#lorenzo is complicit in the death of his brother in the same way that ludovico would've been with ascanio

[sforzesco]

also I'm sorry but tell me more about your Giuliano thoughts because Giuliano is the reason I'm in all of this and he gives me EMOTIONS my poor sad boy 🗡️🥀

shdhdh I had to type out a rough draft in reply in a writing doc and even then my thoughts are a little more abstract, but oh man. giuliano.

my favorite niche focus is brothers and grief/love that transgresses or transcends accepted/expected boundaries. lucullus and his brother, with lucullus waiting until his brother was old enough to hold office with him, and his biography from plutarch closing the same way it opened. with his brother. there's catullus and his brother, where his grief breaks both performances of gender and geography.

Catullan Myths: Gender, Mourning, and the Death of a Brother, Aaron M. Seider

there's ludovico and ascanio sforza. a singular defining moment for ludovico is the death of beatrice, there is a marked before or after in the man, her death has changed him irrevocably. to find ludovico, you must go to where his wife has been interred. when it seems like ascanio will die, ludovico's plans are to bring his brother's corpse back to milan and to inter the body in the same holy space as his wife. milan is a grave multiple times over.

giuliano occupies a similar space. the love the brothers medici have for each other is what makes them complementary to each other in terms of personality and function, but it's also what prompts lorenzo to a truly spectacular scale of violence that cannot contain itself. it's foundational violence! from here on out, the violence will escalate in coming generations. the punishment for the crime of his brother cascades out well beyond the point of justice, and eclipses base revenge. nothing short of absolute annihilation will do, no portraits, nothing will remain except a very sharp outline of a terrible act that was half your own making! how great is that love! it was here, it did not make anything better, and has instead made a lot of things worse.

also I'm obsessed with how giuliano has such a sharp read on francesco de' pazzi from machiavelli's writing of the event. I bet he saw his death coming.