A true Renaissance man

Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli. It would not be an exaggeration — although it is fashionable to dispute it — to say that he was the central figure of the golden age of the Florentine renaissance.

He stamped his image on his city and his time to an extent unequalled in European history since Caesar and Augustus. And he did so, unlike the Romans, without armies at his back.