Lucrezia Donati
15th-century Italian noble
Lucrezia Donati (Florence, Italy, 1447–1501) was an Italian noblewoman, and mistress of Lorenzo de' Medici.
The identity of the woman in the sculpture Dama col mazzolino, at Bargello Museum in Florence has been attributed by some to Lucrezia Donati. Also Sandro Botticelli's painting Fortitude would be another representation of her.
Biography
Lucrezia was the daughter of Manno Donati and Caterina Bardi, a Florentine dame who belonged to a family tree of which she became the last descendant.
From 1461 she was the mistress of Lorenzo il Magnifico, a platonic love affair, until Lorenzo later married the Italian noble Clarice Orsini in 1469. In 1486 Lorenzo remembered the poems he had written for her when he was 16 in the poem Corinto.
Lucrezia married the Florentian businessman Niccolò Ardighelli, who died in exile in 1496.
Popular culture
The actress Laura Haddock starred as Lucrezia Donati in the television series Da Vinci's Demons. Alessandra Mastronardi played Lucrezia in Medici: The Magnificent.
References
Bibliography
Vannucci, Marcello (1999).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lucrezia Donati” as 15th-century Italian noble. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3839022. VIAF identifies the subject as 2944153239460829450009. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1447, 1501, 1461 and 1469.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lucrezia Donati” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.