Florentine statesmanship and patronage
Lorenzo de' Medici
1449–1492 · Italy
Lorenzo de' Medici was born in Florence in 1449, the grandson of Cosimo, and was educated by the humanists his grandfather had gathered. He took charge of the family's affairs in his twenties and soon became the leading figure in a city that called itself a republic.
In 1478 a conspiracy by the Pazzi family and their allies killed his brother Giuliano and nearly killed Lorenzo himself in the cathedral; the reprisals that followed secured his power for good. He survived the crisis by a mixture of nerve, patronage, and an alliance with the papacy that he later had to repair.
As a statesman he worked to keep the Italian powers in balance, and as a patron he supported Botticelli, Michelangelo, and the young scholars of the Platonic Academy. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan vernacular and spent freely on festivals and buildings, so that his city became the model of the Renaissance court. He died in 1492, and the peace he had maintained did not long outlast him.
Workshop of Bronzino · Public domain
Known for
The balance of power
The Italian practice of playing the great powers against one another so that no single state could dominate the peninsula.
After the peace of Lodi in 1454, the five major Italian states — Milan, Venice, Florence, the papacy, and Naples — settled into a wary equilibrium. Each watched the others, formed and dissolved alliances, and understood that a single power strong enough to conquer the rest would also be strong enough to destroy them all.
Lorenzo de' Medici made the maintenance of that balance the core of his diplomacy. He kept Florence friendly with both Milan and Naples, intervened when a crisis threatened to tip the scale, and used his personal prestige as much as his armies. The system held while he lived; within two years of his death, a French army crossed the Alps and the Italian wars began.
The Renaissance court
The courts of fifteenth-century Italy as centers of learning, display, and political theatre.
A Renaissance court was more than a household: it was a stage on which a ruler's power was performed. Magnificent buildings, a household of artists and scholars, elaborate festivals, and a library were all ways of announcing that a family deserved to rule. The larger the court, the greater the claim.
Lorenzo's Florence set the model. Poets, painters, and philosophers were welcomed at his table, and the city's public ceremonies became a form of diplomacy. Rival courts at Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino competed in the same currency of learning and display, so that patronage and politics became two faces of the same enterprise.
Hosted
After the Pazzi conspiracy · 1478 · Florence, Italy
The garden at San Marco · 1490 · Florence, Italy
Attended
The first citizen's table · 1455 · Florence, Italy
A countess holds her court · 1490 · Forlì, Italy