Piero (di Cosimo) [the Gouty] de’ Medici, Lord of Florence
(b Florence, 1416; reg 1464–9; d Florence, 3 Dec 1469).
Son of Cosimo de’ Medici. Raised in early humanist Florence, he was trained to assume his father’s civic and cultural leadership. His artistic tastes were apparently stimulated less by the aesthetic ideals of Republican Florence, however, than by those manifested in such north Italian centres of patronage as Ferrara and Venice, where the Medici lived in exile in 1433–4. Piero watched over family interests at the Council of Ferrara (1437–9) and responded positively to the style of Este court patronage, which he may have sought to emulate (with the wealth of the Medici bank behind him) in the decorations he commissioned for the new Palazzo Medici in Florence. His aesthetic preferences may be deduced from such commissions, which contrast with the large-scale ecclesiastical projects that his father sponsored: typically they show precise, often minute detailing (as in a bust of Piero by Mino da Fiesole), brilliant and resonating colour and rich surface finish.
Francis Ames-Lewis