The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded
Author: Marcello Simonetta
A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved.
The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy.
More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place.
In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers, Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive its tumultuouspolitics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.
The Washington Post - David I. Kertzer
This is a fascinating tale of historical detective work
David Keymer. Modesto - Library Journal
These books offer two different approaches to the regime of Lorenzo de Medici, de facto ruler of Florence in the late 1400s. Unger's Magnificois a popularly written yet scrupulous biography, while Simonetta's Montefeltro Conspiracyis new historical detection about a violent episode in Lorenzo's life. Unger (contributing writer, New York Times) uses contemporary narratives and current scholarship to detail the life of a man initiated into politics at 16 and who consolidated his power against rivals, the Pazzis, after they famously tried to kill him (and did assassinate his brother) in the Duomo in 1478. Thenceforth, Lorenzo strengthened his hold over Florence. Facing an alliance between Pope Sixtus VI and Ferrante, king of Naples, he gambled everything, traveled to Naples, and threw himself on Ferrante's mercy, splitting the alliance and forcing his rivals to come to terms. By the time of his death, he was rightly hailed as the most sagacious politician in Italy, architect of the balance of power among the five principal realms of the Italian peninsula. Unger's comments on Lorenzo's shaky management of the family bank and misuse of the Florentine treasury are sage though hardly original. He also conveys the value of Lorenzo's vernacular poetry and famous patronage of the arts and letters.
The work by Simonetta (Italian & medieval studies, Wesleyan Univ.) is a bird of another feather, more brightly plumed. In a previously closed archive, he unearthed a ciphered letter from Federigo de Montefeltro, the famed humanist and condotierre duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus, written shortly before the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. Drawing on a contemporary book on cipherswritten by his own ancestor, Simonetta broke the letter's code. In a stunning act of historical sleuthing (moving the topic into greater depth and focus than Lauro Martines's April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici), he has unearthed solid evidence linking Montefeltro and the pope directly to the conspirators in a plot to assassinate the Medicis and end their rule of Florence. Simonetta concludes with intriguing speculation on why Botticelli, though a Medici loyalist, accepted a commission from Sixtus to paint the interior walls of the Sistine chapel in Rome, and he speculates on the political significance of Botticelli's most famous paintings, The Birth of Venusand Primavera. Both books are warmly recommended for large public libraries, and academic collections will want Simonetta. [For Magnifico, see Prepub Alert, LJ1/08.]
Kirkus Reviews
Italian historian Simonetta revisits the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. During Ascension Sunday Mass in the Duomo, the two powerful leaders of the Florentine state, Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, were attacked. Stabbed 19 times, Giuliano died; Lorenzo escaped. Members of the rival Pazzi family were subsequently inculcated and variously disposed of. Simonetta delves further back to explain how the balance of power among the Italian city-states was first upset. Two years before, the Medicis' close ally, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza, had been assassinated, leaving his scheming counselor Cicco Simonetta (a distant relative of the author) to block Florence's future need for defense. With the revelation of the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo was indeed isolated, especially in light of new evidence pointing to the collusion of the Duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro. An encrypted letter written by Federico was unearthed from a private archive in Urbino and fell into the author's hands in 2001; he painstakingly decoded it with the help of Cicco's Rules for Extracting Ciphered Letters Without a Sample. The letter reveals a ruthless Machiavellian intent to seize Florence. However, when the plot failed, and Cicco fell to usurpers of the Milanese state, Lorenzo had to scramble for support by groveling to the kingdom of Naples and patching things up with Rome. Lorenzo would later extract his revenge with his protege Botticelli's allusion to the murder and conspiracy in works such as Primavera, as delineated narrowly by the author. Dense and specialized, Simonetta's study requires significant knowledge of the era and characters involved. A work so microscopically focused that it fails to convey alarger significance. Agent: Elizabeth Sheinkman/Curtis Brown UK
New interesting textbook: A Dignified Life or The Healing Promise of Qi
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Digital Classroom
Author: Jeremy Osborn
Dreamweaver CS4 Digital Classroom is like having a personal instructor guiding readers through each lesson, while they work at their own pace. This book includes 13 self-paced lessons that let readers discover essential skills and explore new features and capabilities of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Each lesson is presented in full color with step-by-step instructions. Learning is reinforced with video tutorials and lesson files on a companion DVD that were developed by the same team of Adobe Certified Instructors and Dreamweaver experts who have created many of the official training titles for Adobe Systems. Each video tutorial is approximately five minutes long and demonstrates and explains the concepts and features covered in the lesson. This training package demonstrates how to design, develop, and maintain a fully functioning Web site. Coverage includes applying style sheets, using dynamic HTML, adding style with images and multimedia, publishing and maintaining a web site, using hyperlinks to navigate throughout a website or link to other sites on the Internet, and using databases to create dynamic websites. Jam-packed with information, this book takes users from the basics through intermediate level topics and helps readers find the information they need in a clear, approachable manner.
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