United States or Montenegro ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The study of the classics, especially of Plutarch, at this time, as also during the French Revolution, fired the imagination of patriots. Lorenzino de' Medici appealed to the example of Timoleon in 1537, and Pietro Paolo Boscoli to that of Brutus in 1513.
In 1513 he was suspected of complicity in the conjuration of Pietropaolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, was imprisoned in the Bargello, and tortured to the extent of four turns of the rack. It seems that he was innocent. Leo X. released him by the act of amnesty passed upon the event of his assuming the tiara; and Machiavelli immediately retired to his farm near San Casciano.
Boscoli makes answer: 'Father, waste no time on this; the philosophers have taught it me already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ. What follows, the communion, the leave-taking and the execution is very touchingly described; one point deserves special mention.
When he murdered his cousin, was he really actuated by the patriotic desire to rid his country of a monster? Did he imitate the Roman Brutus in the noble spirit of his predecessors, Olgiati and Boscoli, martyrs to the creed of tyrannicide?
The unhappy transgressor here referred to the same Pierpaolo Boscoli who has been already mentioned who in 1513 took part in an attempt against the newly restored family of the Medici, is a faithful mirror of the religious confusion then prevalent.
It comes out that these partisans of Savonarola knew their Bible very imperfectly; Boscoli can only say the Paternoster and Ave Maria, and earnestly begs Luca to exhort his friends to study the sacred writings, for only what a man has learned in life does he possess in death. Luca then reads and explains to him the story of the Passion according to the Gospel of St.
No example was more popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante, lies with Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against Giuliano, Giovanni, and Giulio Medici failed , was an enthusiastic admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find a Cassius.
When Boscoli laid his head on the block, he begged the executioner to delay the stroke for a moment: 'During the whole time since the announcement of the sentence he had been striving after a close union with God, without attaining it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God. It is clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola which was troubling him.
The tyranny thus established was less secure, inasmuch as it openly rested upon violence, than Lorenzo's power had been; nor were there signs wanting that the burghers could ill brook their servitude. The conspiracy of Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi proved that the Medicean brothers ran daily risk of life.
Of this peculiar moral condition the records of the numerous tyrannicides supply many interesting examples. Girolamo Olgiati offered prayers to S. Ambrose for protection before he stabbed the Duke of Milan in S. Stephen's Church. The Pazzi conspirators, intimidated by the sanctity of the Florentine Duomo, had to employ a priest to wield the sacrilegious dagger. Pietro Paolo Boscoli's last confession, after the failure of his attempt to assassinate the Medici in 1513, adds further details in illustration of the mixture of religious feeling with patriotic paganism. Luca della Robbia, the nephew of the great sculptor of that name, and himself no mean artist, visited his friend Boscoli on the night of his execution, and wrote a minute account of their interview. Both of these men were members of the Confraternit
Word Of The Day