Alessandro Cinuzzi

Portrait on a Commemorative Medal (1474)

Alessandro Cinuzzi (also Alexander Senensis ; born April 19, 1458 in Siena ; † January 8 or 9, 1474 ) had served as a page in the household of Girolamo Riario . The latter was a younger brother of Cardinal Pietro Riario , Pope Sixtus IV's favorite nephew . Cinuzzi succumbed to an insidious fever.

A small group of friends mourned the deceased. This mourning for the “most beautiful boy” (“formosissimus puer”) was met in literary terms with the 32-page collection of poems Epigrammata poetarum multorum Alexandri pueri Senensis , printed as an incunable . Furthermore, a large commemorative medal was created by the Italian medalist Lysippus the Younger. This shows a portrait of the young man with the inscription Alexander etruscus adolescentiae princeps on recto . Verso ride on a Pegasus a winged Amor and a departure ready goose, circumscribed with Hermes Flavius Apollini suo consecravit .

expenditure

• Epigrammata poetarum multorum Alexandri pueri Senensis . Apud Sanctum Marcum (Vitus Puecher), Rome, undated ( digitized version of the Bavarian State Library in Munich: "shortly after 1474" , digitized version of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: 1477 )
• Formosissimus Puer: Poems on the death of the page Alessandro Cinuzzi, 1474. Männerschwarm-Verlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 3-939542-50-4

literature

• Ulrich Pfisterer : Lysippus and his friends, gifts of love and memory in Renaissance Rome or: The first century of the medal. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-004314-2 .
• Federico Patetta : Di una raccolta di componimenti e di una medaglia in memoria di Alessandro Cinuzzi senese paggio del conte Gerolamo Riario . In: Bollettino Senese di Storia Patria. 6, pp. 151-176 (1899).