* Despite considerable contemporary evidence, some historians have tended to downplay or contradict the official version of what happened on August 27, 1466. The main disagreement comes over whether, as the Medici contended, the Hill precipitated the crisis by calling on Borso d’Este’s troops and attempting to seize Piero at Sant’Antonio del Vescovo, or, as their opponents claimed, the whole event was staged by the partisans of the Plain in order to crush the reform movement. A contemporary account of the plot is given by one Iacopo di Niccolò di Cocco Donati, a member of the Signoria that August, who declared that the conspirators “had arranged to assassinate [Piero] at Careggi” (Phillips, chapter 12). (It is Donati’s account, incidentally, that supplies the crucial detail that Piero had gone to his villa as part of an arrangement with Neroni.) Donati’s report offers crucial confirmation of the Medici version. Another contemporary account bolstering the Medici position comes from the diary of the apothecary Luca Landucci, a man whose testimony is all the more credible because he had no political ax to grind (see Landucci, A Florentine Diary, chapter 1). Also significant are the letters of the Milanese ambassador, who confirms the movements of Borso d’Este’s army, and Piero’s panicky call for troops to his friends and neighbors. The confession of Dietisalvi’s brother, Francesco (two versions of which are reproduced in Nicolai Rubinstein’s “La Confessione di Francesco Neroni e la congiura anti-Medicea del 1466,” Archivio Storico Italiano, 126, 1968), offers important testimony on the coordination between the leaders of the Hill and Borso d’Este. Francesco’s confession also confirms the basic outlines of the plot, though it differs on some of the details. The memoirs of Benedetto Dei also tend to support the Medici account (see his Cronica, especially 23v and 24r). For the other side see Marco Parenti’s Ricordi Storici. Parenti, though an ardent adherent of the Hill, had no access to the inner circle that planned the coup. His belief that the accusations against the leaders of his party were false was based on hope rather than fact. Lorenzo’s own later recollections are significant, if frustratingly vague. The subsequent behavior of the leaders of the Hill shows the plot to kill Piero to be thoroughly consistent with their characters. It is suggestive that the two great Florentine historians, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, writing within a few decades of the events, largely accepted the Medici version. Rubinstein is no doubt correct when he says, “Fear was probably the decisive element in the final crisis” (The Government of Florence Under the Medici, chapter 9). Both sides had built up foreign armies just outside Florentine territory, each believing it needed to act to forestall an invasion by the other. Under the circumstances, the pressure to steal the march on one’s opponents was great.
* Piero must have been confident indeed that he would have things his own way in the palace since the Accoppiatori had only recently been abolished. He might well have relished the irony that it was Pitti himself who led the fight to abolish the committee on which he now so desperately wished to serve.
* A holdover from the first days of the commune when government truly rested in the hands of all the citizens, a parlamento was called only in moments of greatest crisis and, though ostensibly the purest expression of Florentine democracy, every citizen knew it was an instrument of tyranny. Such an unwieldy mob was easily manipulated by those in power to achieve their ends.
* For a complete list of those punished and their sentences see Parenti, Ricordi Storici, chapter 7.
* Lorenzo was not always successful in seeking favors for his clients, belying any notion that his writ was law in Florence. For instance, one man imprisoned for debt found little benefit from Lorenzo’s intervention. (See “The Young Lorenzo,” in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, especially chapter 1)
* The exiles had even managed to foment a small-scale war, persuading the mercenary captain Bartolomeo Colleoni, secretly backed by Venetian money, to invade Florentine territory. The so-called Colleonic War amounted to little in the end, but Colleoni’s failure meant that for years to come the Medici regime would have little to fear from foreign intervention.
* Lorenzo usually made these journeys with a large entourage. On a trip to Bagno a Morba in 1485 Lorenzo’s company included thirty-three people, berthed in fifteen beds. Among those accompanying him were the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and the composer Antonio Squarcialupi, two singers, two secretaries, two waiters, a sommelier, five archers, a stable master, two cooks, a wagoner, and assorted grooms and servants (see Draper, Bertoldo di Giovanni, chapter 1).
* Lorenzo’s role as Florence’s most important marriage-broker stirred up much resentment. But while many families decried this humiliating loss of freedom, there were at least as many who pestered Lorenzo to find a good match for their sons and daughters.
* Lorenzo was not the first Florentine to write in the vernacular. Dante more than a century earlier had written his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, in Italian. More recent, Leon Battista Alberti had championed use of the vernacular. Lorenzo’s contributions, however, confirmed the value of the native dialect and put him at odds with more prissy poets who believed that elevated thoughts could only be expressed in the language of Virgil. The brilliant contributions of these Florentines meant that the Tuscan dialect would become the foundation of modern Italian.
* Lorenzo’s verses gained wider circulation through the songs he wrote for popular festivals like Carnival or the Feast of St. John the Baptist, but these songs tended to reveal less of the man than the sonnets. They were part of a more consciously propagandistic program.
* The compilation of poems and commentaries now known as A Commentary on My Sonnets first began to take shape sometime in the early 1470s. Lorenzo tinkered with the poems and commentaries throughout the remainder of his life.
* The road from Careggi would have led him to either the Porta San Gallo or the Porta Faenza, just to the west. The Porta Faenza, however, was the natural point of entry for anyone coming from Sant’Antonio del Vescovo. The Porta Faenza has long since been torn down, along with much of the fourteenth-century wall that once girded Florence to the north, but the Porta San Gallo still stands, now forming the centerpiece of a busy traffic circle.
* Giovanni di Bicci was married to Piccarda Bueri, born in Verona but of Florentine parentage.
† Of her diplomatic mission we have the usual sour observations of Jacopo Acciaiuoli who, with a combination of male chauvinism and anti-Medici prejudice, claimed her behavior “reduced Florence to the lowest level of repute” (Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Sacred Narratives, Introduction, note on chapter 2). Filippo Martelli had a different view, reporting to Lorenzo, “Her visit has been most valuable, for she has not only fulfilled her vow, but she has acquired high favor with all this Court, and especially with these gentlemen, in such a way that even if she had no more than her presence, her conversation and her appearance, it would show that she was greater than her reputation. I know that the Cardinals have talked about her, and have decided that no finer lady ever came to Rome.” (Maguire, The Women of the Medici, chapter 4)
* Jousts were not an infrequent occurrence in Renaissance Florence, and most of the larger ones were held, like this one, in the Piazza Santa Croce. Some were staged by private families, but many were under the aegis of the aristocratic Guelf Party and were, to some degree, a challenge by the city’s most prominent families to Florence’s republican institutions.
† Florentine architects had a difficult time completing the facades of their churches. Most of the ornate marble facades currently visible date from the nineteenth century, including that of Santa Croce and the cathedral. The best example of a completed Renaissance facade is the church of Santa Maria Novella, designed by Leon Battista Alberti and paid for by Giovanni Rucellai. Today, San Lorenzo, with its simple, rusticated front, gives the best notion of what most Florentine churches looked like in Lorenzo’s day.
* Pulci in describing this incident dwells at length on the heroism of Lorenzo’s horse, Falsamico, a gift of the king of Naples: “And on the gro
und the youth was thrown, / and all in the field ran to help him; / but that horse through its great nobility / strove to do what it could not; / now he rises, and now he falls / causing those who admired him to sigh.” (Pulci, La Giostra di Lorenzo de’ Medici, cxiv.)
* The pertinent lines are “and had there been then Clarice, /never would a city have been so happy”—all in all a rather tepid tribute (Pulci, La Giostra di Lorenzo de’ Medici, xxvi–xxvii).
* Florentines were obsessed with the cost of everything, from ladies’ gowns to altarpieces, and contemporary chronicles are chock-full of price tags for even the most sacred objects. Piero had inscribed on the tabernacle he built for the miraculous image of the Virgin in Santissima Annunziata the boast, “The marble alone cost 4000 florins.” This obsession with money did not strike Florentines as crass. This was a mercantile society in which the simplest, most understandable way to fix the value of anything was in terms of its monetary cost.
* The diamond ring, an emblem employed by both Piero and Lorenzo that can be seen on the facade of their palace, as well as in paintings like Botticelli’s Pallas Athena and the Centaur and Gozzoli’s Adoration of the Magi, also stands for eternity.
* Gold ducats were minted by the Venetian Republic, florins by Florence, and were roughly equivalent in value. In the time of Lorenzo, a skilled artisan might earn about 50 florin, or ducats, a year. One florin could purchase about thirty chickens. By contrast, income from Pietro Riario’s benefices totalled 60,000 florins per year.
* Among the judges were Tommaso Soderini, Lorenzo’s uncle, the condottiere Roberto di Sanseverino, and such important members of the reggimento as Carlo Pandolfini and Bongianni Gianfigliazzi: a distinguished but not necessarily unbiased panel.
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