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.
No comments:
Post a Comment