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Updated: May 21, 2025
He stayed in the Vatican three days and then set forth again to join his army, which was besieging Imola. It was his intention first to take this city and then attack Forli, in the castle of which the mistress of the two cities, Catarina Sforza, had established herself for the purpose of resisting him.
Of the grand equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Leonardo never finished more than the model in clay, which was considered a masterpiece. The profound anatomical studies which Leonardo made for this work still exist.
Yet it must be borne in mind that the Duke of Urbino was far less representative of his class than Francesco Sforza, and that the aims and notions of Gian Galeazzo Visconti formed the ideal to which an Italian prince of spirit, if he had the opportunity, aspired.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we see the bastard born of a noble, as noble as his father, displaying his father's arms without debruisement and enjoying his rank and inheritance unchallenged on the score of his birth, even though that inheritance should be a throne as witness Lucrezia's husband Giovanni, who, though a bastard of the house of Sforza, succeeded, nevertheless, his father in the Tyranny of Pesaro and Cotignola.
And being taken with her, it may be that Giovanni listened the more readily to her intercessions on my poor behalf. Since it was she who begged this thing, he could not wholly refuse. But since he was Giovanni Sforza, he could not wholly grant.
When Ascanio Sforza, who, as we know, had stayed at Milan, learned the news of this cowardly desertion, he supposed that his cause was lost and that it would be the best plan for him to fly, before he found himself a prisoner in the hand's of his brother's old subjects: such a change of face on the people's part would be very natural, and they might propose perhaps to purchase their own pardon at the price of his liberty; so he fled by night with the chief nobles of the Ghibelline party, taking the road to Piacenza, an his way to the kingdom of Naples.
In Mantua and Ferrara his friends shed secret tears over his fate. "Duke Ercole is very sad," writes our friend the annalist, "for his son-in-law's sake, and so are all the people." And Caterina Sforza, in her lonely captivity within the walls of the Castel' Sant' Angelo, wept over her uncle's ruin and the downfall of her race.
Pavia was sacked by the French, and Lombardy paid with tears and blood for its loyalty to the race of Sforza. The period of anarchy and confusion which followed is described in mournful language by the Milanese chroniclers.
Preserve for me the position and the little nest which, thanks to the mercy of Milan, my ancestors left me, and I and my men of war will ever remain at the service of your Excellency. GIOVANNI SFORZA. ROME, April, 1494. The letter plainly discloses other and deeper concerns of the writer; such, for example, as the future possession of his domain of Pesaro.
He was succeeded by his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who, upon his coronation at Rheims, assumed the title of King of France and the Two Sicilies and Duke of Milan a matter which considerably perturbed Federigo of Aragon and Lodovico Sforza.
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