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Lorenzo de' Medici (January 1, 1449 – 9 April, 1492) was an Italian statesman and ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance. Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo il Magnifico) by contemporary Florentines, he was a diplomat, politician, and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. His life coincided with the high point of the early Italian Renaissance; his death marked the end of the Golden Age of Florence. The fragile peace that he helped to maintain between the various Italian states collapsed with his death; and two years later the French invasion of 1494 began nearly 400 years of foreign occupation of the Italian peninsula.

Childhood

His grandfather, Cosimo de Medici, became the first of the Medici to combine running the bank with leading the Republic in both government and philanthropy, spending an enormous portion of his fortune (he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe) on art and public works. Lorenzo's father, Piero 'the Gouty' de' Medici, was also at the center of Florentine life, and extremely active as a patron and collector. His mother Lucrezia Tornabuoni was also a dilettante poet and friend to figures like Luigi Pulci or Agnolo Poliziano.

He was considered the brightest of the five children. He was tutored by Gentile Becchi, a diplomat. He partook in jousting, hawking, hunting, and breeding horses for the palio, a horse race in Siena. His own horse was named Morello.

Piero sent Lorenzo on many important diplomatic missions when he was still a youth. These included trips to Rome to meet with the pope and others of that nature.

Lorenzo and politics

Lorenzo, groomed for power, assumed a leading role in the state upon the death of his father in 1469, when Lorenzo was twenty. Lorenzo had little success in running the bank, and its assets contracted seriously during the course of his lifetime.

Lorenzo, like his father and grandfather, ruled Florence indirectly, through surrogates in the city councils, through threats, payoffs, strategic marriages - all the tools of autocracy. It was inevitable that rival families should harbor resentments as to Medici dominance, and enemies of the Medici remained a factor in Florentine life long after Lorenzo's passing.

On April 26, 1478, in an incident called the Pazzi Conspiracy, a group including members of the Pazzi family, backed by the Archbishop of Pisa and his patron Pope Sixtus IV, attacked Lorenzo and his co-ruler brother Giuliano in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo was stabbed but escaped; however the attackers managed to kill Giuliano. The conspiracy was brutally put down, with measures including the lynching of the archbishop.

In the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy and the punishment of the Pope's supporters, the Medici and Florence suffered from the wrath of the Pope. He seized all the Medici assets he could find, excommunicated Lorenzo and the entire government of Florence, and finally put the city under interdict. When that had little effect, the Pope formed a military alliance with King Ferdinand I of Naples, whose son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria launched an invasion.

Lorenzo rallied the citizens. However, with little help being provided by traditional Medici allies in Bologna and Milan (the latter being convulsed by power struggles among the Sforza), the war dragged on, and only diplomacy by Lorenzo, who personally traveled to Naples, resolved the crisis. This enabled him to secure constitutional changes that enhanced his power.

Thereafter, Lorenzo, like his grandfather Cosimo de' Medici, pursued a policy of maintaining both peace and a balance of power between the northern Italian states and of keeping other states out of Italy.

Lorenzo and the Renaissance

Lorenzo's court included artists such as Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, and Michelangelo Buonarroti who were involved in the 15th century Renaissance. Although he did not commission many works himself, he helped them secure commissions from other patrons. Michelangelo lived with Lorenzo and his family for several years, dining at the family table and attending meetings of the Neo-Platonic Academy.

Lorenzo was an artist of some note himself, writing poetry in his native Tuscan. In his poetry he celebrates life even while—particularly in his later works—acknowledging with melancholy the fragility and instability of the human condition. Love, feasts and light dominate his verse.

Cosimo had started the collection of books which became the Medici Library (also called the Laurentian Library) and Lorenzo expanded it. Lorenzo's agents retrieved from the East large numbers of classical works, and he employed a large workshop to copy his books and disseminate their content across Europe. He supported the development of humanism through his circle of scholarly friends who studied Greek philosophers, and attempted to merge the ideas of Plato with Christianity; among this group were the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

Later years

Lorenzo was not successful in business. During his tenure, several branches of the family bank collapsed because of bad loans, and, in later years, he got into financial difficulties himself and resorted to mis-appropriating trust and state funds for his own needs.

Toward the end of Lorenzo's life, Florence came under the spell of Savonarola, who believed that Christians had strayed too far into Greco-Roman culture. Lorenzo played a role in bringing Savonarola to Florence.

Two of his sons later became powerful popes. His second son, Giovanni, became Pope Leo X, and his adopted son Giulio (who was the illegitimate son of his slain brother Giuliano) became Pope Clement VII.

His first son and his political heir, Piero 'the Unfortunate', squandered his father's patrimony and brought down his father's dynasty in Florence. Another Medici, his brother Giovanni, restored it, but it was only made wholly secure again on the accession of a distant relative from a branch line of the family, Cosimo I de' Medici.

Lorenzo de' Medici died during the night of April 8th/9th, 1492, at the long-time family villa of Careggi (Florentine reckoning considers days to begin at sunset, so his death date is the 9th in that reckoning). Savonarola visited Lorenzo on his death bed. The rumor that Savonarola damned Lorenzo on his deathbed has been refuted by Roberto Ridolfi in his book, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola. Letters written by witnesses to Lorenzo's death report that Lorenzo died a consoled man, on account of the blessing Savonarola gave him. As Lorenzo died, the tower of the church of Santa Reparata was allegedly struck by lightning. He and his brother Giuliano are buried in a chapel designed by Michelangelo, the New Sacristy; it is located adjacent to the north transept of the Church of San Lorenzo and is reached by passing through the main Capella di Medici; the chapel is ornamented with famous sculptures, and some of the original working drawings of Michelangelo can still be distinguished on two of the walls.

He died at the dawn of "the age of exploration"; Christopher Columbus would reach the "New World" only six months later. With his death, the center of the Renaissance shifted from Florence to Rome, where it would remain for the next century and beyond.

Marriage and children

Lorenzo married Clarice Orsini by proxy on February 7, 1469. She was a daughter of Giacomo Orsini, Lord of Monterotondo and Bracciano by his wife and cousin Maddalena Orsini. They had nine children:

• Lucrezia de' Medici (August 4, 1470 - November, 1553). She married Giacomo Salviati. Their daughter Francesca Salviati was mother to Pope Leo XI.
• Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici (February 15, 1471 - December 28, 1503).
• Twins born in March, 1472. Died shortly after birth.
• Maddalena de' Medici (July 25, 1473 - December, 1528). Married Franceschetto Cybo, an illegitimate son of Pope Innocent VIII.
• Pope Leo X (born Giovanni de' Medici; December 11, 1475 - December 1, 1521).
• Luisa de' Medici (1477 - 1488). She was betrothed to her cousin Giovanni de' Medici il Popolano.
• Contessina de' Medici (1478 - 1515). Married Piero Ridolfi.
• Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Nemours (March 12, 1479 - March 17, 1516).

See also

• The Medici Family
• Renaissance
• Medici giraffe

Further reading

• Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (Morrow-Quill, 1980) is a highly readable, non-scholarly general history of the family, and covers Lorenzo's life in some detail
• F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de- Medici and the Art of Magnificence (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) A summary of 40 years of research with a specific theme of Il Magnifico's relationship with the visual arts

External links

• Life And All Complete Works By Lorenzo de' Medici - Format HTML