Victoria

= **I am Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.** =

People today mostly know me as Lorenzo de Medici, but before, I was know as Lorenzo il Magnifico (Lorenzo the Magnifcent) by the contemporary Florentines. I was an Italian de facto* ruler and statesman of the Florentine Republic. I was a diplomat, politician and patron of scholar, artists and poets. I was born in Florence in 1449 and I died in Careggi in 1492 at the age of 43. My father was called Piero de' Medici and my mother was Lucrezia de' Medici. I helped a lot of people during the Renaissance, which included Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Andrea del Verrochio, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Although I didn't comiision many works from those artists, I helped them secure comissions from other patrons. I was an artist myself! I was a poet, writing my poetry in my native Tuscan (Italio-Dalmatian language spoken in Tuscany, Italy). I celebrated life in my poetry even while - mostly in later works - acknowledging with melancholy fragility and instability of the human condition. Love, feasts and light dominate my verse. My grandfather, Cosimo de' Medici, had started the collection of books which became the Medici Library (also know the Laurentian Library) and I expanted it. My agents got large numbers of classical works from the East and I employed a large workshop to copy my books and disseminate their content across Europe. I also suported the development of humanism through my cirlcle of scholarly friends who studied Greek philosophers and attempted to merge the ideas of Plato with Christianity; among this group were the philosophers Marsilio ficino, Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. I led Florence to its "highest flowering" and I made it the most powerful stae in Italy. Macchiavelli said I was 'the greatest patron of literature and art that any prince has ever been'.  I think this contributions were particularly important, because maybe none of the artists and scholars mentioned above would have been famous without my contributions to the renaissance. I also helped to spread some classical booksm when I wmployed the workshop. I was a poet, meaning I was also an artist, so I could understand the ones I was comiisioning.

My portrait by Giorgio Vasari.



 * de facto is a Latin expression tha means "concerning fact".

References...
Wikipedia -> Lorenzo de' Medici. __http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_de%27_Medici__ Picture. __http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Vasari-Lorenzo.jpg__ De facto.

__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto__ Hyperhistory.com -> Lorenzo de' Medici 1949-1492 Italian statesman. __http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/people_n2/persons6_n2/medici.html__