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Lorenzo de' Medici, called 'Il Magnifico', lived from 1449 until 1492 (dying just weeks short of Columbus making landfall in the New World) and can be seen as the main sponsor of the early Italian Rennaissance. He hailed from Florence's leading family and was the city's most influential citizen of his time. He was patron to artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Botticelli, founded a library and financed the dissemination of books at the dawn of the age of movable print. Without him, our Western world today would not be what it is.

This version of Lorenzo, however, comes from a CBBC series about the youth of Leonardo da Vinci. The series is a typical BBC anachronism stew with hints of clockpunk and nods to canons such as Discworld or Asterix. In it, a teenage Leonardo da Vinci is a painter's apprentice and best friends with a young Lorenzo de' Medici, Niccolo Macchiavelli, and a girl named Lisa working in disguise as another apprentice to the same painter, who will eventually be the Mona Lisa. It is much better than it sounds: - once you realise it's not meant to be historically accurate, you find that it makes a lot of timeless points and modern jokes, and is still historically more correct than expected, at times.

Lorenzo de' Medici, in this canon, is an insecure boy or young man of about fifteen or sixteen years. Of the group of friends, he's probably the most awkward and most conventional, but he loves going along with them and discovering the new wonders of the world through their eyes. He wants nothing as much as the attention and approval of his father, Piero de' Medici, who however turns out to be the series' main villain quite early on -- unbeknownst to the four friends. Being the richest man in Florence means, however, that Piero has many items and resources that come in handy to the friends' current scrapes and Leonardo's mad inventions, so they are forever smuggling things in and out from the Palazzo Medici, and covering things up from his father. He has no idea his father actually knows and wants things this way. Lorenzo, however, ends up being a young man of very deeply and painfully divided loyalties...

Oh, and he really is plug-ugly. He's the only character that looks anything like his historical self in this series, minus the mouth. He's also (historically more correct than expected) the only one with several changes of clothes among the four friends: - Leo and Lisa, being poor apprentices, always wear the same things, Mac has three or four sets of flashy clothes, but Lorenzo is a bit of a dandy wearing colours and caps with feathers and different doublets every episode. The longish straight black hair, dark eyes, spidery hand and general gawkiness of posture are also straight from the extant historical portraits.-

Lorenzo de' Medici is from Leonardo, and is the property of the CBBC. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar and mixed_muses, from which no profit whatsoever is being made. The mun behind the curtain is [Bad username or unknown identity: yakalskovich.]