Shortly before midday on Sunday 26 April 1478, a sudden commotion disturbed the celebration of mass in Florence cathedral. As the priest raised the host, and the sanctuary bell tolled, a man named Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli pulled a knife out from under his cloak and plunged it into the body of Giuliano de’ Medici, younger brother of Lorenzo de’ Medici. As he reeled back, Giuliano was stabbed ferociously and repeatedly by another man, Francesco de’ Pazzi: there were found to be nineteen separate wounds on the body. Lorenzo was himself the target of two other assassins in the congregation – malcontent priests – but they bungled the job. Bleeding profusely from a wound in his neck, he was hustled into the safety of the north sacristy. The great bronze doors were locked behind him, though in the scuffle one of his friends, Francesco Nori, was fatally stabbed, also by the knife of Bernardo di Bandino.
This was the day of the Pazzi Conspiracy,11 also called the April Plot, a desperate attempted coup d’état against the rule of the Medici, fomented by the rich Florentine merchant-family the Pazzi, discreetly backed by Pope Sixtus IV, and involving various anti-Medici interests including the Archbishop of Pisa. There are contemporary accounts of the plot by the poet Agnolo Poliziano, who was actually in the cathedral when the attacks happened; by the diarist Luca Landucci, who witnessed the grisly reprisals that followed; and by Florentine historians like Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. The construction of the event which is found in these sources, and which has been handed down to our own day, is either overtly or implicitly pro-Medici, but a recent book by Lauro Martines has opened up other angles. The plotters’ motives were tangled, but there were genuine grievances at the cynicism of Medici power-politics – what Martines calls Lorenzo’s ‘piecemeal usurpation’ of Florence’s much-trumpeted political freedoms by bribery, vote-rigging and pilfering of public funds.12 The assassination of the Duke of Milan a year or so previously was a precedent – the death-blows similarly struck during high mass in the city’s cathedral – and the barbarous execution of his assassins was a portent.
In the confusion at the cathedral the assassins escaped, but the other half of the plan – the taking of the Palazzo della Signoria by a contingent of Perugian mercenaries – had failed, and when Jacopo de’ Pazzi galloped into the piazza shouting ‘Popolo e libertà!’ (‘For the people and freedom!’) he found the doors of the Palazzo barred. The warning bell known as La Vacca was booming from its tower; armed citizens were pouring into the streets; the uprising had failed. Jacopo, the head of the family in Florence, had initially been sceptical about the putsch, which was promoted by his nephew Francesco, head of the Pazzi bank in Rome. ‘You will break your necks,’ he warned the conspirators. He was eventually persuaded, though his prediction proved accurate, and his own neck was among those that got broken.
Now began the bloody reprisal. The grim etiquettes of Florentine public execution were suspended: the first night was nothing less than a mass lynching. According to Landucci, there were more than twenty conspirators hanging out of the windows of the Signoria and the Bargello. A further sixty, at least, died over the next few days. On that first day, as the revenge squads roamed the streets, Lorenzo appeared at a window of the Palazzo Medici, a scarf bandaged around his wounded neck: the vanquisher. According to Vasari, Verrocchio was commissioned to produce three life-sized wax figures of him, dressed exactly as he was at that moment of bitter triumph. No trace of these remains, nor of Botticelli’s portraits of the hanged traitors, for which the painter received 40 florins in mid-July.13 Thus the studios served their political masters.
On 28 April Lorenzo received a discreet visit from Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo’s future patron – the younger brother of the assassinated duke, Galeazzo Maria. Though the latter’s ten-year-old son, Gian Galeazzo, was duke apparent, Ludovico was now the strongman of Milan. It was he who controlled the puppet-strings, and he would retain them, remarkably, for more than twenty years. He brought condolences and promises of support to Lorenzo.
Of the four assassins in the cathedral, three were captured. Francesco de’ Pazzi was hanged on the first night of the conspiracy, and the two priests who had bungled the assault on Lorenzo perished on 5 May – it is said they were castrated before being hanged. The fourth man, the double-murderer Bernardo di Bandino, was cleverer or luckier, or both. In the first confusion after the killing of Giuliano he had hidden, just a few yards from the murder scene, in the bell-tower of the cathedral. Somehow, despite the watch set for him he got out of Florence; he made it to the Adriatic coast at Senigallia and thence took ship out of Italy. He disappeared. But the eyes and ears of the Medici were everywhere, and in the following year came news that Bandino was in Constantinople. Diplomatic representations were made by the Florentine consul, Lorenzo Carducci; envoys were loaded with gifts; and Bandino was seized by the officers of the Sultan. He was brought back to Florence in chains, was interrogated and doubtless tortured, and on 28 December 1479 was hanged from the windows of the Bargello.14
Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli hanging.
Leonardo was there, for the sketch by him showing Bandino’s hanging body was undoubtedly done in situ. The punctilious notes in the top left-corner of the paper record exactly what Bandino was wearing for the occasion: ‘Small tan-coloured berretta; doublet of black serge; a black jerkin lined; a blue coat lined with fox fur [literally ‘throats of foxes’] and the collar of the jerkin covered with stippled velvet, red and black; black hose.’ These notes give an air of reportage to the drawing: a small moment of history is being witnessed. They also suggest that Leonardo intended to work the drawing up into a painting of the sort that Botticelli had produced the previous year. Perhaps he had been commissioned to do so, or perhaps he was just struck by this scene taking place virtually on the doorstep of Ser Piero’s house.15
As the body dangles in its final indignity, with bound hands and unshod feet, Leonardo captures a strange sense of repose. Bandino’s thin face with the downturned mouth has almost a wistful look about it, as if contemplating from this new and drastic vantage-point the errors he had committed. In the bottom left-hand corner Leonardo does another drawing of the head, adjusting its angle slightly, giving to it that tilt of exhausted resignation so often seen in depictions of the crucified Christ.