Sperandio's Renaissance Medals

With the ever-increasing enthusiasm, in the courtly and scholarly circles of fifteenth- century Italy, for the study and analysis of ancient historical texts, the writings, for example, of Suetonius or Plutarch, came the desire to create historical records of the events and leading figures of the Quattrocento itself. Humanists, attempting to attract patronage or commissioned by their princely employers, wrote biographies of the rulers of Italy's city-states while they were alive and funeral orations for them after their deaths. These writings were intended to be read in the future, to ensure the posthumous fame of the figure in question and were not always very accurate. It would not have been politic, for instance, for his biographer, Decembrio, to describe the grotesque physical feebleness of the last Visconti duke of Milan, Filippo Maria, who was unable even to lift his head unaided. Rulers were ritually praised for their learning, their military skills, their magnificence, their magnanimity nr their dispensation of justice while their consorts' vaunted chastity and modesty formed the subject of contemporary panegyrics. These were not chronicles dispassionately recording events from day to day. Rather they were intended to be the chief source for posterity for the lives of deliberately glorified individuals.