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After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro , and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,8 which is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore, related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country's sake.
They went to Venice, and 'I, says Bibboni, 'being most intimately acquainted with all that city, and provided there with many friends, soon quietly contrived to know where Lorenzino lodged, and took a room in the neighbourhood, and spent some days in seeing how we best might rule our conduct. Bibboni soon discovered that Lorenzino never left his palace; and he therefore remained in much perplexity, until, by good luck, Ruberto Strozzi arrived from France in Venice, bringing in his train a Navarrese servant, who had the nickname of Spagnoletto.
I have elsewhere given at length reasons for believing rather that whispered bit of scandal of the time which declared the pope, Clement VII., to be his father. When Florence fell he became duke, and reigned over the unhappy city for seven years, in such sort that the murder of him in 1537 by his kinsman Lorenzino, traitorously and cowardly done as the deed was, was deemed the act of a patriot.
The vigour of the workmanship indicates that the bust was begun soon after Michael Angelo left Florence in 1584, and may indicate Michael Angelo’s feelings towards the tyrant Alessandro de’ Medici. We may remember in this connection that the exiles nicknamed Lorenzino, his murderer, Brutus.
This is the quarter of San Polo, one corner of which, somewhere between the back of the Palazzo Foscari and the Campo di San Polo, was the scene of a memorable act of vengeance in the year 1546. Here Lorenzino de' Medici, the murderer of his cousin Alessandro, was at last tracked down and put to death by paid cut-throats.
It is recorded that one of the wounds given by the bravo Scoronconcolo, whom Lorenzino had hired to assist him in the murder, and who ran up to complete the job when his master was disabled by being fast held by the teeth of Alexander, was a stab in the face.
Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous among them. Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs.
The story goes that when Lorenzino stabbed him as he slept on a bed in Lorenzino's own house, to which he had been inveigled in the hope of meeting there a certain lady, the wife of a Ginori of the time, Alexander started up, and, seizing the thumb of the murderer between his teeth, held him so firmly that he could not have escaped had not a bravo whom he had hired to aid him come to his assistance.
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.
"You might say that the moment when Lorenzino killed Alessandro was the most auspicious for a deed of that kind.
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