Introduction

The Florentine vernacular used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a dry proverb to underline that a man, knowing that he did everything he could to sort out a problem, could not blame himself anymore: “fa che dei, sia che puo.” Lorenzo de’ Medici at the end of the fifteenth century changed, softened, and polished the old dictum and by absorbing it into an intimate self-portrait he altered definitively its popular and formulaic nature into a much more sophisticated, personalized and intellectual discourse about his natura. His discourse introduces a fine analysis of the balance between feelings and reason, and between self representation and reality: “pure io non sono apto a disperarmi per questo, perche, facto che ho quello che debbo, tu sai che non sono di natura che pigli troppa molestia di quello che adviene.”

Lorenzo de Medici represents a milestone in research and imagination on the Italian Renaissance: the edition of Lorenzo de Medici's letters was inaugurated in 1955 “with the hope that a less romanticized portrait of him would result.” Ironically, rather than painting a more “realistic portrait of Lorenzo, recent research is discovering instead that “it is not possible to separate the man from the aura of legend and that the latter constitutes an indissoluble aspect of his historical character.” Lorenzo's image-making was a political as well as a psychological necessity of the day, and his correspondence offers insight into his character and into the subtlety of his public style, at the same time illuminating the political reality of late fifteenth-century Italy, its discursive resources, and the psychological adjustments it required.

In this context, today I will read Lorenzo's letters looking for “emotions,” that is aiming to find out which words and expressions in his diplomatic and political writings reveal some emotionality, and when and why he chose to resort to them, or to let them filter in his letters, in relation to different kinds of linguistic, textual, and rhetorical discursive resources. An “emotional turn,” as Ferente recently said, is in fact entering the medieval studies on politics. Different sources and ages are increasingly investigated from an “emotional” point of view, aiming to answer to various questions mostly related to the debate on political languages.