Lorenzo de' Medici — known to posterity as Lorenzo il Magnifico — assumed effective control of Florence in 1469 after the death of his father Piero, becoming the pre-eminent patron of arts and letters in the Italian Renaissance at the age of twenty. Under his guidance Florence became the cultural capital of Europe, a city where Neoplatonic philosophy, lyric poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture were pursued under one extraordinary roof. Lorenzo was himself a gifted poet whose carnival songs and pastoral verse contributed to the canon of Italian lyric.

Lorenzo's Florentine court was the nursery of the Italian Renaissance lyric: he fostered Angelo Poliziano, who brought Homeric grandeur to Italian verse, and Luigi Pulci, whose mock-epic Morgante mingled chivalric romance with vernacular wit. The Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino, which Lorenzo patronised, gave poets a philosophical framework — the contemplation of ideal beauty as the path to divine love — that shaped the sonnet tradition from Michelangelo to Sir Philip Sidney. Lorenzo's own Comento to his sonnets established a model of the poet reflecting critically on his own verse that influenced Renaissance poetic self-consciousness for generations.