This second half of the book is further dulled by Viroli's determination to streamline the Machiavelli controversy, to clarify rather than argue. After his retirement from politics, Machiavelli is interesting purely as a writer, and that means we have to argue about what he wrote. In trying to sketch Machiavelli the man as larger than life, Viroli only succeeds in making Machiavelli's writing one-dimensional. His banal account of what Machiavelli's 'smile' signifies is quite astonishing in its emptiness, its naiveity, its whimsy. Not normally words associated with Old Nick.

Niccoló came to view all Italian leaders in the same light, as we see in his urgent appeals for a liberator to purge Italy of the barbarians who violate her. What he saw led him to view contemporary politics as a comedy. Nevertheless, his "country," as Viroli insists, was more important to him than his soul. Politics became a tragic comedy to him. Perforce there formed on Niccoló's lips a tight smile concealing his pain.

It would be unfair to make comparisons to more scholarly interpretations of his thought and motives. Viroli has no such pretensions. To him, it seems, Niccoló's more famous writings arise only as an epiphenomenon of his disgrace. He leaves this reader wondering as to the cause of Niccolo's daemonic outburst. That outburst claimed that the Christian god caused the neglect of the art of war, as well as inform us that the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes were too good to succeed. They were too good because they suffered from the pangs of conscience. That outburst left an indelible impression on his age and its effects ripple through our own.

Niccoló, we are told, self-consciously smiled at the ridiculousness of "the constant to-and-fro of men driven by passions." Yet Niccoló continued in the end to advise his country. He wished "to show the world that although (he) could not found a state like Solon or Lycurgus it was not out of ignorance." In Viroli's account, Niccoló did so because he sought to be among "the first praised." Niccoló desired then, at least in Viroli's interpretation, the praise of men he thought foolish.

I think Viroli's interpretation wanting, even if the book is worth reading. It is a good, general introduction. But it places too much faith in what men say openly and to everyone. It neglects the import of what Niccoló wrote to Guicciardini: "for some time now I've never said what I believe or never believed what I said; and if sometimes I tell the truth, I hide it behind so many lies that it is hard to find." If we adopt Viroli's interpretation, we risk joining Pier Soderini in Limbo with the other babies.