[4] In September 1512 Giovanni and his brother Palla may have among those who, when news came to Florence of the sack of Prato by Ramón de Cardona, went to the Palazzo della Signoria to demand the resignation of the Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini.

Rucellai was among those who accompanied his cousin Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici, now Pope Leo X, when in 1515 he went to Bologna to negotiate with Francis I of France following his defeat of the Swiss forces at Marignano.

[1] Adrian died a few months later and was succeeded on 19 November 1523 by Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici as Clement VII.

Giovanni di Bernardo wrote two tragedies, Oreste, a paraphrase of the Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, and Rosmunda, based on the Hecuba of the same author.

Both were completed by early in 1516, and are often cited together with the Sophonisba (1515) of Gian Giorgio Trissino as being the first classical tragedies in the vernacular language that would later be called Italian; they are also the earliest works to be written in blank (unrhymed) hendecasyllables.

Despite the efforts of Benedetto Varchi to have it published,[8] Oreste was not printed until it was included in the first volume of Teatro italiano, o sia, Scelta di tragedie per uso della scena, introduced and possibly also selected by Scipione Maffei,[9] together with Trissino's Sophonisba, a translation by Orsato Giustiniano of the Oedipus of Sophocles, and the Merope of Pomponio Torelli.