Medici Money

by Tim Parks

  The Ancona adventure, though short-lived, marked a turning point in the history of the bank. It fused its destiny with that of the Florentine state. Here was a branch that lent mainly for political purposes, without expecting to recover its capital. Not good news for the small investor. Matters of state go beyond the rationale of any commercial venture. Thirty years later, Sforza would owe the Medici bank something in the region of 190,000 florins, a sum far beyond repayment. This was how the Bardi and Peruzzi banks had gone under years ago. But in 1440, Piccinino, Milan, and the Albizzi faction were decisively beaten by the Florentines at Anghiari, to the south east of the city. Sforza, the most successful military adventurer of the fifteenth century, was up north fighting in the Veneto. He never attacked Florence, despite the fact that the Florentines were his future father-in-law’s bitterest enemies.

  IT WAS THE period of the bank’s maximum expansion. In 1442, a branch was set up in the subject coastal town of Pisa, whence the Florentine galleys set out every spring for Bruges and London. State-built and with a monopoly on all sea trade in and out of Pisa and Florence, the galleys were rented to merchants who then sold space to others. The right to rent for each voyage was auctioned off in a contest that lasted an hour, or the time it took for a particular candle to burn out. The smarter merchants waited till the flame began to gutter before beginning to bid. So it was decided that the auction would end with the chiming of the clock on the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria—audible but not visible from the auction room. Without a wristwatch, this was nerve-wracking stuff. The palazzo’s clock-minder was put under armed guard for the duration, lest the hour should shrink or expand. In this etiquette-obsessed world, cheating is the rule. Alertness is all. Nobody is fooled, for example, when the auctioneer plants dummy bids to get things going.

  To set up a branch of the bank meant finding a house with a suitable room for the obligatory green table, as well as storage space for goods in transit. The half-dozen employees would then live and eat there together. To oversee the new venture in Pisa, Cosimo went to the town himself. For a two-month stay away from home, he took with him a trunk of books and his best ceremonial armor. He collected the stuff: swords with red velvet sheaths, painted lances, a silver-decorated helmet with a crest in the form of a gilded eagle, a shield picturing a young girl. He also collected books, of course, and was friends with Florence’s leading humanists, who wrote or translated those books and often dedicated them to him. Common to the two areas of interest—books, arms—was the vision of a noble, superior man with an innate dignity that had nothing to do with Christian humility, the kind of dignity that painters and sculptors were learning to conjure up in the faces and postures of their figures.

  “Only the little people and lower orders of a city are controlled by your laws …,” says a speaker in one of humanist Poggio Bracciolini’s philosophical dialogues. Cosimo had once taken time out with Poggio to explore Roman ruins in Ostia. “The more powerful civic leaders transgress their power.” That was an interesting idea, for a civic leader. It referred to the kind of man, surely, who, if he hadn’t suffered from crippling gout, might have worn a helmet with a gilded eagle.

  Along with all the calculation of profit and loss, there is, then, in Cosimo’s mind, an ideal of fame and fine deeds that will survive the grave. “All famous and memorable deeds spring from injustice and unlawful violence,” says Poggio’s man in the dialogue. What a shame, Cosimo complained, that they had never captured Lucca! Perhaps one day, if sufficiently well paid, Francesco Sforza would help them do that. Then he, Cosimo, would be remembered as the city’s leading citizen when Lucca was taken, as the Albizzi family, though exiled, was still remembered for having taken this proud town of Pisa, where, as always when establishing a new branch, Cosimo now faced the problem of how to register the operation. If a branch was registered with the Medici name, it would have more prestige and attract more investment. But in that case, the Medici holding would have to assume unlimited liability. If it took the name of the resident local partner who actually ran the branch, then Medici liability was limited to the capital actually invested, but the branch’s prestige would suffer. Despite his ceremonial armor and incendiary reading, cautious Cosimo almost always opted for the latter solution, at least for the first few years. The Pisa branch opened under the names of Ugolino Martelli and Matteo Masi. In 1450, when serious losses forced the Medici holding to put a limit on its liability in the London and Bruges branches, which thus renounced the Medici name and emblem, the other Italian merchants took pleasure in the reversal and “cawed like so many crows.” Like profit and loss, renown and ridicule are never far apart.

  One wished to be honored long after one was dead, like a Roman senator (Cosimo collected Roman coins as well), but by that time, surely, the superior man would have humbled himself before his Maker and flown to heavenly glory, where such earthly honor could hardly matter. There was even the danger that chasing earthly honor might cost you your place in heaven.

  Here, then, was another set of irreconcilables, and if the conundrum this time lay in the mind, or in metaphysics, rather than in the balance of world trade, it was no less urgent for that. Florence had two ideal visions of itself: It was the true inheritor of ancient Rome, eternal renown, wise republicanism; and it was also the city of God. Why else would the government insist that prostitutes dress as described in the Book of Isaiah? Why would there be talk of a crusade to bring the Holy Sepulchre to Florence? Centuries later, England would entertain the same delirium of piety and empire, producing that curious hybrid, the Christian gentleman. Some Americans still think these thoughts today, trying not to see the contradictions between Christian Puritanism and world domination.

  Enamored of both visions, Cosimo attended regular discussions with Bracciolini, Niccoli, and other avant-garde humanists, and likewise regular meetings of the religious confraternity dedicated to the Magi. That he did sense a contradiction between political ambition and religious belief is evident from his famous remark, upon being accused of cruelty in exiling so many enemies, that “you can’t run a state with paternosters.” Christian charity takes the back seat when you’re dealing with political necessity.

  But contradictions, of course, were there to be overcome. That had always been Cosimo’s attitude. And when it came to the conflicting claims of Christian devotion and secular fame, the most effective way to resolve the problem, as Cosimo had learned from the commissioning of Giovanni XXIII’s tomb, was through art and architecture. “I know the Florentines,” Cosimo told his bookseller and later biographer, Vespasiano da Bisticci. “Before fifty years are up we’ll be expelled, but my buildings will remain.” Most of those buildings were religious. You lavished money on the sacred, to gain earthly fame. And a place in heaven. Apparently you could have your cake and eat it too. Or have your wife drunk and the wine keg full, as the Italians say.

  Having “accumulated quite a bit on his conscience,” Vespasiano tells us, “as most men do who govern states and want to be ahead of the rest,” Cosimo consulted his bank’s client, Pope Eugenius, conveniently present in Florence (hence more or less under Cosimo’s protection) as to how God might “have mercy on him, and preserve him in the enjoyment of his temporal goods.” This was shortly after his return from exile.

  Spend 10,000 florins restoring the Monastery of San Marco, Eugenius replied. It was the kind of capital required to set up a bank.

  The monastery, however—a large, rambling, and crumbling structure within two minutes’ walk of both the duomo and Cosimo’s home—was presently run by a bunch of second-rate monks of the Silvestrine order reported as living “without poverty and without chastity.” Unforgivable. I’ll spend the money if you get rid of the Silvestrines and replace them with the Dominicans, Cosimo said. Those severe Dominicans! Only the prayers of men whose very identity was grounded in poverty and purity would be of use to a banker with an illegitimate child.

  This was 1436, the year Pope Eugenius reconsecrated the d
uomo upon the completion, after more than fifteen years’ work, of Brunelleschi’s huge dome. With a diameter of 138 feet, the dome was the most considerable feat of architectural engineering for many hundreds of years. Its red tiles rose even higher than the white marble of Giotto’s slender ornamental tower beside the cathedral’s main entrance, and the two together completely dominated the skyline of the town in yet another ambiguous combination of local civic pride and devotion to faith. The Florentines, in fact, had for years been anxious that the dome would collapse, thereby inviting the ridicule rather than admiration of their neighbors.

  On the occasion of the consecration, Cosimo bargained publicly with Eugenius to get an increase in the indulgence that the Church was handing out to all those who attended the ceremony. The pope gave way: ten years off purgatory instead of six. It cost no one anything and brought both banker and religious leader great popularity. On the matter of San Marco, the pope again proved flexible. The Silvestrines were evicted. The rigid Dominicans were moved in from Fiesole. Their leader at the time was Antonino, later Archbishop Antonino, a priest with a streak of fundamentalism about him. What would our Saint Dominic think, he wrote after the expensive renovation was complete, if he saw the houses and cells of his order “enlarged, vaulted, raised to the sky and most frivolously adorned with superfluous sculptures and paintings”?

  But this fundamentalism was indeed only a streak—only a would-be severity, if you like—otherwise the priest could hardly have worked together with the banker for as long as he did. For the story of Cosimo’s relationship with Antonino, who oversaw the lavish San Marco renovation project and then became head of the Florentine church for most of Cosimo’s period of power, is the story of the Church’s uneasy accommodation with patronage of dubious origin. “True charity should be anonymous,” Giovanni Dominici, militant leader of the Dominican order, had insisted. “Take heed,” Jesus says, “that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.” The position is clear: no earthly honor through Christian patronage. But Antonino and Cosimo were both sufficiently intelligent to preserve those blind spots that allow for some useful exchange between metaphysics and money: in the ambiguous territory of art. In return for his cash, the banker would be allowed to display his piety and power. And superior aesthetic taste. The Church would pretend that all this beauty was exclusively for the glory of God, as it readily pretended that the building of the duomo’s cupola had nothing to do with Brunelleschi’s megalomania. Without such dishonesty, the world would be a duller place.

  Michelozzo, more than ever Cosimo’s personal friend after sharing his period of exile, was the architect. The monks’ cells would be suitably austere. The library, with its rows of slim columns supporting clean white vaults, was a miracle of grace and light. Cosimo donated the books. Many were copied specifically for the purpose. Many were beautifully illuminated. The main artist in the project was Fra Angelico, otherwise known as Beato Angelico, a man who wept as he painted the crucifixions in all the novices’ cells. Quarrel with that if you will. Antonino insisted on crucifixions, especially for novices. The true purpose of art is to allow the Christian to contemplate Christ’s agony in every awful detail. But at the top of the stairs leading to those cold cells, Angelico’s Annunciation presents two sublimely feminine figures generously dressed as if by Florence’s best tailors. And in the church below, the monastery’s main altarpiece, The Coronation of the Virgin, shows just how far Cosimo has come since the tomb of Giovanni XXIII.

  Holding her unexpected child, the Virgin sits crowned with banker’s gold in a strangely artificial space, as if her throne were on a stage, but open to trees behind. It was the kind of scene the city’s confraternities liked to set up for their celebrations, funded of course by benefactors such as the Medici. Aside from San Marco and San Domenico (patron saints of the monastery and of its newly incumbent order), the figures grouped around the Holy Mother are all Medici name-saints: San Lorenzo, for Cosimo’s brother, who had recently died; San Giovanni and San Pietro for Cosimo’s sons. Kneeling at the front of the picture, in the finest crimson gowns of the Florentine well-to-do, are San Cosma and San Damiano. Cosma on the left, wearing the same red cap that Cosimo prefers, turns the most doleful and supplicating face to the viewer, the Florentine congregation. Apparently he mediates between the people and the Divine, as Cosimo himself had done the day he got the pope to hand out ten years’ worth of indulgences instead of six. Damiano instead has his back to us and seems to hold the Virgin’s eyes.

  In later years, other managers of the Medici bank—Francesco Sassetti, Tommaso Portinari, Giovanni Tornabuoni—would have themselves introduced directly into biblical scenes. Solemn in senatorial Roman robes as they gazed on the holy mysteries, they showed that at least in art there need be no contradiction between classical republic and city of God, between banker and beatitude. Cosimo had more tact. He appeared only by proxy, in his patron saint. Or saints. For he never forgot to include brother Damiano, perhaps half hidden by Cosma’s body, turned toward the Virgin, or the crucifixion, as if half of the living Cosimo were already beyond this earth, in heaven, with his dead twin brother. No doubt this generated a certain pathos. “Cosimo was always in a hurry to have his commissions finished,” said Vespasiano da Bisticci, “because with his gout he feared he would die young.” He was in a hurry to finish San Marco, in a hurry to finish the huge renovation of his local church, San Lorenzo, then the beautiful Badia di Fiesole, the Santissima Annunziata, and many others as the years and decades flew by, including the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Ever in a hurry, he grew old fearing he would die young. Perhaps it was this that made him such a master of the ad hoc.

  Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, one of the many paintings commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici when he undertook the restoration of the monastery of San Marco. Six of the eight saints in attendance are Medici name saints, with St. Cosma turning to face the congregation in the foreground to the left, balanced by San Damiano on the right. Around the edge of the luxurious carpet run red balls on a golden field, the motif of the Medici family. The sacred space thus becomes more comfortable, for the rich.

  WHEN THE RESTORATION of San Marco was finally finished in 1443, Pope Eugenius, now with his bags packed ready to return to a pacified Rome, agreed that the church should be reconsecrated under the name San Marco, San Cosma, and San Damiano. So Cosimo reminded everyone of his part in the project, but unobtrusively, as with the Good Men of San Martino. Not for him the gesture of the banker Giovanni Rucellai, who advertised his personal patronage by having his name written in yard-high letters right across the façade of Santa Maria Novella. All the same, an attentive observer would have noticed, in that San Marco altar-piece, a line of red balls around the lovely carpet on which the family name-saints knelt before the gorgeous Virgin. Were they really the red balls of the Medici family emblem? There were no Last Judgments in Cosimo’s San Marco. Discreetly, head bowed and cap in hand, the profane invaded the sacred space and made it comfortable.

  Cosimo practiced the banker’s art of unobtrusive proximity. It wasn’t enough that men dedicated to poverty had accepted his money and its role in their scheme of things, thus giving tacit approval to his business practices; they must also admit him right into their community, accept that he was one of them. So he had a cell built for himself beside the monks’ cells. Except that Cosimo’s cell had two rooms. It was larger and pleasanter. Over the door, engraved in stone, were the words of the papal bull that granted him absolution from all sins in return for his expenses. Few eyes would see this, but Cosimo wanted it written down, indelibly, like a bank contract that only the interested parties need consult. “Never shall I be able to give God enough to set him down in my books as a debtor,” he remarked humbly of his huge outlay for San Marco. Yet clearly that was the kind of relationship he would have preferred.

  Opposite the door of the first room of Co
simo’s cell, on a wall that novices might glimpse as they walked along the corridor, was one of Fra Angelico’s crucifixions. How could the monks not approve? But in the larger, private cell behind, with more expensive paints and stronger colors, Cosimo had the younger, more cheerful artist, Benozzo Gozzoli, assist Angelico in painting a procession of the Magi. It was Cosimo’s favorite biblical theme. He would be responsible for at least half a dozen such pictures in his lifetime. All in bright colors. Fifteen years after San Marco, around three walls of the tiny chapel in the heart of his great palazzo, he and his son Piero had the same Gozzoli paint a lavish Magi procession in which, for the few who penetrated that sanctum, Cosimo himself at last appeared in person, riding on a mule behind the youngest of the three Magi. Common to many of the Florentine elite, the Magi obsession is easily explained. What other positive images of rich and powerful men did the New Testament offer?

  Gozzoli’s Adoration of the Magi (detail). Only in this fresco, painted around three walls of the tiny chapel in the heart of his great palazzo, did Cosimo at last allow himself to be depicted in a biblical scene. Typically unobtrusive, he wears black and rides a mule, while to his left (our right), son Piero is rather more magnificent on a white horse.