Francesco I Sforza
Videos
Francesco I Sforza was an Italian condottiere who founded the Sforza dynasty in the duchy of Milan, ruling as its duke from 1450 until his death. Renowned for his military skill and political acumen,
Portrait of Francesco Sforza (c. 1460) by Bonifacio Bembo. Sforza insisted on being shown in his worn dirty old campaigning hat. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza in Famiglie celebri italiane, by Pompeo Litta Biumi (1823)
Ludovico Sforza
Videos
Ludovico Maria Sforza, also known as Ludovico il Moro, and called the "arbiter of Italy" by historian Francesco Guicciardini, was an Italian nobleman who ruled as the Duke of Milan from 1494 to 1499.
Francesco I Sforza
…1466 and was succeeded by his son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Although Francesco ruled with broad recognition, it was not until 1494 that his other son, Ludovico Sforza, received formal investiture as Duke of Milan by Emperor Maximilian I. Francesco Sforza was born in Cigoli, near San Miniato, Tuscany, one of the seven…
Ludovico's portrait in the Pala Sforzesca, 1494–1495 (Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan)
Ludovico Sforza by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis
Pala Sforzesca, c. 1494, by an unknown author: on the left, Ludovico with his son Cesare; on the right, Beatrice with her son Ercole Massimiliano
Silver reproduction (1989) of the testone that Ludovico had minted in 1497 with his own effigy on the one hand and of his wife Beatrice on the other, immediately after her death