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Alessandro de' Medici 's life and its representation reveal important beliefs about family, politics, and genealog y during the Italian Renaissance. Duke Alessandro's government marked the end of the Florentine Republic and the beginning of hereditary rule. Many scholars interpret Alessandro's assassination as a fitting end to the tyrannical usurpation of Florentine liberty. This moral and political interpretation, championed by supporters of Italian unification and cherished by writers from the Romantic period until this day, has dominated assessments of Alessandro's life and rule. The fact that he was illegitimate has g iven rise to many accounts of his orig ins and to the related controversies over the possibility that his mother was a peasant or a slave. The slave controversy admits a further question: was his mother's background North African? Or Southern (i.e., sub-Saharan) African? Such arguments assume that slaves are black and that black s are a clearly defined group. The history of Alessandro de' Medici is inseparable from claims made for liberal society against tyranny, from evolving concepts of race, and from ideas of European cultural superiority over Africa. This essay studies images, both written and visual, of Alessandro de' Medici with a focus on race and on the changing significance of traits now associated with ideologies of ethnicity and nationhood.
It is important to determine how the life of Alessandro de' Medici (1512-37) has been conceived by historians and art historians with regard to the empirical and theoretical biases that underpin the perception of race. Historically, the concept of race measures physical, mental, and spiritual differences among various human groups. Race has been construed in two broad directions: as a natural phenomenon and as a social construct. Thus the taxonomic dimension of racial thinking invariably entails the following questions: how do we determine the race of an individual, by forensics and genetics or by reading the social formations of cultural history? Can a DNA profile definitively answer the question of race in the past as well as in the present? I will address the extent to which such concerns have shaped the biography of Alessandro de' Medici, first Duke of Florence.1
Since 2004, paleopathologists have been examining the bones of members of the Medici family buried in the crypt...