Bianca de' Medici Pazzi

The painting, Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat, today in the Uffizi, is said to portray the family of Piero de' Medici, de facto lord of Florence from 1464.  His wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni as Mary, Lorenzo as the young man with the ink-pot, flanked by his brother Guilano de' Medici who is holding a book.  Behind the two boys is Maria, while the two older sisters are holding the crown in the background, Bianca on the left and Nannina on the right.   The newborn would be the daughter of Lorenzo, Lucrezia de' Medici.  One would think that the one dressed in white would be the one called "Bianca," which translates "white," and while I don't know if there is any truth to the story that it is the Medici family portrayed hereit makes a pretty story. 

More on Bianca:  Because she had married Guglielmo Pazzi in 1458, he was allowed exile as his punishment for being a member of the family creating the conspiracy.  Bianca and Guglielmo had a large family, at least 14 children who lived to adulthood.  In a letter Bianca wrote to her mother Lucrezia in 1479, after the conspiracy, she is again pregnant.

Revenge

The plan had effectively misfired, but the plotters were relying on the support of the people.  Archbishop Salviati and Jacopo Pazzi with a group of their companions immediately leapt to their horses and rode to the Piazza della Signoria shouting "Freedom!"  In the meantime a meeting of the Signoria had been urgently summoned by the gonfonieri Petrucci, who had been informed of what had happened.  Salviati requested in vain to be received with the intention of obtaining the support of the public authority:  instead he was cast into prison and later hanged.  Just a few hours after the conspiracy, his body and that of Francesco Pazzi, who had been wounded himself in the attack, dangled from the nooses outside the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria.

Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, another of the conspirators, initially managed to escape as far as Constantinople, but he was recognized and handed over to the Florentine authorities who condemned him to be hanged.  There is a sketch on a sheet by Leonardo da Vinci, which shows him dangling from a noose from one of the windows of the Palazzo del Bargello (see above).

All the members of the Pazzi family were either killed or exiled and their goods confiscated.  In addition they were also condemned to a sort of damnatio memoriae; the coats of arms of the family were demolished and erased from the florins of their bank, while their names were banished from all official documents in the city.

For more information go to:   http://www.palazzo-medici.it/mediateca/en/schede.php?id_scheda=160   

And the Plot Thickens . . .

Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, shown above as he appears in his portrait in the Uffizi, is now known to be the major orchestrator of the Pazzi Conspiracy.  Long thought to be a friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, Montefeltro was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place.

More than five hundred years after the attack in the Duomo on the Medici brothers, a Renaissance scholar, Marcello Simonetta found concrete evidence of Montefeltro's prominent role in the plot.  Working in a private archive in Italy, he stumbled on a coded letter written by Frederico to Pope Sixtus IV.  Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence.

Marcello Simonetta's book, The Montelfeltro Conspiracy, was published in 2008, and is a fascinating read on the complex politics of Renaissance Italy.  On the Random House web-site, there is a You-tube  entry with great photos:  http://www.randomhouse.com/quizzes/index.cgi?Montefeltro.

Pope Sixtus IV, one of the conspirators . . .

 . . . in the Pazzi conspiracy, whose posthumous portrait by Titian appears above, is better known for building the Sistine Chapel.  This pope, who was born in Liguria in modest circumstances as Francisco della Rovere, was an ambitious man who used nepotism to the advantage of his family.  Six of the many cardinals he created were his nephews.  Pope Sixtus IV wanted to expand the Papal States to the north by purchasing the lordship of Imola, a stronghold on the border between the Papal States and Tuscany.

     Fearing the Pope's ambitious expansion, Lorenzo refused to provide the financing, at which point the Pazzi, a rival banking family in Florence, stepped in.  As a reward, Sixtus IV granted the Pazzi a monopoly at the alum mines at Tolfa--alum being an essential mordant in dyeing in the textile trade that was central to the Florentine economy -- and he assigned to the Pazzi bank lucrative rights to manage Papal revenues.

     I think this portrait might be at the Pitti Palace Museum in Florence, but I have not been able to verify that.