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| © Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx |
The Strozzi clan (31 separate households in 1427) played a part in Florentine history up to the mid-16th century second only to that of the Medici. Among the earliest of Florentine bankers, they weathered the financial crisis that pulled down so many firms in the mid-14th century. As other Strozzi had taken up permanent residence abroad in pursuit of profit, whether elsewhere in Italy or in Spain, France or the Low Countries, there were always places of refuge for those Florentine members of the clan whose prominence in domestic politics attracted that habitual penalty for backing the wrong power group: exile.
Thus Filippo (1428-91) returned to Florence in 1466, from the wave of banishments that had swept out his father on Cosimo de' Medici's return from his exile in 1434, as a man with foreign contacts of an importance to make him indispensable as an adviser to Lorenzo the Magnificent - and with a fortune sufficient for him to embark in 1489 upon the building of the truly palatial Strozzi Palace. Before that he had purchased the freehold of the chapel in S. Maria Novella that bears his name and commissioned Filippino Lippi to decorate it. Indeed, his 'style', culminating in the most impressive funeral of a private citizen Florence had yet witnessed, and springing from his intimacy with princely courts (especially that of Naples), may have influenced those patricians who were at last to defer to a princely government in Florence after 1530.
Even so, his son, also called Filippo (1488-1538), though he married a Medici (Clarice, daughter of the younger Piero) and lent financial assistance to that family from 1512 to 1527, found it increasingly difficult to square his own dynastic plans with the presence of a Medici duke. He, the son of an exile, came to assume the leadership of the new wave of exiles in 1530, and after Alessandro de' Medici's assassination financed and took part in their campaign to oust Cosimo I in 1537. Filippo was captured after their defeat at Montemurlo and imprisoned in the Fortezza da Basso where, next year, he died - whether by suicide or assassination remains uncertain. His sons and brothers moved to France where, as businessmen, clerics, and above all as military and naval commanders, they played a prominent part during the rest of Francis I's reign and those of his successors.
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| © Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx |