by Tim Parks
THE TALE OF Giovanni XXIII’s vicissitudes—his four-year imprisonment, the Medici’s remarkable loyalty to him, his bequest to them of the sacred finger of John the Baptist, their payment of 3,500 florins to ransom him, his assignment to them of his collection of rare jewels, their successful intercession with Martin V (after returning to the Curia a certain fabulously bejeweled mitre) to have their friend named on his release, whores and heresies forgotten, bishop of Tusculum (Frascati)—all this would be story enough to fill a book. Yet often it is not the obvious melodrama that really changes things, nor even the bewildering back-and-forth of money and sacred objects, but something quite different, apparently innocent. What mattered most in this tale—for the Medici, their bank, for Florence, and arguably, as we shall see, for us too—was Baldassarre/Giovanni’s funeral monument. For in 1419, six months after he was ransomed, the ex-pope coughed up, in Cosimo de’ Medici’s house, that final debt whose payment you can only put off for so long.
Let us return for a moment to the first story of the Decameron. Ser Ciappelletto, notorious liar, cheat, fornicator, murderer, and sodomist (the list begins to look familiar), a notary by profession, is sent to a foreign country to do some debt collecting. He lodges with the local Italians, who, true to the nation’s international vocation, are usurers. He falls mortally ill. They are terrified: if their guest doesn’t confess, he will be denied burial; if he does, the scandal of the company they are keeping will offer local people the excuse they are looking for to lynch them for their usury. But Ser Ciappelletto has a solution. He confesses himself, yet claims to remember no worse sins than having once spat in church and once cursed his mum when he was a little boy. No, he never lent money at an interest. No, he never had sex with anyone. He preserved his virginity. Convinced the man is a saint, the priest has him buried in the local convent, where his tomb becomes an object of frenetic popular devotion; those who pray over it claim miraculous results.
The comedy of the story depends on the absolute clarity of the underlying theology and metaphysics. This world is a trial for the next. Death is the day of reckoning, after which it is hell or heaven (purgatory being just a more or less extended annex of the latter). To tell lies, then, in a final confession is madness. It turns the world upside down. Ser Ciappelletto is quite brilliant in the way he resolves an earthly problem, but utterly blind because he does so at the expense of his soul. He is going to burn. Human astuteness, which is so seductive, so funny, has no place in a vision that divides the world into good or bad and sees no space between.
It is precisely this clarity, then, and people’s complete conviction in it (atheism is unimaginable), that leads to all the equivocation when it comes to describing complicated financial activities. For everything must be declared a sin or not a sin. “He who is not for me is against me,” Christ said. In the Baptistery, Florence’s oldest, most central church, a Last Judgment divided the domed ceiling into the blessed and the damned. Nothing else. The rigid, static Byzantine style, the hard little stones of the mosaic, allowed for no confusion, or even diversion. The image is its message. The beauty of color, line, and gesture only increases the clarity. For me or against me. Your fate. What could a banker do?
We know nothing of Giovanni di Bicci’s childhood. Presumably, like other middle-class youngsters, he was signed on at a guild in his teens and was working in his uncle’s bank as an adolescent. But for his sons he chose a more sophisticated education, first at a monastery school, then under the supervision of Roberto de’ Rossi, a humanist from a patrician family, a man who introduced the young Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo to other more celebrated early humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli, and Ambrogio Traversari—men who instilled in the young banker a passion for the pre-Christian, classical world, and above all for finding, collecting, and even reading the manuscripts through which that world could be known. So while Cosimo was at the Church Council in Constance, and hence skipping his regular discussion groups with these men, he could enjoy the company of Poggio Bracciolini, who was present as secretary to Giovanni’s papal court and who took time out from his duties to visit the monasteries of Cluny and St. Gallen, where he uncovered various forgotten manuscripts of Cicero and Quintilian. About these much could be said, but for the essential, though rarely declared, inspiration that lies behind early humanism, we can go back a generation and read Boccaccio’s preface to his compendium book, De mulieribus claris, “About Famous Women.” “I have decided to exclude Christian women,” Boccaccio begins apologetically. Of course they are “resplendent in the true and unfailing light,” but, “their virginity, purity, holiness and invincible firmness in overcoming carnal desire” have already been amply praised “by pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature.” So I am going to turn elsewhere, Boccaccio tells us, to the pre-Christian world.
Christianity is duly acknowledged and revered, so that then we can concentrate elsewhere—on the women of Rome, the literature of Greece, on human qualities and values that have nothing to do with religion. This, more than any particular content, is the sense of humanism: to carve out a space that need not be understood in the urgent and inconvenient tensions of Christian metaphysics—heaven or hell—while still remaining within the Christian world. Dogmatism is abandoned, but not the faith. Is it really okay, Boccaccio had asked his mentor Petrarch some years before that preface, for a Christian to spend so much time with profane literature? So long, Petrarch assures him, as the literature is instructive, educates the young to serve the community, and turns the soul toward beauty and truth. This is the breakthrough: the idea of a secular space where one can have such moral values, but independently of Church teaching. What would-be honest banker dealing in dry exchanges would not yearn for such a thing, would not contribute to a culture that recognized other qualities than strict adherence to canon law? It is the space we live in today. Much of it was first staked out in fifteenth-century Florence.
Tomb of Pope (or anti-pope) Giovanni XXIII, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici from Donatello and Michelozzo, in the Florence Baptistery. Warned not to disturb the Byzantine austerity of the space, the architects built upward rather than outward, but lavishly. The sculpted words, IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA (“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope”), offered disturbing food for thought for Florentine worshippers.
In the medium of writing, creating this territory must have seemed easy enough: one rediscovered the literature of Rome and later Greece, made new copies, discussed it, wrote books about it. But the visual arts were almost entirely devotional in nature. How would the secular ever find some elbow room here? Slowly, is the answer, by stealth. The Medici played their part.
Of the four illustrious men appointed as executors of Baldassarre/Giovanni XXIII’s will, one was his banker, Giovanni di Bicci. The ex-pope wanted to be buried in the Baptistery, the oldest, the most holy place of worship right in the center of Florence. Only three other bishops had ever been buried there, and only in the simplest and sparest of stone boxes. Decoration on the walls was a rigid black-and-white marble patterning. Nothing must distract attention from the final division of the blessed and the damned on the ceiling.
Cosimo took over the venture and got together the young architect and sculptor Michelozzo and the versatile genius Donatello. The Merchants’ Guild, which was responsible for the church’s interior decoration, expressed scepticism. No fancy stuff, they warned. The tomb must not project into the floor space. The artists placed their work between two existing pillars that stood against the wall. It did not project, but rose, through a loophole in the rules, twenty-four magnificent feet up the side of the church. Above three marble bas-reliefs showing standing female figures—Faith, Hope, and Charity—rested the sarcophagus, on the side of which two naked angels unfurled a scroll. Above the sarcophagus, carved in marble, was a narrow bed complete with mattress and pillow; and lying on the bed, entirely human and apparently asleep, his handsome, intelligent face turned toward the cong
regation, lay Baldassarre/Giovanni, cast in gleaming bronze. Above the reclining figure, taking the monument even higher, rises the most elegant bedroom canopy, again carved in stone and with its curtains apparently just drawn apart, and at the apex of the canopy, a ring appears to fix the whole structure to a point where the wall of the church juts out. The scroll, held by the angels on the side of the sarcophagus, announced IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA—“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope.”
Was the monument obtrusive? It obeyed orders about depth. But the bronze did gleam so brightly in the early sunlight while morning mass was recited; the reclining figure was so very human, so clearly a man of character, and so evidently neither in heaven or hell, that it was hard not to be distracted. Above all, that inscription, “erstwhile Pope,” brought a gust of schism and ambiguity into the eternally still air of the Byzantine mosaics. Had he been pope or not? Nothing is more inimical to the diktat of revealed truth than the complexity of human history. Martin V hated the monument. Baldassarre was never pope, he insisted. The Giovanni XXIII domain was still available. This man was the Medici’s friend, people whispered. They paid for this tomb. How fascinating it all was! As if, in the niche of the medieval church, where one expected to find a rigid symbolic representation of this or that virtue, a real person appears, not easily judged or categorized. The effect is not unlike those moments in Dante’s Inferno when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic toward.
Did the Medici banker know what he would be getting when he commissioned Baldassarre Cossa’s tomb? We do not know. But whatever his intentions may have been—to honor a family friend, to embellish a church, to suggest the power of Medici money—Cosimo was a man who saw when there was a lesson to be learned. Something had shifted in the hitherto-timeless stasis of the church. From now on, Donatello would be Cosimo’s favorite sculptor, Michelozzo his preferred architect.
3
The Rise to Power
Cosimo was thirty-one. It was 1420, and his father, turning sixty, retired from the bank. Piero di Cosimo, first of the next generation, was four. A second son, Giovanni, was on the way. The wife and mother, Contessina de’ Bardi, was jolly, tubby, and practical. Uneducated, she was not allowed in Cosimo’s study. Away on business, he rarely wrote. Marriages were arranged and that was that. She was a Bardi and he a Medici. Neither complained. On the contrary.
Taking over the bank, Cosimo went down to Rome for three years where Martin V’s preferred bankers had just failed and the Medici were back in the papal saddle again. A relief. What kind of man is Cosimo? Polite, unostentatious. He prefers a mule to a horse. Challenged, he is pithy and cryptic. “Cosimo, I wish you would say things clearly so I could understand you.” “First learn my language,” he replies. “Cosimo, how should I behave on this diplomatic mission?” “Dress like a lord and say as little as possible.” It’s a style that allows you to be smart, without giving much away. To confide in a man is to become his slave.
Cosimo loves collecting books, religious and profane. Reading one entitled Monastic Institutes, he marks passages stressing patience and discretion, and what to do about the temptations of the flesh. In Cicero’s On Oratory, he notes that an audience may often be won over if you appear to take the majority opinion. Interesting reflection. He’s not interested in jousting or piazza sports. But he is a member of a religious confraternity. People get together once a week to sing praises to God, give each other a penitential whipping, and plan street processions in honor of patron saints. Cosimo commissions a fancy bas-relief chest from Ghiberti to hold the relics of three obscure martyrs. He’s fascinated by astrology and magic, but he loves banking. “Even if money could be made by waving a wand,” he says, “I would still be a banker.” Why? Banking involves manipulation, risk, power. It’s magic that works.
Cosimo is immensely ambitious. The Medici family was once second to none. He is also immensely cautious. The Medici family was disgraced. In 1421, his father, Giovanni di Bicci, is elected gonfaloniere della giustizia (standard-bearer of justice), head of the Florentine government. It’s the first time the honor (a two-month appointment) has gone to a Medici since Silvestro sided with the woolworkers’ revolt in 1378. The family is on the up again, third richest in the city. Who knows what might be possible? But Cosimo is also constantly aware of his mortality. He was born a twin, his brother Damiano died at birth. And death means eternal judgment. What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul? However many fine sculptures were made showing beautiful human figures, this ultimate truth could not be avoided. Cosimo’s destiny was to steer a course between conflicting aspirations—power and security, earthly wealth and paradise. With patience. Discretion. Hiding ambitions behind majority opinion. “Semper,” was the motto he eventually came up with for himself, “always,” together with the diamond as a symbol, something precious and extremely resistant. Nothing in the history books gives us a sense of the man’s ever having been young. Unless perhaps during those three years down in Rome.
Thou shalt not gamble. This was one of the commandments a Medici employee signed up to when he went to serve the bank in some distant branch. Years later, when Archbishop Antonino asked Cosimo to support a drive to stop the clergy from gambling, the banker replied, “Maybe first we should stop ’em using loaded dice.” It was a religious age in love with transgression. There is no contradiction. Article seven of the Medici employee’s contract said, “Thou shalt not keep a woman in the house.” Your Florentine wife didn’t travel, of course, and local liaisons meant scandal.
In the Eternal City, Cosimo settled in Tivoli. Deprived of stout Contessina’s domestic skills, he asked an agent in the bank’s Venice branch to find him a slave. The keeping of slaves had been permitted since the late 1300s after the plague had left the working population seriously depleted. The epidemic struck down men and women, old and young alike, of course, but the slaves brought in to solve the shortage—from the Slavic countries, Greece, North Africa—were almost all young women. She is “a sound virgin, free from disease and aged about twenty-one,” Cosimo’s agent told him. Quite an advertisement. Himself a declared devotee of the Virgin, Cosimo called the girl Maddalena, after a more ambiguous Mary, and some time later she bore him a child, Carlo, with marked Circassian features. We do not know how much embarrassment this caused, but clearly being a manifest adulterer was not as much of a problem as being a manifest usurer. No question of restitution here. Cosimo brought up Carlo in his own household together with the legitimate sons, Piero and Giovanni, and later used his influence to get the boy into the Church and have him become bishop of Prato. This was standard practice. It was considered appropriate for the fruits of carnal sin to take vows of celibacy. Hadn’t Saint Jerome rather paradoxically suggested that the only purpose of procreation was to produce virgins for God?
One of the men Cosimo was working with in the bank in Rome, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci, had a child by a friend’s slave before marrying a much younger woman who bore him eight children. Then, when she died, he had another child from his own slave, who once again had been given the name Maria. A deeply religious man and brilliant accountant, Benci was to be the chief architect of the Medici bank’s success under Cosimo and eventually spent some of the considerable wealth he accumulated in the process to restore a convent of cloistered nuns (known as the Murate, the walled-in ones) before whose altar this prolific man wished to be buried. Meantime, we have no more news of Cosimo’s Maddalena. In a tax return of 1457, the aging banker would declare possession of four slaves, but their names and genders are not mentioned. Only their collective market worth—120 florins.
FOREIGN VISITORS TO Italy in the fifteenth century frequently remarked on two peculiarities: Everybody had illegitimate children and everybody was extremely concerned with etiquette. Of visiting foreign courts, the Italians observed that, deserving or otherwise, the monarchs enjoyed the blind lo
yalty of their subjects, who nevertheless behaved in the most slovenly fashion. Courtiers snacked and played cards in a French king’s presence. How boorish the Germans were! What horrible eating habits! My life is at your service, the Italians said, deferring to their betters. I live only to do your bidding. But treachery was endemic. They bowed and scraped and stabbed you in the back.
The historian Jakob Burckhardt related the high level of illegitimacy to the general breakdown of dynastic order in Italy. All that mattered was power. With cash you could buy papal recognition of an illegitimate child’s legitimacy. Does that make sense? And it was perhaps in the absence of order and under the constant threat of anarchy that etiquette and obeisance became so important. They gave a form to life, however superficial. All the art of the period, literary and pictorial, all the imaginative constitutional compromise, the obsession with precise accounting, the interminable rules about what could be worn and what could not, the huge output of letters, chronicles, reflections, and memoirs, might be seen, in part, as a reaction to encroaching chaos. Frescoed, the crowd or the battle scene became form, manageable, beautiful, less frightening. The court of Francesco Sforza, the bastard who, with Cosimo’s financial help, would fight his way to being duke of Milan, gave the most punctilious attention to ceremony. Even before his wife became duchess, Francesco insisted that people call her illustrissima. She too was illegitimate.
But as well as this mime of decorum, there was also an Italian habit, still alive today, of seeking out, in the risky business that life always is, a protecting figure, not unlike a patron saint, who would intercede on your behalf with the powers that be—the taxman, for example, and the priest. It would not be long now before Cosimo the banker would become such a figure, the center of a network of families writing him letters of the variety, “Cosimo, you are our God on earth,” or poems addressing him as “the singular refuge of all those/who live under the standard of poverty.” Meanwhile, the Medici bank was expanding, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci was sent to Geneva to do business at the city’s big international fairs, and Florence, of course, was at war.
