Donatello's bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici rule in Florence - Bibliography

(64.) The proceedings were published as Acta Concilii Parisiensis in the edition of Jean Gerson's Opera omnia, ed. Louis Ellics du Pin, 5 vols. (Antwerp: Sumptibus Societatis, 1706), vol. 5, 49-342. Petit's Justificatio Ducis Burgundiae is included there, 15-42, as is the Acta in Concilio Constantiensi, 341-1012.

(65.) Coville, 497.

(66.) Ibid., 135-77.

(67.) Guenee (as in n. 63), 258-60. The proximate cause of this practical experience and legal expertise was the assassination in 1412 of Duke Gianmaria of Milan, heir of Giangaleazzo Visconti, but equally relevant was the earlier Milanese history of acknowledged tyrants like Bernabo Visconti, which had already raised the issues of what persons and means were authorized to end a tyrant's reign.

(68.) Cosimo de' Medici and other Florentines attended the Council of Constance motivated by ardent support of John XXIII, who had made the Medici papal bankers. John was deposed at the Council of Constance and offered refuge in Florence. He was subsequently accorded the rare honor of a tomb in the Baptistery of Florence, created by Donatello. On these issues, see Sarah Blake McHam, "Donatello's Tomb of Pope John XXIII," in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 146-73, 232-42. In addition, a record of the debates between Gerson and Petit in Paris and Constance is contained in the Opera omnia of John Gerson, a copy of which was in the Library of S. Marco; see Ullman and Stadter, 175, nos. 435-37.

(69.) Bernhard Bess, "Die Lehre vom Tyrannenmord auf dem Konstanzer Konzil," Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte 36 (1916): 1-61.

(70.) Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, 40 vols. (London: John Hodges, 1891), vol. 2, 216-37, provides a succinct account of Stefano Porcari's attempt to kill Pope Nicholas V and end papal rule in Rome. Porcari claimed that he wanted to reinstate a republic in the city of Rome modeled on that of ancient Rome.

(71.) Bortolo Belotti, II dramma di Gerolamo Olgiati (Milan: L. F. Cogliati del Dr. Guido Martinelli, 1929), provides a detailed account of the Milanese conspiracy. The three conspirators, Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani, Gerolamo Olgiati, and Carlo Visconti, were inspired by the teachings of the court humanist Cola Montano. They were convinced of their legitimate right to rid Milan of Sforza, whom they considered a tyrant, and invoked the model of heroic Romans like Cassius and Brutus who had also been willing to die for the benefit of the state.

(72.) Rinuccini's treatise is translated in Renee Neu Watkins, Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 193-224. Rinuccini considered Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant Tellingly, he has Alietheus, the interlocutor called "the Truthful," speak the following words: "In all Italy ... there is no city [Florence] that has so energetically and enduringly championed the cause of liberty.... Thus did they [Jacopo and Francesco dei Pazzi] undertake a glorious deed, an action worthy of the highest praise. They tried to restore their own liberty and that of the country.... Men of sound judgment will always rank them with Dion of Syracuse, Aristogiton and Harmodius of Athens, Brutus and Cassius of Rome, and in our own day, Giovanni and Geronimo Andrea of Milan" (195-96).