A voice of moderation

A close reading of Vespasiano’s Lives suggests that Vespasiano was neither a “pro” or “anti” Medici partisan, but rather that he tried to thread the political middle in fifteenth-century Florence. This article suggests that the actions of nineteenth and twenty-century editors of the Lives may have helped cloud later views of Vespasiano’s politics. In fact, Vespasiano disapproved of several changes made to the Florentine government under the Medici family even as he also disapproved of extreme measures taken to remove the Medici from power. Consequently, Vespasiano’s moderation shaped his descriptions of the Pazzi Conspiracy across three different Lives and contrasts with the accounts of more partisan contemporaries like Angelo Poliziano and Alamanno Rinuccini

Business · Moderation · Computer Science · History of Emotions Research · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Social Psychology