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Note: Piero the Gouty
Tag(s): Italy, Medici
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To his grandfather’s infinite sorrow, this beloved boy died in 1461 shortly before his sixth birthday. And two years later Giovanni himself, having steadfastly refused to diet to lessen his great weight, died of a heart attack. Cosimo never recovered from the shock.
LOCATION: 1374

PIERO WAS forty-eight years old when he became head of the family. The perpetual ill health which had afflicted him since early manhood, and which had been responsible for his nickname, ‘il Gottoso’ (‘the Gouty’), had prevented him from taking as active a part in either the business of the bank or the affairs of Florence as would otherwise have been expected of the heir to the Medici fortune.
LOCATION: 1426

Indeed, his nature displayed little of the edgy irritability so often associated with prolonged illness. He was considerate, patient and courteous.
LOCATION: 1434

In France, in fact, King Louis XI had been so taken with him that, soon after he became head of the family, he was granted permission to decorate one of the balls of the Medici arms with three of the lilies of the House of Valois.
LOCATION: 1440

That most Florentines were prepared for the moment to accord to Piero the privileges and respect enjoyed by his father was due partly at least to the wife he had married and the five attractive, healthy children she had borne him. For Lucrezia Tornabuoni was a remarkable woman,
LOCATION: 1441

Lorenzo, in particular, was precociously gifted. He did not share the good looks which – rare in the Medici – his father and younger brother both enjoyed. But his sallow, irregular features were powerful and arresting; and though his movements were jerky and ungainly, he was tall, strong and athletic. His education, thorough and wide-ranging, had been supervised at first by Gentile Becchi, the Latinist and diplomat, and later by Cristoforo Landino, translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante, and Marsilio Ficino, his grandfather’s protégé and friend, whose allowance his father continued to pay.
LOCATION: 1455

Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli had recently been joined by the Archbishop of Florence’s brother Dietisalvi Neroni, Florence’s first resident ambassador in Venice and later ambassador in Milan. Between them these three men constituted a formidable opposition to the Medici;
LOCATION: 1472

Soderini returned to his own palazzo convinced – as Pitti, Acciaiuoli and Neroni were all now convinced – that the only chance of success against the Medici lay in armed rebellion.
LOCATION: 1491

the same time he added numerous ancient coins to the collection assembled by his father, bought great numbers of rare manuscript books for the Medici Library, and had many volumes copied out for him and brilliantly illuminated. Antonio Averlino Filarete was told that Piero spent hours looking at these books, turning over the pages ‘as if they were a pile of gold’:
LOCATION: 1529

It had been one of Donatello’s last requests that he should be buried near Cosimo in the church of San Lorenzo. Piero ensured that this request was fulfilled and undertook to bear the cost of his interment in the crypt next to Cosimo’s tomb. When the coffin was carried there, it was followed by the Medici and
LOCATION: 1541

In adapting classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and of her rulers, no artist was more in sympathy with Piero’s ideas than Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli. At the time of Donatello’s death, he was twenty-two years old.
LOCATION: 1564

Gozzoli painted a memorial to the history of the Medici family
LOCATION: 1591

As in the case of other pictures which he commissioned, Piero took great interest in the painting of this picture, instructing Gozzoli to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich and brilliant as possible.
LOCATION: 1611