The poet Angelo Poliziano was standing just a few metres away when, on 26 April 1478, the twenty-five-year-old Giuliano de' Medici was murdered with nineteen knife wounds during mass in Florence Cathedral. He wrote an account of his experiences and the course of events surrounding the conspiracy, which is also inextricably linked to the name of the Pazzi family through this text. By the summer, Poliziano's Short Account of the Pazzi Conspiracy had already been printed in two places and appeared in both Rome and Florence. It shaped the view of contemporaries and subsequent centuries.

Even though the poet was an eyewitness, his account is not the whole truth: Poliziano provides the official Medici version of events, as he was a close confidant of Lorenzo de' Medici, educated his children and was at the forefront of Florence's literary scene.

Author, translator and Renaissance expert Tobias Roth introduces us to this milieu, presents the poet Angelo Poliziano and his account of the Pazzi conspiracy, and reads from his translation of the Short Account, which appeared in his book Welt der Renaissance: Florenz 2024 (World of the Renaissance: Florence 2024), published by Galiani Berlin. The exhibition thus reveals, in a harmony of literature and art, the interplay of politics and culture that characterised the rule of the Medici and the entire Renaissance.

Tobias Roth was born in Munich in 1985, where he now lives again after studying in Freiburg and Berlin. In 2017, he received his doctorate from HU Berlin with a thesis on Italian Renaissance poetry. As an author, translator and editor, he has published around four dozen books to date. His selected, translated and annotated tome Welt der Renaissance (World of the Renaissance, published by Galiani in 2020) appeared on the Spiegel and Swiss bestseller lists.

Roth has been awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize (2013) and the LCB Prose Writers' Workshop Scholarship (2010), among others, for his work; working scholarships have taken him to Ventspils (2016), Florence (2018) and Salzburg (2024). He is the first artist to have received the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize twice (2015 and 2021). Roth is co-founder of the publishing house Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis and, since 2021, editor of the Grüne Reihe series at Sukultur Verlag.

The event is free of charge after purchasing a ticket. 

The book and the exhibition catalogue are available for purchase at the Bode Museum bookshop.