Pulci

Growing up, Lorenzo was surrounded by administrators, bankers, and courtiers, but also by great poets such as Luigi Pulci and Agnolo Poliziano.

Many of the most powerful families were heretics or open defenders of heresy—the Baroni, Pulci, Cipriani, Cavalcanti, Saraceni, and Malpresa.

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that Don Juan is something quite different from the mere mock-heroic—from Pulci, for instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to imitate.

It is not, for example, possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this: But almost sanctify the sweet excess By the immortal wish and power to bless.

Several literary characters are here delineated; principally those of Cristoforo Landino, and Leo Battista Alberti, the Crichton of Italy, of whose unlimited powers the greatest was perhaps that, which he, if we believe Vasari, possessed over his horse; and our author proceeds to the giostra, or tournament, celebrated by Luca Pulci and Agnolo of Monte Pulciano, in which Lorenzo and Juliano appear to have been the principal actors, though the candidates were eighteen in number.