The Medici family tree
The Medici were a powerful banking family during the Italian Renaissance. Their influence spanned a couple of centuries, and they produced four Catholic Popes. They were patrons of the arts, funding artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as Machiavelli and Galileo.
Below is the top half of the Medici family tree from the book The Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance by Paul Strathern1.
1 It’s a good book. I recommend it if you’re into history. Here is its page on Goodreads.
This diagram contains a lot of hidden information, which makes it possible, but difficult, to answer questions like:
- Who was born first, Cosimo or Lorenzo?
- Which Medici lived the longest?
- Which of these Medici was the last to die?
All the information is there, but it is not possible to quickly see the answers, you have to work them out. And of course there is very important information that is lacking in this diagram - only the fathers are shown, not the mothers. Many of the women in the Medici family were fascinating characters in their own right, and had significant influence over the family, so their absence is curious.
My first attempt to improve this diagram (drawn by hand using the Concepts App on the iPad) looked like this:
I turned it on it’s side, as it is a convention that time flows from left to right in diagrams. It’s now easy to see that Cosimo was born before Lorenzo, and it’s much quicker to find out who lived the longest and who died last. But I didn’t like the way that the dotted lines overlay the text, and it would be nice to add portraits of them so we can see what they look like. Second try:
Much neater! The portraits really add a lot of information about the individuals. The faint vertical lines make it even easier to identify which was the last to die. But of course we are still missing the women. Third try:
I’m very happy with this. It contains a lot of information that is quick and easy to read. For example, we can see that the parents of Guiliano Illegitimate both died the year he was born. We can see Contessina de’ Bardi had a long life, living well over 80 and outliving her husband Cosimo the Elder by about a decade. We can see most of the men married women younger than them, with the exception of Pierfrancesco the Elder and Giovanni. None of these things could be seen in the original diagram.
I really enjoyed creating this information visualization. There is still so much that could be added to it. I may revisit it again in the future and see what further information and improvements I can make.
Epilogue March 2023
Looking at the final version above again, I notice that the date figures have poor contrast and they would be difficult to read for people with certain eye conditions. I will fix that one day.
