Lorenzo de' Medici

Following his grandfather Cosimo (b. 1389–d. 1464) and father Piero (b. 1416–d. 1469), Lorenzo (b. 1449–d. 1492) was the third head of the Medici dynasty to use commercial wealth and international banking connections to lead Florence’s dominant political faction, undermine its republican constitution, and exercise strategic influence over its relations with other states. As his copious correspondence confirms, Lorenzo was a significant diplomatic player in all the peninsular conflicts of his time, including the Pazzi War in the late 1470s, and the War of Ferrara and the Neapolitan Barons’ War in the 1480s. To the generation of Italians who lived through the French invasions of Naples in 1494 and Milan in 1499, and the lengthy conflicts they initiated, Lorenzo came to personify a lost golden age of peace, prosperity, and cultural efflorescence. His posthumous reputation was enhanced by the fact that his son Giovanni and nephew Giulio went on to be elected pope, as Leo X and Clement VII, respectively, and that his great-grandson Cosimo was the first of a line of Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. Over the intervening centuries, secular hagiography has gradually given way to a more balanced assessment of his achievements as a faction leader, statesman, and cultural patron. Consequently, after citing a number of Reference Works, the present article explores the evolution of Lorenzo’s Reputation. It does not separate primary and secondary sources. Rather, it emphasizes the major initiative to publish his Correspondence, which has, in turn, influenced all other recent work in the field. Dynastic Interests were played out on a broad European canvas, though the nature of Italian archives means that there has been an obvious concentration on Lorenzo and the Florentine Elites. Logically, that leads outward into the Florentine Territorial State. The Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 had both Florentine and Roman dimensions, making it a useful connection to Relations with Other States. Away from politics and diplomacy, his poetry has always ensured that Lorenzo’s name has been integral to the study of Literary Culture in Renaissance Italy. Festivals combined literary and nonliterary elements, so are placed ahead of the Visual Culture, which spans the building of villas in the Florentine contado, references to a sculpture garden in the city and the cultural dimension of interstate diplomacy. Studies of all these subjects and more exist in the Collections of Papers that proliferated in and around the fifth centenary of Lorenzo’s death.