Sublime

The bribe bought Florence peace for a year, but in June 1502 Borgia was back. As his army sacked more surrounding towns, he commanded the leaders in Florence to send a delegation to hear his latest demands. Two people were selected to try to deal with him. The elder was Francesco Soderini, a wily Church leader who led one of the anti-Medici

Giuliano de’ Medici died. Beginning during his early career in Florence, Leonardo’s relationship to the Medici family had been uncomfortable. “The Medici made me and destroyed me,” he wrote cryptically in his notebook at the time of Giuliano’s death.2 He then accepted the French invitation, and in the summer of 1516, before the snows made the Alps

Andrea Toma-celli, who had used Boldrino to help him restore order in the Papal States, decided that he would anticipate Boldrino’s next desertion and win popularity with the local inhabitants by having him murdered at a dinner party in Macerata. Bold-rino’s company is said to have carried the body of their murdered leader with them for two years

church of Santa Maria del Fiore. It had once been a magnificent piece of raw stone, but an unskillful sculptor had mistakenly bored a hole through it where there should have been a figure’s legs, generally mutilating it. Piero Soderini, Florence’s mayor, had contemplated trying to save the block by commissioning Leonardo da Vinci to work on it, or

Florence had controlled the town of Pisa, just over fifty miles down the Arno River toward the coast of the Mediterranean, for much of the fifteenth century. This was critical for Florence, which had no other outlet to the sea. But in 1494 Pisa managed to wriggle away and become a free republic. Florence’s middling army was incapable of breaching

The French writer Stendhal, in his 1817 travelogue, Rome, Naples, and Florence, described

Borgia next set his sights on Florence, which cowered in dread. Its treasury was depleted, and it had no military to defend it. In May 1501, as his forces neared Florence’s walls, the ruling Signoria of the city capitulated by agreeing to pay Borgia 36,000 florins a year as protection money and…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to

The Florentine authorities reluctantly let him leave at the end of May 1506 partly for diplomatic reasons. Florence had been protected from Borgia and then other potential invaders by the French king, Louis XII, who then controlled Milan and admired The Last Supper and its artist. Louis expressed his desire to have Leonardo return to Milan, at