| For those who would like to know what he really looked like - nothing like that dyspeptic guy in Assassin's Creed 2, I am glad to say. I used only more or less contemporary portraits of Lorenzo, and of course his death mask, so his real face is in there somewhere. The others are a portrait bust by Pollaiuolo, two by or after Verrocchio, and a posthumous painting. The portrait of the eleven year old Lorenzo is from the wallpaintings by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Capella dei Magi in the Palazzo Medici-Ricardi. No trickery, just morphs thanks to MorphThing.com. Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo il magnifico) was de facto ruler of Renaissance Florence, and fostered many artistic and intellectual geniuses such as Michelangelo and Angelo Poliziano. A patron of the arts, he was himself a gifted poet and athlete (if you count jousting as a sport) as well as a cunning politician (or mafioso, but that was essentially the style of politics at that time). Unfortunately, he was not so clever with the family business and managed to run the Medici bank nearly into the ground. Ah well, even the ultimate Renaissance Man can't be good at everything. His was maybe not the most beautiful face of the Renaissance - what with a badly broken nose (it may have been a birth defect) that meant that he had no sense of smell. Mind you, that could have counted as a bonus in a 15th century city with open sewers. Still, he was known to be able to charm the socks off his contemporaries, including the King of Naples ... |
