The Feast That Is Never Satisfied

The Feast That Is Never Satisfied

Florence, 1474, and presentRinaldo was not an evil man in any simple sense. He was a man who had learned, within the institution that raised him, that certain things were his by right of his position: the deference of everyone below him in the hierarchy, the right to...
What Institutional Violence Looks Like

What Institutional Violence Looks Like

Florence, April 26, 1478Giuliano de Medici was stabbed nineteen times in the Cathedral this morning during High Mass. Lorenzo escaped, barely, through the sacristy. The signal for the attack was the elevation of the host. They used the consecrated moment. They always...
The Bishop Called Me Damned

The Bishop Called Me Damned

Florence, 1473His name was Rinaldo Orsini. A bishop. My cousin by blood, which made the verdict more precise in its particular cruelty.I was fifteen years old. I had been in his household since infancy, sent north from Umbria after the deaths of both my parents. He...
The Workshop on the Via dei Servi

The Workshop on the Via dei Servi

Florence, October 14, 1471He was not yet thirty and already the most unsettling mind in any room he entered. I watched him from across Verrocchio’s workshop today, where he was bent over a drawing of a water wheel, cross-hatching shadow with his left hand in a...
What Institutional Violence Looks Like

Banks, Not Armies

Florence, 1490sThe thing about the Medici that is most relevant to the present moment is not the art patronage, which is what they are remembered for, but the banking. Lorenzo understood something that most political leaders of his era did not fully grasp: that...