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Night in Pompeii. Photos taken last week by Marco Macri

Night in Pompeii. October 2024

© Marco Macri

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THE APRIL PLOT 26 April 1478

Lorenzo, flushed with youth and power, would assume the direction of everything, and resolved that all transactions should bear an impress of his influence. The Pazzi, with their nobility and wealth unable to endure so many affronts, began to devise some means of vengeance. The first who spoke of any attempt against the Medici, was Francesco, who, being more sensitive and resolute than the others, determined either to obtain what was withheld from him, or lose what he still possessed.

Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

francesco de' pazzi should've gotten to stab lorenzo de' medici twice over tbh 😔ALAS

April Blood, Lauro Martines

society6 | ko-fi | twitter (pillowfort, cohost) | deviantart

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lol

please appreciate the funniest painting of Ficino (left) and Angelo (right) I've ever seen. Marsilio had blond hair, why is his dark brown? Angelo doesn't look like any other contemporary portrait I've ever seen of him lol. Pico (centre) at least looks a little like Cristofano dell'Altissimo's posthumous portrait of him and that one facial reconstruction from 2008.

This is a detail from Cosimo Rosselli's Miracle of the Sacrament painted from 1485-86 (so very much when all three men were alive. Rosselli could have gone and looked at their faces).

However, in Rosselli's defence, no one seemed able to agree on Marsilio's appearance.

Comparisons

Marsilio is on the far left and Angelo is second from right (Landino is the grumpy guy looking towards the audience and the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkondyles is the curly haired one on the far right). This is from a detail of Domenico Ghirlandaio's Angel appearing to Zacharias done for the Tornabuoni chapel. This is a contemporary portrait of all four scholars.

Marsilio on a coin from around 1499 (again, contemporary).

this is an illumination from one of his manuscripts - done when Marsilio was still alive.

another contemporary illumination from one of his manuscripts.

Posthumous Portraits

The famous bust of him by Andrea Ferrucci in the Duomo dates from 1521. Andrea was born in 1465 in Fiesole and while it seems he didn't come to Florence until after Marsilio's death, it's not out of the realm of possibility that he might have seen the man. Not likely, but not impossible.

My favourite engraved portrait of him wherein he is given the MOST haunted eyes is also quite posthumous.

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anyway, going nowhere in particular with this. I just saw the Rosselli portrait of Marsilio and was like what?? Did you never meet the man??

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love this

I regret to inform y'all that Octavian fucked. A lot. To the point that even Mark Antony called him out on it.

Suetonius, Divus Augustus, 69 (lol)

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Just in case anyone has not seen this cute medieval drawing of the ides of March

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platonic dialogues are just like.

socrates: massive chunk of text

the other guy: everything you say is beautiful and true.

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i’m up for it

Boys night on the 15th of March, in the senate! so excited so hang out with the boys, heard theres cake, hope someone brought a knife.

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Dixon, T. (2020). What is the history of anger a history of? Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 4(1), 1-34.

u r mostly right but I don’t think that Seneca’s work are in the same cultural linage with the Greek predecessors. Just check how he depicted Medea killing her sons in his version of Medea…

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Sumillera, R. G. (2020). Political Medicine in Early Modern Spain, or How Physicians Counsel the King. Sixteenth Century Journal, 51(2).

I'm not so sure about the medical metaphor used by natural philosophers - or, more precisely, medical humanists - in the late 16th century. I'm still looking into it. For now, I believe they are first and foremost physicians or philosophers. This represents their (social) identity. Then, of course they can counsel the princes if given the opportunity, using the metaphor that compares the country (in need of remedies) to a (unbalanced) body.

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I looked at the calendar and realised what day it was. And it reminds me of walking into the British Museum two summers ago and discovering that the one coin with this guy's portrait was not on display.

I guess all I have to say is “Felix Natalis.”

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Keitt, A. (2013). The devil in the Old World: anti-superstition literature, medical humanism and preternatural philosophy in early modern Spain. Angels, demons and the New World, 15-39.

When I read Examen de ingenios para las ciencias written by Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-1588) it strikes me that he seems to have absorbed the idea of elevating soul (& poetry as a divine frenzy) proposed by Marsilio Ficino. In Huarte’s theory the faculty of imagination is related to the quality heat in Galen’s temperament theory. It is heat that brings to imagination a feature of promptnesses, and establishes a direct link between imagination and (artistic) creation.

In page 109 of the English version Huarte says: “Three degrees of heat, and this quality so extended (as we have before expressed) breeds an utter loss of the understanding.”

…which, is the key to poetry writing. I am glad that there is a paper confirming my guess. (And as we know how much Ficino loves the concept of melancholy.)

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u r right

The worst part about Crowley getting dragged back to Hell in 1827 is that he would’ve thrived in the ridiculous upcoming 1830s fashions

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love you guys sooooo much🥺🥰✨💖

Love what a mess 15th century Florence was. Lorenzo pretty sure comparing the relationship between God and the Soul as a husband sodomizing his wife is a first class ticket to getting into serious trouble with Rome.

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💖💖💖💗💗💗

CESARE & LUCREZIA BORGIA, the borgias (2011 - 2013)

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I realy love these scenes (again?) and I really do believe that hbo rome has grasped the exact subtlety in the relationship between Caesar & Antony. That's why I love these scenes💞

You’ll make a lot of men very angry with your Gauls and your Celts and your plebs and such. l’ll have to double your guard.

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so gorgeous🥺

up to the elbows, and besmear our swords

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I!! Love this one!!!

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