A group of about fifty armed Medici supporters burst into the Palazzo della Signoria, and, joined by the palace guard, attacked the Perugians. Having killed them all, they rushed out into the Piazza again, bearing the dripping heads of their victims on the ends of lances and swords. News of Giuliano’s murder had by now reached the Palace where immediately a rope was tied round Jacopo di Poggio’s neck, the other end was fixed to a transom and his body was hurled from a window. Archbishop Salviati was treated in the same way. So, too, was Francesco de’ Pazzi who, still bleeding profusely from the thigh, had been dragged from his hiding place in the family palace and stripped naked. Two of the Archbishop’s companions were strangled, and their bodies also hurled out. All five bodies were left dangling above the heads of the surging mob in the Piazza, twisting and swaying in the shadows beneath the machicolations of the northern wall. Poliziano, who was in the Piazza at the time, recorded the gruesome fact that as the Archbishop rolled and struggled at the end of his rope, his eyes goggling in his head, he fixed his teeth into Francesco de’ Pazzi’s naked body.
Following the fierce lead of the executioners in the Palazzo della Signoria, hundreds of people now ran through the streets, seeking out other conspirators or any unpopular citizen who could conveniently be charged with complicity in the plot. They swarmed beneath the windows of the Medici Palace, demanding to see Lorenzo who appeared before them, his neck in bandages, his brocade waistcoat covered with blood, to assure them that he was only slightly injured and to beg them not to wreak vengeance on those whom they merely suspected of murder. He urged them to save their energy to resist the enemies of the State who had engineered the conspiracy, and who would now undoubtedly attack the city that had thwarted it.
If the people cheered his words, they did not heed them. They attacked the conspirators, and those whom they chose to accuse of conspiracy, killing some, mutilating others, and dragging their remains through the streets. For several days the rioting continued, country people pouring into the city to see what pleasures or rewards were to be had, until some eighty people had been killed.
Few of those involved in the attempted coup escaped punishment. The young cardinal, Raffaele Riario, who had stood as though stunned by the High Altar during the uproar in the Cathedral until led to a safe place inside the old sacristy, was rescued by Lorenzo who sent some of his servants to bring him back to the Medici Palace. After the rioting was over, Lorenzo had him escorted in disguise to Rome where, to the end of his days, so it was said, his face never lost the pallor which the ghastly events he had witnessed had imposed upon it. Raffaele Maffei, a brother of the priest who had tried to murder Lorenzo, and Averardo Salviati, a relative of the Archbishop, were also saved from the mob through Lorenzo’s intervention. But with the one exception of a certain Napoleone Francesi, whose complicity in the plot was in any case by no means clear, not one of the known conspirators escaped either public or private vengeance. Jacopo de’ Pazzi, so overcome by despair at the failure of the plot that he boxed his own ears and threw himself to the floor in despair and rage, managed to escape from the city to the village of Castagno; but the villagers recognized him and brought him back to Florence where, after being tortured, he was stripped naked and strung from a window of the Palazzo della Signoria next to the Archbishop. Later, he was buried in Santa Croce; but the people, blaming the subsequent heavy rains upon his evil spirit, dug up the body and threw it into a ditch in an apple orchard. From here also it was later removed, to be dragged through the streets by a mob shouting, ‘Make way for the great knight!’ It was then propped against the door of the Pazzi Palace where, to the accompaniment of obscene jokes and cries of ‘Open! Your master wishes to enter!’ its decomposing head was used as a knocker. Eventually, the putrid corpse was thrown into the Arno from which it was fished by a gang of children who strung it up on the branch of a willow tree, flogged it and tossed it back into the water again.
The two priests, Antonio Maffei and Stefano da Bagnone, were also discovered in hiding. Both were castrated, then hanged. Renato de’ Pazzi, Jacopo’s brother, who was found in a house in the Mugello, was also executed, being hanged in a peasant’s grey smock ‘as if to make a masquerade’, though his involvement in the plot was never established. Other members of his family escaped with terms of imprisonment in the dungeons of Volterra, though Lorenzo’s sister’s husband, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, who seems to have been innocent, was merely confined to his villa.
Montesecco, one of the last of the conspirators to be taken, was discovered on I May. He was closely questioned under torture and gave a detailed account of the origins of the conspiracy and of the Pope’s involvement in it. All the information which he could give having been forced out of him, he was, as a soldier, beheaded by sword on 4 May in the courtyard of the Bargello. Baroncelli, who had helped to murder Giuliano, succeeded in making his escape from Florentine territory and got as far as Constantinople; but there he was recognized and, following Lorenzo’s official request to the Sultan, he was brought back in chains to Florence where he, too, was executed in the Bargello.
The disgrace of the Pazzi family was not permitted to end with their execution. Their names and their coat-of-arms were ordered to be suppressed in perpetuity by a public decree of the Signoria; their property was confiscated; their palace was given another name, as were all other places in Florence which formerly had borne it; orders were given for their family symbol – the dolphin – to be cut down or blotted out wherever it was to be found. No man who married a Pazzi was ever to be allowed to hold office in the Republic. All customs associated with the family were abolished, including the ancient ceremony of carrying the sacred flint to their palace on Easter Eve.4 Representations of the Pazzi traitors, together with those of the other conspirators, were painted by Botticelli – for a fee of forty florins for each figure – on the wall of the Bargello as Florentine custom dictated. They were portrayed with ropes round their necks, representing the manner of their death, except in the case of Napoleone Francesi who was painted hanging by his ankle to indicate that he had escaped. Beneath each portrait was inscribed a suitable epitaph in verse composed by Lorenzo.
In contrast to these insulting representations, so Giorgio Vasari recorded,
Lorenzo’s friends and relations ordered that, in thanksgiving to God for his preservation, images of him should be set up throughout the city. So [a skilled craftsman in wax] with the help and advice of Verrocchio, made three life-size wax figures with a wooden framework and a covering of waxed cloth, folded and arranged so well that the result was wonderfully attractive and lifelike. He then made the heads, hands and feet, using a coating of thicker wax, copying the features from life, and painting them in oils with the hair and other adornments. The results of this skilful work were so natural that the wax figures seemed real and alive, as can be seen today from the three figures themselves. One of them is in the church of the nuns of Chiarito, in Via di San Gallo, in front of the miraculous crucifix. This statue is dressed exactly as Lorenzo was when, bandaged and wounded at the throat, he stood at the windows of his house and showed himself to the people… The second of the statues, dressed in the citizen’s gown worn in Florence, is in the church of Santissima Annunziata above the lower door by the table where the candles are sold. And the third was sent to Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assist and set up in front of the Madonna.