A century of riding high

When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Florentine government. Ever the art patron, Lorenzo commissioned Botticelli, the Florentine master, to depict the hanged conspirators in lifelike frescoes on a government building. The paintings were only removed after the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494.

The origin of the dispute arose when the Pazzi were about to receive a windfall inheritance from a female cousin. As Lorenzo observed in his memoirs, ‘It is hard for the rich to live in Florence, unless they rule the state.’ To counter the threat, Lorenzo disinherited his banking rivals by passing a law that gave nephews precedence over daughters.