Lorenzo de Medici Inherits Florence

1469

The twenty-year-old grandson of Cosimo, poet and athlete, took over family affairs after his father Piero's death. Florence's unofficial ruler for the next twenty-three years, he would sponsor Botticelli, Verrocchio, the young Michelangelo, and Poliziano, and survive an assassination conspiracy that killed his brother in the cathedral. Known as il Magnifico, Lorenzo was less a patron of painting than of philosophy, yet his era became synonymous with Florentine brilliance.