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Updated: June 2, 2025
Dr. Burckhardt felt, no doubt, the necessity of linking Pinzone to the Borgias, that the alleged guilt of the former may recoil upon the latter, and so he accomplished it in this facile and irresponsible manner. Oh the art of writing history in sweeping statements to support a preconceived point of view! Oh that white powder of the Borgias! Giovio tells us all about it.
Afterwards Pomponius Laetus took up the same subject, and acted as producer when Plautus was put on the stage in the houses of great churchmen. That these representations became less in common after 1520, is mentioned by Giovio, as we have seen, among the causes of the decline of eloquence.
The full title of the work is: Joh. He wrote with considerable elegance, judgment, and force, contradicting the assertions of the historian Paolo Giovio, who was a strong partisan of the Medicis, and displaying much animosity towards them. This book aroused the ire of the powerful family of the Medicis, and was suppressed by public authority.
In 1521 Bigio competed with Andrea and Pontormo, in the Medici Villa at Poggio a Cajano; Andrea's Casar receiving Tribute occupies one wall of the hall, and Francia Bigio's Triumph of Cicero another. The subjects were selected by the historian, Messer Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera; it only remained for the artists to make the most of the chosen themes.
He was short of stature, spindle-shanked, rachitic and malformed, and of his face, with its colossal nose, loose mouth and shallow brow, Giovio says that "it was the ugliest ever seen on man." Such was the person of the young king he was twenty-four years of age at the time who poured his legions into Rome, and all full-armed as if for work of immediate destruction.
But as Giovio does it naturally, and lays no special stress upon it, we are not offended if, in his melodious language, the cardinals appear as 'Senatores, their dean as 'Princeps Senatus, excommunication as 'Dirae, and the carnival as 'Lupercalia. The example of this author alone is enough to warn us against drawing a hasty inference from these peculiarities of style as to the writer's whole mode of thinking.
Machiavelli and Paolo Giovio, for example, both praise the massacre at Sinigaglia as a masterstroke of art, without uttering a word in condemnation of its perfidy. Machiavelli sneers at Gianpaolo Baglioni because he had not the courage to strangle his guest Julius II. and to crown his other crimes with this signal act of magnanimity.
In this sense, for example, Machiavelli conceives the character of Stefano Porcari; of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza , the documents tell us about the same; and the assassination of Duke Alessandro of Florence is ascribed by Varchi himself to the thirst for fame which tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici. Still more stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.
Guicciardini repeats the same, but Paolo Giovio, who had seen Lodovico at Como, asserts that his complexion was fair, and he owed this surname to the mulberry-tree which he adopted as his device, because it waits till the winter is well over to put forth its leaves, and is therefore called the most prudent of all trees.
The terrible way in which Ferdinand of Naples handled the conspiracy of the nobles of his kingdom made him, in the eyes of Italy, not horrible but great; and Macchiavelli speaks of the trick with which Cæsar Borgia outwitted his treacherous condottieri at Sinigaglia as a "masterstroke," while the Bishop Paolo Giovio called it "the most beautiful piece of deception."
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