In these circumstances, and confronted by one of the most dangerous crises of his whole life, Lorenzo rose to the occasion and effected a solution of the difficulty by daring to perform what was undoubtedly one of the bravest acts ever achieved by a diplomatist.  By some statesmen it might be condemned as foolhardy, by others as quixotic.  Its very foolhardiness and quixotry fascinated the man it was intended to influence, the blood-thirsty, cruel, and pitiless Ferrante of Naples, who was restrained from crime by the fear neither of God nor man, and who had actually slain the condottiere Piccinino when he visited him under a safe-conduct from the monarch’s best ally.  But the Renaissance annals are filled with the records of men and women whose natures are marvellous studies of contrasted and contradictory traits.  Such was the Neapolitan tyrant.  While a monster in much, he had his vulnerable points.  He was ambitious to pose as a friend of the “New Learning,” and he knew that Lorenzo was not only the most munificent patron, but also one of the most illustrious exponents, of the Renaissance principles.

Although his enemy, Ferrante received Lorenzo with every demonstration of respect and satisfaction.  He lost sight of the hostile diplomatist in the great humanist.  Two Neapolitan galleys were sent to conduct him to Naples, and he was welcomed on landing with much pomp.  Never did Lorenzo’s supreme diplomatic genius, never did his versatile powers as a statesman, as a scholar, as a patron of letters, and as a brilliant man of the world, blaze forth in more splendid effulgence than during his three-months’ stay in Naples.  Though opposed by all the papal authority and resources; though Sixtus by turns threatened, cajoled, entreated, promised, in order to prevent Lorenzo having any success, the successor of St. Peter was beaten all along the line, and the Magnifico carried away with him a treaty, signed and sealed, which practically meant that henceforth Naples and the papacy would be in antagonistic camps.

It was the Renaissance card which won the trick.  With startling boldness, yet with consummate art, Lorenzo played the game of flattering Ferrante.  No ordinary adulation, however, would have had success with the Neapolitan Phaleris.  He was too strong-minded a man for anything of that kind.  But to be hailed by the great Renaissance patron of the period, by one also who was himself one of the leading humanists, as a brother-humanist and a fellow-patron of learning, was a delicate incense to his vanity which he could not resist.  He liked to be consulted on matters of literary moment, and, when he blundered, Lorenzo was too shrewd a student of human nature to correct him.