7
IT WAS CLEAR that Cosimo de’ Medici was keen to use Gozzoli’s frescoes to display his wealth and power, but Galeazzo Maria Sforza would have noticed that the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem also seemed to point toward another, rather different side of the aging banker’s character. Despite the splendor and confidence of the composition, Cosimo had chosen to have himself portrayed in a deliberately understated manner. Far from occupying pride of place—as might have been expected—he appeared at some distance from the center of the drama. Riding a humble donkey, he meekly followed in the wake of his son Piero. He almost seemed to blend into the crowd behind. His golden reins and fur-trimmed cuffs notwithstanding, there was little in the way of ostentation. His clothing was simple, even penitential. Even his conical red hat seemed to have been designed to minimize his visual impact. Indeed, the whole impression was one not of pride or ruthlessness but of a self-effacing modesty and humility.
It was a puzzle. Though he could do almost anything he pleased in business and politics, Cosimo was—as Galeazzo Maria was to learn—“anxious to remain in the background, hiding his great influence and acting, when need arose, through a deputy.” Ten years before Machiavelli had even been born, Cosimo seemed to have had an intuitive appreciation of the value of dissimulation.
But Galeazzo Maria would have found it hard to avoid the suspicion that, for all his influence, Cosimo wanted to appear humble. He was, after all, well-known for his occasional attempts to flee the life he had created for himself. Galeazzo Maria would have heard rumors that Cosimo was fond of shutting himself away in a cell that was kept for his use in San Marco and devoting himself for days on end to silent prayer or pious discussions with his friend Fra Antonio Pierozzi. With Cosimo seated quietly on his donkey, there was more than a whiff of the genuine penitent about his portrait.
As a snapshot of Cosimo’s life, character, and “public image,” the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem would have presented Galeazzo Maria with a strangely confused and even contradictory picture of the man standing in front of him. Lavish ostentation, political chicanery, and coldhearted cunning appeared alongside a meekness that hovered between Machiavellian deceit and heartfelt piety. The old man was an “indecipherable sphinx.” It was almost as if there were not one Cosimo but two or even three.
But despite its apparent contradictions, what Galeazzo Maria would have seen was an entirely consistent and coherent image of Cosimo de’ Medici. Although unusual for the scale of his political and financial influence, Cosimo was the embodiment of the Renaissance merchant banker. The means by which he had acquired his wealth and power—writ large into Gozzoli’s frescoes—were an encapsulation of the process by which this new breed of businessmen had emerged and the cunning they had employed. At the same time, his urge for magnificence, atonement, and dissimulation was a vivid illustration of the altogether novel challenges that had confronted successive generations of devious merchant bankers. And perhaps most important of all, the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem summed up the extent to which Cosimo and his mercantile predecessors had used their patronage of the arts to craft a public image that responded to each of these problems.
By tracing the surprising and often shocking path that had led Cosimo de’ Medici to become the person who would have caused Galeazzo Maria Sforza such uncertainty, it is possible to see the shadowy and unpleasant world of the Renaissance merchant bankers, and the ugly and cynical concerns that underpinned their remarkable role as some of the Renaissance’s foremost patrons of the arts. Although inextricably bound up with the world of political chicanery, corruption, and coups, it’s a tale of high finance, enormous profits, and—inevitably—moral bankruptcy that puts the scandals surrounding today’s merchant bankers in the shade. And as the story behind the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem unravels, it becomes clear that this breed of super-wealthy men lived very far removed from the beauty and splendor of the works they commissioned.
FROM MONEY CHANGERS TO BANKERS
In many senses, the Renaissance was the golden age of merchant bankers. Even more so than today, they were defined by their staggering wealth. But in 1459, no banking family was as fabulously rich as the Medici. They made Croesus look like a pauper. Between 1435 and 1450, for example, Cosimo de’ Medici personally made a profit of 203,702 florins. If Giovanni Rucellai’s estimate is to be believed, this figure alone was the equivalent of some 13 percent of Florence’s total worth. But this was just profit, and the profit of a single member of the family at that. When the full range of the Medici’s investments is taken into account, their wealth easily exceeded that of any of the greatest states in Europe.
Yet the Medici had not always been rich. Their money had been amassed slowly and patiently by generations of men graced with cunning and driven by a burning desire for cash. They had come a long way, and the road they had traveled neatly embodied the route by which merchant banking itself had emerged in Renaissance Italy.
Like those of many other banking families, the origins of the Medici are shrouded in mystery. In later centuries, they were fond of claiming descent from a legendary knight called Averardo, who was supposed to have killed a marauding giant under the Carolingians. But what little evidence survives seems to suggest rather more prosaic roots. As their name implies, they might well have started out as doctors or apothecaries. For most of Cosimo’s contemporaries, however, it seemed more probable that they had begun as humble pawnbrokers. All that can be said with any certainty is that when they first appear in the historical record in the early thirteenth century, they had somehow discovered a talent for working with money.
At this time, the economies of the city-states of northern Italy were just beginning to take off. The trade in cloth and grain was beginning to expand, and regular markets were springing up around Europe. Italian merchants were soon trading not only with other cities on the peninsula but also with states far beyond, from England and the Low Countries to Egypt, Cyprus, and even Kievan Rus’. Indeed, as Francesco Balducci Pegolotti explained in the Pratica della mercatura (ca. 1335–43)—perhaps the earliest commercial handbook of its kind—a serious trader could not expect to get anywhere in life without a working knowledge of at least five or six different languages and a good familiarity with the types of goods that were traded in a score of different ports and markets around the Mediterranean.
But even though trade was starting to boom, commerce was obstructed by one very serious practical difficulty. It was a matter of money. Although today paper money, credit cards, electronic bank transfers, and established rates of exchange make it possible to execute a transaction quickly and easily anywhere in the world, none of these things existed in the thirteenth century. Coin and bullion were the only mediums for monetary exchange, and since each city had its own coinage, a huge variety of currencies was in circulation, the exchange rate between which was a matter of guesswork. Simply going to the market to buy a few odds and ends could be a chore when you had to carry around bundles of heavy coins and argue with the stallholder about the value of the strange collection of foreign coins you had in your purse. High-value business across larger distances could be even more complicated. Obliged to carry cumbersome chests of coins or stacks of bullion on long journeys, a tradesman ran the risk not only of being robbed en route but also of being slowed down by the sheer weight of the money he was carrying. Even if a merchant arrived at his destination in good time and with his capital reserves intact, he was in danger of losing a good deal of money in negotiations that—by their very nature—involved working in a multitude of unfamiliar currencies. Although Pegolotti’s Pratica della mercatura included a careful survey of the relative fineness of some of the more common gold and silver coins in use around the Mediterranean, such tables were simply inadequate to guard against the shifting and uncertain character of the financial world.
Two Medici, Ugo and Galgano, set up shop as small-time moneylenders as early as 1240, but it was the fact that a certain Ardingo and his siblings opened a money-changing business in the Mercato Vecchio a few decades later that showed they knew which side their bread was buttered on. It was this profession that offered the only real solution to the problems of trade, and it was as money changers—not as moneylenders—that the great merchant banks started life.
Initially, money changers like the Medici acted simply as agents of financial order in a world of monetary chaos. Usually operating out of a small shop near a city market, they would exchange a confusing mishmash of different currencies for a roughly equivalent value in uniform coinage. It was a bustling, busy way of life. Although painted some two centuries after the Medici brothers opened their shop in the Mercato Vecchio, Marinus van Reymerswaele’s The Moneychanger and His Wife (1539; Prado, Madrid) gives a good impression of the sorts of practices that made up the money changer’s trade (Fig. 19). Surrounded by bags of money and overflowing piles of paperwork, the money changer is shown weighing coins carefully to test their fineness and checking his values against the manual in his wife’s hands. It was a long and laborious process, but people like the Medici were able to console themselves that they could make plenty of money out of transaction charges and the massaging of fluid rates of exchange.
As trade became more brisk and merchants needed to carry larger volumes of cash around with them, these money changers started to allow people to deposit sums of money with them for safekeeping. The primitive current accounts that were thus created could be treated in much the same way as today. Money could be paid in by the account holder or his debtors and paid out according to the holder’s instructions. This all made trade a good deal easier, but since it was initially founded on face-to-face interactions across a banking table, there was still a little way to go before the serious problems of large-scale international trade could be tackled and before significant profits could be made.
The first truly dramatic innovation was the bill of exchange. Having emerged in Genoa toward the end of the twelfth century, this allowed merchants to avoid the dangers of transporting large quantities of coin/bullion and facilitated international currency exchange. If a merchant in Florence (the payer), for example, wished to make a payment to someone in Bruges (the payee), he would hand over the necessary sum of money to the Florentine branch of his chosen bank, plus a certain commission, and would receive a bill of exchange for that value in return. The Florentine payer would then send this bill to the payee in Bruges, who could redeem it for the agreed sum in the local currency from the Bruges branch of the same bank or its factors. Although there were obviously risks involved, the banker made his profit on the basis of the rate of exchange that was agreed. A closely related, and similarly profitable, device was the letter of credit, which functioned much like a modern traveler’s check.
The second important profit-generating development was the interest-bearing loan. This was facilitated by the prior evolution of deposit accounts (which could be encouraged by banks offering interest on savings) and the fact that bills of exchange also allowed the banker a “window” within which he had access to the sums of money being transferred. With a substantial amount of raw cash on hand, the banker could use this capital to offer substantial loans for a set period of time, for a set rate of interest. Sometimes a loan could be offered against a surety, such as jewelry, but often it was simply agreed on the basis of trust.
There is little doubt that the Medici cottoned on to the potential of these innovations fairly quickly, and with the profits they made from bills of exchange, letters of credit, and interest-bearing loans, they be- gan to invest in property and the wool trade in the first half of the fourteenth century. Before long, being “like a Medici” became a byword for affluence among the shopkeepers of the Mercato Vecchio.
THE ART OF ATONEMENT
But as the Medici began to make their money, they ran up against a serious challenge. Although there were few—if any—practical obstacles to the profits that could be made from early forms of banking, the practices intrinsic to the industry raised some troubling moral issues.
The Church had long regarded the avaricious pursuit of wealth as one of the most troubling impediments to Christian virtue. Christ had, after all, warned that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and had urged all those who wished to follow him to give away all they had. This, indeed, had been the inspiration for Saint Francis of Assisi’s celebration of poverty as the only true calling for a devout Christian in the early thirteenth century. Facilitated by both the success of the mendicant orders and the growth of trade, such a line of thought struck a ready chord in the commercial centers of early Renaissance Italy. Equipped with a burgeoning commercial sector and a certain suspicion of wealth itself, Florence provided an ideal setting for the reception of Franciscan ideals into the mercantile consciousness, and it was in this spirit that in the early fifteenth century Poggio Bracciolini devoted an entire treatise to condemning avarice, and Cristoforo Landino penned a savage verse against covetousness.
But if the pursuit of wealth was bad enough in the abstract, banking itself rapidly came to embody the very essence of avariciousness. If ordinary traders were susceptible to greed, bankers were plainly wedded to it by virtue of the fact that they lent money for a profit. This practice of “usury”—lending money at interest—had been identified as a mortal sin in the New Testament and had been expressly forbidden by the Church since the Council of Nicaea in 325. The reason for this was that in demanding interest, bankers were guilty of “charging” people for nothing. “To take interest for money lent is unjust in itself,” claimed Saint Thomas Aquinas, “because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality, which is contrary to justice.” Usury was, in other words, basically the same as theft. And those who made the most money of all out of merchant banking were those whose souls were most heavily stained with sin. This, indeed, was precisely the line wheeled out in Florence in the sermons of the fiery Franciscan preacher San Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444).
The awful wrongs that the Church associated with banking were hammered home time and again in the literature of the early Renaissance. Indeed, literary works could be more forceful even than theological treatises in their condemnation of usury. In the De avarita, for example, Bracciolini went out of his way to condemn usury as the archetype of avarice and even attacked the notoriously vicious Bernardino of Siena for not making his listeners fully aware of the “horror of such a crime.” None, however, harbored a more virulent hatred of interest-bearing loans than Dante. In the Inferno, Dante described the fate of usurers in vivid detail. Wearing money sacks bearing heraldic crests around their necks, “dishonest” moneylenders are depicted squatting on the bottommost rim of the seventh circle of Hell, vainly trying to fend off the flames like dogs pawing at fleas. Among their number, Dante spied representatives of two noted Florentine banking families—the Gianfigliazzi and the Obriachi—and paused to speak to the wailing figure ofReginaldo degli Scrovegni, a Paduan usurer who predicted the imminent arrival of his compatriots Vitaliano del Dente and Gianni Buiamonte of Florence.
The bankers of the early Renaissance were deeply affected by the harsh line their contemporaries took against usury. The possibility of spending an eternity in Hell was a very real fear, but even if their sins were not sufficient to merit perpetual damnation, there was still good reason to be afraid. Only a little before the explosion of Italian commerce, theologians had developed a full-fledged conception of Purgatory as the antechamber of the underworld, and it was generally accepted that it was in this place of suffering and torment that any sins that had not been atoned for would be punished. The threat of Purgatory was enough to strike fear into the heart of even the most skeptical of bankers. In later years, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was to seek guidance on this matter from prelates, and his son Cosimo was sufficiently troubled by the perceived immorality of usury to engage in regular, protracted discussions with friends in holy orders about how best to expunge the banker’s sins.
The sacraments of the Church offered the most obvious solution. Whenever a banker was at death’s door, his family—or the doctor in attendance—would send for the priest. The dying man would then confess his sins, and, provided he was contrite, the priest would then give him extreme unction, wiping his soul clean for its passage into the afterlife. It was simple and—in theological terms—effective. The only problem was, however, cynicism. Although atheism was unthinkable, bankers raised in the Catholic faith were nevertheless apt to sneer at the very idea of making an honest confession.
In the Decameron, Boccaccio gleefully tells of how a Pratese notary named Ser Cepperello is unexpectedly struck down by a fatal illness in Burgundy. A deeply sinful man, given to cheating, stealing, drinking, gambling, and whoring, Cepperello has enough faith to recognize that he needs to give a deathbed confession but is shrewd enough to realize that a truthful confession would give Italian merchants a bad name in the Low Countries. Without hesitation, he summons a friar noted for his holiness and “confesses” to a pack of lies that make it seem that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Much impressed with his “virtues,” the friar duly gives Cepperello extreme unction. So successful are Cepperello’s lies that after his death, the naive friar ensures that he is celebrated as a saint, much to the amusement of Boccaccio’s lieta brigata.
But this left bankers with a problem. If the idea of making an honest confession was laughable, how could the sin of usury be expiated? How could they reconcile their appetite for profits with their desire to stay out of Purgatory?
Bankers were nothing if not practical men. If confession and extreme unction were not to be relied upon, they could at least put their faith in cold, hard cash. Although he might not be able to talk his way through the Pearly Gates, a banker could at least hope to buy his way into Heaven.
At the same time as a priest was called to a banker’s deathbed, a notary would also be summoned. His task was to draw up a final will at the dying man’s bedside, and in the will lay another great hope for last-minute salvation. Most wills—especially those of bankers and merchants—included clauses (known as mala ablata) which stipulated that a certain sum of money should be given to the Church in proportion to the sins committed. In return, it was expected that priests, monks, friars, and even ordinary worshippers would offer prayers for the soul of the deceased and thus help to rescue him from the sufferings of Purgatory.
This practice was later condemned in no uncertain terms by Fra Giovanni Dominici (d. 1420) and Antonino Pierozzi, the future archbishop of Florence, but the idea of bequeathing money in restitution for the sin of usury proved remarkably popular, and the greater part of bankers took advantage of the option to insure themselves against their wicked ways. A typical example is found in the will of Michele di Vanni Castellani, which was drawn up in Florence in 1370. Although he claimed he had not obtained any illicit income, Michele added:
I bequeath 100 florins to the bishop as compensation for money which I may have gained illegally, and this should be used in benefit of the souls of those from whom I received the money.
Just to make sure, he also lavished a similar amount of money on the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Carmelites of Florence.
There was, however, a nagging doubt. Even if money was bequeathed to the Church—sometimes with an explicit statement of how many prayers and masses were to be said for the deceased—this only went a certain way to guaranteeing that ecclesiastics and the faithful would keep the soul of a dead banker in mind. Thankfully, art came to the rescue.
Perhaps the simplest and most straightforward means of keeping a banker’s memory alive was for him to commission a lavish tomb, either directly or by instructing his relatives to make the necessary arrangements. Commonly including a carefully designed effigy of the deceased and a series of accompanying inscriptions stressing his or her qualities, such sepulchres were obviously intended to ensure that the patron would be remembered after death, not merely by passersby or even by the city at large, but also—and most specifically—by those whose prayers would be necessary for the dead man or woman to merit a place in heaven. Thus, Niccolò Acciaiuoli—the scion of his family’s banking house, the chancellor of the kingdom of Naples, and a friend of Petrarch’s—not only had an elaborate tomb carved for himself in the certosa of San Lorenzo, outside Florence, but also made doubly sure that the monks would pray for his soul by leaving them a huge bequest on the condition that a thousand masses would be said for him in the first year after his death. No amount of money was too much for such sepulchral endeavors. In 1471, for example, the Florentine merchant Piero del Tovaglia summarized contemporary opinion when he observed, “If I spend 2,000 florins on my house, my dwelling on earth, then five hundred devoted to my residence in the next life seems to me money well spent.”
As art gradually began to gain in stature, however, other—more obviously demonstrative—options also emerged. At least from the beginning of the fourteenth century, bequests were often made with the stipulation that the money be spent on commissioning an altarpiece or on decorating a chapel, especially for the churches of the mendicant orders. In this way, it was thought, there would be almost no way that the faithful could forget to pray for the donor.
Particularly in the first half of the fourteenth century, this proved an amazingly popular solution to the immorality of usury, especially among Florentine bankers. Indeed, the more money banking generated, the more intense was the competition between families to display their moral credentials through such artistic bequests. Heated games of devotional one-upmanship blew up around the patronage of chapels in major churches, and nowhere more so than in Florence. In the years after the Black Death, for example, Santa Maria Novella “had chapels endowed by the Rucellai, Bardi, Guidalotti, and Strozzi, while patronage rights in the choir behind the main altar were claimed by the Ricci and Tornaquinci,” and in 1348 Turino Baldesi left the church the enormous sum of more than 300 florins to have the whole Old Testament painted “from beginning to end.” Even more strikingly, in the same period, the “Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Cavalcanti, Tolosini, Cerchi, Velluti, Castellani, Rinuccini, Ricasoli, Alberti, Machiavelli, and several other families all had chapels” in Santa Croce, and the Bardi family alone had secured rights over a further four.
Not uncommonly, such bequests divided responsibility for large-scale commissions between the family of the deceased and the church or monastery in which the work would be housed. The Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence is a particularly good example. A noted banker from a distinguished and wealthy family, Rosello Strozzi set aside money in his will to atone for his sins in this manner. His youngest son, Tommaso, then arranged to fund the adornment of a chapel in the left transept, with frescoes showing Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory by Nardo di Cione and a magnificent altarpiece by Orcagna (Andrea di Cione) in 1354. Throughout the proceedings, however, Tommaso Strozzi—like many early patrons—worked in harmony with the Dominican friars to ensure that the works commissioned were mutually acceptable.
But if bankers were going to spend good money on works of art in the hope of atoning for their sins, they increasingly wanted to make sure they would be in full control, even from beyond the grave. From the beginning of the fourteenth century onward, bankers and patrons began to tussle for influence over the direction that commissions would take. Perhaps inevitably, the men holding the purse strings rapidly gained the upper hand, and works designed to wipe away the stain of greed, avarice, and usury came to be more closely tailored to the patrons’ immediate moral needs.
The Arena Chapel in Padua is perhaps the clearest case in point. A towering jewel of early Renaissance art, the chapel harks back to Dante’s condemnation of the Paduan banker Reginaldo degli Scrovegni. Tormented by the immorality of his father’s usury, Reginaldo’s son, Enrico, decided that the only way for the family to free itself from the stain of sin was for him to push patronage to its absolute limits. After purchasing a piece of land from the Dalesmanini family, Enrico acquired permission to erect a family chapel on the site and immediately commissioned Giotto di Bondone to adorn the interior with a dazzling cycle of frescoes depicting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary. And to ensure that the devout would offer prayers for him and his father, Enrico took the added precaution of soliciting a papal indulgence for all those who visited the chapel, much to the annoyance of the monks at the nearby Eremitani Church.
But to say that Renaissance bankers were concerned for the fate of their souls is not to tell the whole story. Although they were extremely worried about what would happen to them after death, they were equally concerned that the Church’s tough stance on usury gave them a very bad name. And if you were a banker, no amount of artistic “death insurance” could make up for the fact that the average man on the street thought you were irredeemably immoral. Bankers needed not just to atone for their sins but to be seen to atone for their sins.
One of the great advantages of the new forms of patronage that had begun to appear at the start of the fourteenth century was that bankers were able to project a powerful image of piety and repentance while actively bidding for the prayers of the faithful. Art, in other words, allowed bankers to subvert reality and gloss over their misdeeds. Even if people attending Mass in Santa Maria Novella did not actually pray for the soul of Rosello Strozzi, for example, the visual impact of the family chapel would have gone a long way toward convincing them that Tommaso Strozzi was actually a very devout individual concerned to make reparation for his sins. So, too, it was difficult for anyone visiting the Arena Chapel not to be persuaded that Enrico degli Scrovegni nurtured a sincere faith and was earnestly striving to reconcile himself with God.
As the relationship between artists and patrons became ever closer, bankers were able to push the bounds of “moral PR” even further. Taking active control over the design and composition of the works they commissioned, bankers were able to emphasize their piety and contrition by having themselves included as participants in or witnesses to scenes from Christian history, ensuring that the works’ intended audience would perceive them as more moral individuals than their business practices would otherwise suggest. It was with this in mind that Enrico degli Scrovegni, for example, had a portrait of himself offering a model of the chapel to the Virgin included in the Last Judgment, on the entrance wall of the Arena Chapel, and that Giovanni Tornabuoni had a portrait of himself kneeling in prayer, with his hands crossed piously across his chest, included in Ghirlandaio’s frescoes for the family chapel in Santa Maria Novella late in the next century.
The early Medici appear to have had only a limited involvement in artistic patronage, but from the very beginning of their careers as bankers they were highly conscious of the sinfulness of usury and the extent to which they could atone for their sins through patronage of the arts. Having watched and learned from others throughout the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they later embraced—and mastered—all forms of artistic atonement, not least insofar as their patronage of Benozzo Gozzoli was concerned. That Cosimo de’ Medici chose to have himself depicted as a penitent in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem was a powerful expression of the Medici’s quest for redemption. This dimension of his portrait was entirely in keeping with his family’s development of a long-standing trend among Florence’s shady bankers and wholly reflective of his own awareness of the perceived immorality of his own usury.
FROM BANKERS TO MERCHANT BANKERS
Despite Cosimo’s subsequent wealth, the Medici were—comparatively speaking—late starters when it came to the banking trade. By the mid-fourteenth century, they had become affluent, but they were still far from rich and were perhaps even knocked back a little by the advent of the Black Death. Although a respected member of communal society, Foligno di Conte de’ Medici, for example, complained bitterly about the modesty of the family’s means in 1373. At around this time, “a large proportion of the Medici were in very modest economic circumstances,” and “only five or six could be classified as moderately wealthy.” Indeed, in 1363, the tax assessments for two members of the family revealed them to be no better off than ordinary cloth workers and substantially worse off than many shopkeepers.
The Medici’s problem was that they were still thinking too small. Despite their tentative investments in other sectors, they hadn’t actually made the leap from being relatively modest bankers to being colossally ambitious merchant bankers. And it was in merchant banking that the real money was to be made.
The essence of the merchant banker’s art lay not in making loans per se but in using loans to serve much greater purposes. As its acknowledged masters—the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Acciaiuoli—knew, truly gigantic loans could be exchanged for trading concessions abroad. These concessions could then be used as the basis for dealing in large-scale and highly profitable exports. The Peruzzi, for example, agreed to lend the cash-strapped Edward III of England huge sums of money (Villani estimated that they handed over around 780,000 florins through the years) in return for lucrative privileges that allowed them to circumvent customs duties and corner the enormously valuable wool trade. By the same token, the grain trade with southern Italy opened up similarly profitable opportunities, and many Florentine merchant bankers turned their lending potential toward the exploitation of the kingdom of Sicily. Perhaps the shadiest opening was, however, the prospect of gaining lucrative tax farming privileges. Instead of paying back loans directly, cities or rulers could offer merchant bankers the opportunity to recoup the money they lent by collecting certain taxes for a given period of time; in this case, the banker’s objective was to collect more than he had lent, by whatever means necessary.
Whichever mechanism was chosen, a merchant bank needed four things to make this whole idea work. First, it needed an established network of foreign branches or agents able both to tender loans and to manage the trading side of the venture on the ground. Second, it needed enormous deposits from reliable investors. Third, it needed the ability to sustain huge loans. And fourth, it needed to be willing to strike rather questionable deals with unpredictable foreign potentates and to gamble on the shifting outcomes of international politics. If these were in place, there was no limit to the money that could be made. The only real danger was the temptation to lend too much to bad debtors in pursuit of ever-larger concessions, as the Bardi and the Peruzzi found to their cost when Edward III “defaulted” on his loans in 1339. Unlike today, no merchant bank—no matter how huge—was too big to fail. But provided loans and trade were managed astutely, merchant banking was a recipe for printing money.
By acting both as bankers and as merchants in the international arena, and by launching themselves into the shady world of big-time deals, such “super-companies” rode the crest of Italy’s commercial wave and took wealth to a whole new level. The Peruzzi company, for example, saw its net capital grow from an already huge 124,000 lire a fiorino in 1300–1308 to a massive 149,000 lire a fiorino in 1310–12, and even on the edge of bankruptcy the family firm had assets worth some 90,000 lire a fiorino in 1331–35. Indeed, so massive were their resources that they were able to loan Edward III no less than 175,000 florins in 1337 alone (about $31.5 million in gold terms; about $164,937,500 measured against wages). Even after the cataclysmic crash that followed the English default, Florence’s merchant bankers could still expect to make vast amounts of money very quickly. One of the greatest Florentine success stories of the period was that of the Serristori. Despite only starting out as merchant bankers in the early years of the fifteenth century, the Serristori were catapulted to the very pinnacles of wealth within a few decades. In 1427, Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro personally declared net assets of around 35,000 florins (about $6.3 million in gold terms; about $16,240,000 measured against wages) and used his loans to leverage his interest in exporting textiles and importing wood, silver, alum, sugar, and all manner of other things. Within a few years, Antonio’s resources had grown so large that he—the grandson of a humble notary—was able to marry his sons into the greatest of Florence’s patrician families, the Strozzi, the Pazzi, and the Capponi.
It was Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci, who transformed the Medici’s fortunes by taking the next step. He did not, it must be admitted, immediately strike his contemporaries as a pioneering go-getter. With a high forehead, bulging, heavily hooded eyes, and tight lips, he was quiet, retiring, and ineloquent. He was almost forgettable. What was more, his beginnings were far from auspicious. Giovanni had inherited only very little from his father, Averardo, and had started out in a modest way as a petty moneylender in Florence. Yet in contrast to many of his predecessors, his unassuming appearance concealed a burning ambition and a clear knowledge of where the future was pointing. More than anything else, however, his sudden jump up from mere banking helps to illustrate just how shady Renaissance merchant banking could be.
Giovanni got his big opportunity when he went to work as a managing partner in the Rome branch of the bank owned by his father’s second cousin Vieri di Cambio. This experience opened his eyes for the first time to the full possibilities of merchant banking. Equipped with a clear vision of how money was to be made, he founded his own company in Rome after Vieri’s death in 1395. He then returned to set up a new partnership in Florence in 1397 and a new branch in Venice a few years later.
It was, however, in Rome that Giovanni made his money. On striking out on his own, he had set his eyes on the Church. It was a shrewd move. The Church had a uniquely attractive combination of attributes. On the one hand, it had colossal holdings and reliable revenues streaming in from every corner of Europe. And on the other hand, the papacy’s need for cash often far outstripped the Church’s short-term income. It was the ideal client, and its vast territorial resources meant there were plenty of commercial privileges to be traded. The only problem was that in the past only a single banker had been appointed to handle Church business; and it wasn’t the Medici.
Giovanni’s strategy revealed not only his astuteness in taking advantage of opportunities but also the shallow, underhanded methods that merchant bankers had to employ. In 1378, the Great Schism tore the Church apart. Instead of there being only one pope, there were suddenly two, and then three, rival pontiffs vying for primacy, each of whom needed a banker.
When Pope Alexander V (who headed the Pisan Obedience) died in 1410, Giovanni saw his chance. For more than a decade, he had been banker to the Neapolitan cardinal Baldassare Cossa, and having become fast friends, the two men seem to have struck a deal. Lending him the 10,000 florins he needed to bribe the other cardinals, Giovanni allowed Cossa to buy his way to the papacy. In return, Cossa—now enthroned as Pope John XXIII—entrusted Giovanni with the massive resources of the Pisan papacy, widely acknowledged to be the most “legitimate” of the three. So successful was Giovanni at handling papal finances that even after John XXIII’s deposition and the reunification of the Church in 1415, the Medici were ultimately confirmed as the Church’s sole bankers in 1420.
It was corrupt, deceitful, and cunning. But from that moment on, the profits that could be made were almost limitless. Taking over the family’s business interests on his father’s retirement in 1420, Cosimo pushed the Medici bank to ever greater heights of success and profitability. Making the most of his control of papal banking, Cosimo ensured that Church business accounted for an amazing 63 percent of the company’s profits between 1420 and 1435. Reestablishing the bank on a new footing, he then massively expanded its operations, opening branches in Ancona, Avignon, Basel, Bruges, London, Geneva, and Pisa to make the most of international trade.
Although he was shrewd enough to avoid investing too much of his money in (taxable) assets such as land or property, Cosimo’s wealth soon outstripped that of those who had hitherto been regarded as the richest men in Florence. Even the famously rich Palla Strozzi was overshadowed by his Medici rival by the third decade of the century. Indeed, so fantastically prosperous had Cosimo become by 1459 that Giovanni Rucellai observed that he was “probably not only the richest Florentine, but the richest Italian of all time.” It is, however, revealing that while Rucellai praises Palla Strozzi for having earned his wealth “honestly,” he remains pointedly silent about the manner in which Cosimo had made his money.
THE ART OF MAGNIFICENCE
The art of merchant banking made the ethical problems of moneymaking much more serious. Although the profits were huge, there was no getting around the fact that they depended on a more relentless pursuit of usury than had ever been attempted before. What was more, the underhanded methods, backroom deals, and outright extortion that were part and parcel of the game of international finance left merchant banking open to accusations of outright immorality.
When Cosimo de’ Medici took over control of the family business in 1420, he assumed responsibility for a commercial enterprise that was not only more profitable but also more heavily tainted by wickedness than ever before. Cosimo’s fortune was inescapably marked by the moral stigma attached to usury, and the richer he grew, the more indelible the stain of sin became. What was worse, not merely was he a usurer, but he also used usury to bribe or blackmail cash-strapped potentates. He was holding the Church to ransom and was even encouraging simony and corruption in the Curia itself. Whichever way you looked at it, Cosimo’s mastery of merchant banking was every bit as morally bankrupt as it was financially rewarding.
It was perhaps inevitable that the new breed of merchant bankers should have felt an especially intense need to spend ever greater sums of money on the “art of atonement,” and it is no exaggeration to say that the superabundance of richly decorated chapels and churches for which Florence, in particular, is famed testifies both to the guilt felt by patrons and to the desperation with which they clamored to save their blackened souls through art.
Being richer than any others, the Medici felt the need for artistic atonement more acutely than most, and they led the field in terms of the variety and scale of their bequests. Having watched and learned from others throughout the fourteenth century, Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo embraced—and mastered—the practice of using patronage for this purpose in the early fifteenth century. They positively lavished money on bequests and gifts. Works such as Fra Angelico’s Madonna and Saints were given to convents and churches, and individual chapels (such as that in Santa Croce) were funded after the manner of the Bardi and the Peruzzi by other members of the family. Similarly, they took very great care to ensure that their tombs were placed in locations that would virtually guarantee the prayers of the faithful. Giovanni di Bicci was buried in the middle of the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo, while Cosimo went one step further in having himself interred right in front of the high altar in the main church.
Yet it would be mistaken to believe that Italy’s super-rich merchant bankers patronized the arts purely for the sake of their rotten souls. Even in the early fourteenth century, the more affluent members of the mercantile elite had begun to feel the need to show off a little, and it was certainly not uncommon for atonement to shade off into display. The endowment of family chapels and the inclusion of portraits in fresco cycles, in particular, could easily be interpreted as expressions of a latent desire to exhibit wealth to the public. By the early decades of the fifteenth century, however, merchant bankers found themselves in possession of fortunes so vast that their wealth rivaled—and, in some cases, even exceeded—that of the crowned heads of Europe. With money also came status, and—finding that kings, popes, and princes were dependent on the credit they could offer—they had difficulty resisting the feeling that they were a cut above the ordinary citizen. Their pockets bulging with cash and their chests puffed out with pride, merchant bankers simply could not resist the temptation to display their wealth and prestige through ever more inventive displays of conspicuous consumption.
Embarking on one of the greatest spending sprees in history, the merchant bankers of Renaissance Italy rapidly found that there were no limits either to the money they could spend or to the things they could spend it on. Of course, like many of the modern world’s richest men and women, they found a certain satisfaction in giving large and very public donations to charitable institutions. But there were more gratifying and direct ways of satisfying their need for recognition. Dazzling jewels, fine brocades, clothes embroidered with golden thread, rich silks, and the finest Arabian horses were purchased with almost wanton abandon. Vast banquets with dozens of dishes for hundreds of guests were given day after day; huge, bacchanalian dances were thrown on the smallest pretext; and households thronged with armies of liveried servants. Splendor was the only thing that really mattered.
Most of all, however, merchant bankers poured money into the patronage of the arts. Eager to have their wealth displayed for posterity, they commissioned carefully arranged portraits in greater numbers than ever before: the example of Antonio Rossellino’s bust of Francesco Sassetti is a typical early case in point. Latching onto the growing social value attached to classical learning, they paid artists to produce playful paintings on ancient themes, or statues of nymphs and gods in stone and bronze, and began collecting antique originals with unbridled enthusiasm.
But at least in the early years of the fifteenth century, merchant bankers focused their attention most especially on architecture and sought to use this medium as the most dramatic and impressive means of showing off their wealth. As shared social spaces that served as focal points for community activity, churches in particular caught their eye as offering rich potential for the affirmation of status. More concerned with prestige than with atonement per se, they sought out every opportunity to rebuild and extend churches and monasteries in as public a manner as possible. Although contemporaries such as Palla Strozzi, Tommaso Spinelli, and the Pazzi family all contributed lavishly to the construction of new chapels, cloisters, and convents, Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo de’ Medici stood head and shoulders over everyone else. In 1419, Giovanni agreed to pay for the construction of the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo—employing Brunelleschi for the task—and after 1440, Cosimo assumed responsibility for rebuilding the entire church, thus transforming the whole into a gigantic shrine to the Medici family. Only a few years earlier, Cosimo had paid for the remodeling of San Marco and had stacked its library with the choicest manuscripts that money could buy. Not long after, he followed this up by taking on the task of rebuilding the Badia Fiesolana in comparable style. The competition between merchant bankers for a financial interest in the Badia Fiorentina was, however, so intense that not even Cosimo could get a look in.
Yet despite the enormous sums spent on ecclesiastical building projects, nothing compared with the amount of money that was poured into palazzi and villas. At the end of the fourteenth century, the homes of even the richest merchant bankers had been relatively unprepossessing, even if they were a little larger than most. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, for example, spent most of his adult life in a comparatively unremarkable house in the via Larga, and even when he moved to a fractionally bigger house in the Piazza del Duomo, the family residence remained modest. The explosion in merchant bankers’ fortunes in the early fifteenth century, however, catalyzed a sudden vogue for enormous and richly decorated palazzi. Their worth was vast. According to some recent estimates, the average merchant banker’s palazzo had a value of between 1,500 and 2,500 florins, while the most elaborate, built by Filippo Strozzi and his heirs, cost almost 40,000 florins, more than a thousand times the annual wage of the most skilled workman. No price, indeed, was too high. As Giovanni Rucellai put it, “I think I have given myself more honor, and my soul more satisfaction, by having spent money than by having earned it, above all with regard to the building I have done.” In size and richness, these family palazzi were no less impressive. Significantly bigger even than the White House, the Palazzo Strozzi is reflective of the heights to which palatial ambition and ostentation could rise, and the fact that the Rucellai (whose palace was designed by Leon Battista Alberti in ca. 1446–51), the Pitti (who commissioned their palazzo in 1458), and the Tornabuoni later strove to outdo one another in grandeur testifies to the extent to which the prestige of a merchant banker was bound up with the size of his home. None, however, came close to Cosimo de’ Medici as far as scale and opulence were concerned. Even though Cosimo rejected Brunelleschi’s original plans as being “too sumptuous and magnificent,” the Palazzo Medici Riccardi was so grandly appointed and luxuriously decorated that, as Vasari later recorded, “it has comfortably accommodated kings, emperors, popes, and as illustrious princes as there are to be found in Europe, and won endless praise for the magnificence of Cosimo and for Michelozzo’s outstanding talent in architecture.” Nor was the Palazzo Medici Riccardi Cosimo’s only home. Again employing Michelozzo for the task, he “restored the palace of Careggi [two miles from Florence], richly and magnificently,” and built a completely new, fortresslike villa at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello.
It was obvious to anyone who cared to look around the streets of Florence that having rapidly acquired colossal fortunes, Renaissance merchant bankers—much like modern-day hedge fund managers or Russian oligarchs—wanted nothing more than to spend their money on showing off their wealth and status. Yet having begun to splurge on art and architecture on an altogether new scale, they ran into an entirely new set of problems. Quite apart from the perceived immorality of usury, it became clear that both wealth and spending came with their own, rather troubling, ethical issues.
On the one hand, there was the problem of wealth itself. Put simply, money bred resentment and moral disapproval. Regardless of how it had been obtained, it had long been regarded as an obstacle to virtue and as an impediment to public-spiritedness. The Franciscan ideals that had dominated civic spiritualism in the fourteenth century had led to a certain popular disdain for riches. In the De seculo et religione (1381), for example, Coluccio Salutati had captured the tenor of contemporary opinion in praising poverty as the status most befitting piety, and in associating wealth with greed. But despite the profound economic changes of the early fifteenth century, this contempt for Mammon’s fruits remained deeply entrenched in the religious imagination. Writing in either 1445 or 1446, for example, Bartolomeo Facio contended that “riches bring no satiety to man, but greater greed, rather, and thirst,” and consequently opined that no one “who practices commerce and profit-making” could attain the true “riches” of the Christian faith “even if he possesses the fortune of Cosimo.” This fed into a long-running social mistrust of riches. Although the Ciompi Revolt (1378) had been comprehensively crushed, the humble folk of Florence who flocked to hear firebrand preachers attack the opulence of the rich retained a deep resentment of the grassi (fat cats) simply because they were wealthy.
On the other hand, ostentatious spending was itself problematic. Still deeply attached to the ideal of poverty, the stricter of the mendicant orders continued to denounce showy expenditure as nothing more than an expression of self-love. Large palaces, richly decorated chambers, fine clothing, and eye-popping jewels were all condemned. Indeed, preachers such as Fra Giovanni Dominici and Cosimo’s own friend Antonino Pierozzi even denounced those who gave large amounts of money to charity on the grounds that such gifts were inspired more by pride than by Christian caritas.
The key to legitimating wealth and lavish spending lay in the manner in which both were presented. As many of the humanists who gathered around Florentine merchant bankers in the early fifteenth century realized, half of the problem lay with the common conflation of riches with greed. Artificial though the distinction might have been, it was argued that the two did not always go hand in hand, least of all at a moral level. Wealth was, after all, just a pile of cash. It wasn’t a process but a fact. However a person’s fortune had been obtained, therefore, it was illogical to have any disdain for money itself. The mere fact of being rich didn’t make a merchant banker a bad person. In his commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics (1419), for example, Leonardo Bruni suggested that far from being an impediment to Christian virtue, riches were “neither good nor bad in themselves.” As Poggio Bracciolini argued in his De nobilitate (1440) and as Francesco Filelfo explained in his De paupertate (ca. 1445), wealth was morally indifferent, and it was impossible to judge a merchant banker for being filthy rich.
Nevertheless, it was still possible to judge the wealthy for the manner in which they spent their money. Clearly, some forms of expenditure were considered immoral. By virtue of the contempt in which usury was held, few denied that the idea of reinvesting profits to make money “breed” was anathema. By the same token, truly excessive spending was equally undesirable. But at the same time, it was also clear that the total avoidance of expenditure was to be shunned. The miserly tendency to hoard cash for its own sake was a classic paradigm of senseless greed, every bit as bad as wanton profligacy.
There was, however, a middle way. A certain level of spending was regarded as socially acceptable. For Leon Battista Alberti—who was himself the illegitimate child of a Florentine merchant banker—there was no harm at all in money being spent on extensions to churches or in decorating private houses with a cheerful liberality. Such playful indulgences could, he argued, only bring pleasure, and no one could possibly find anything amiss about a bit of pleasure, provided it remained within the bounds of propriety.
But some spending could actually be presented as a manifestation of public virtue. Perhaps inspired by the efforts to justify the lavishness of signorial courts in the previous century, the humanists of the early fifteenth century came to develop a complete “theory of magnificence” that attributed a definite moral value to merchant bankers’ patronage of the arts, and especially to architecture.
Perhaps the fullest and most forceful defense of “magnificence” (which literally means “doing great things”) was offered by the Augustinian canon Fra Timoteo Maffei (ca. 1415–70) in his In magnificentiae Cosmi Medicei Florentini detractores (ca. 1454–56). Grounded in the forms of patronage that Maffei saw springing up around him, this dialogue was intended specifically to rebut the criticisms that had been leveled against the enormous sums Cosimo de’ Medici had already spent on his ecclesiastical building projects. Drawing heavily on Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Maffei argued that Cosimo’s construction and decoration of Florentine churches and monasteries could be viewed not as an expression of his overweening pride and arrogance but as manifestations of a desire to celebrate God’s majesty and incite men to virtue. Far from being contemptible, Cosimo’s extravagant patronage only testified to his virtue and merited the approval of all true believers. As Maffei put it:
All these things deserve extraordinary praise and should be recommended to posterity with the utmost enthusiasm, since from Cosimo’s Magnificence in building monasteries and temples it will have had divine excellence before its eyes, and it will consider with how much piety and with how much thankfulness we are indebted to God.
The more merchant bankers like Cosimo spent on ecclesiastical building projects, the more they revealed themselves to be truly virtuous and devout men.
It should, of course, be noted that Maffei limited himself to talking only about churches and monasteries; but it did not take too much imagination to transpose the basic thrust of his argument to the more secular setting of civic society. As both Francesco Filelfo and Leon Battista Alberti argued, “magnificence”—that is, a willingness and capacity to spend on a grand scale—was a virtue that could be applied to all forms of artistic patronage, provided only that the viewer could believe that the patron had been driven by motives other than mere self-glorification. In constructing an enormous palazzo, for example, a merchant banker, it was thought, was not simply serving his own ends but also conferring great honor on his family and on his city. Families and cities were, after all, known by their monuments. Splendor was thus thought of as a profoundly social virtue that manifested both a familial devotion and a public-spirited commitment to enhancing the prestige of the commune. Indeed, the more fabulously decorated and grandly conceived a palace was, the greater the owner’s virtue was thought to be. This was expressed with unusual clarity and force by Giovanni Pontano, writing in 1498:
The magnificent man is made great through great expenditure. Thus the works of the magnificent man consist in illustrious palaces, in churches of excellent manufacture, in theatres, in porticoes, in streets, in sea-ports … But since magnificence consists in great expense, it is necessary that the size of the object itself be sumptuous, and imposing, otherwise it will not justifiably excite either admiration or praise. And impressiveness, in turn, is obtained through ornamentation, the extent and the excellence of the material, and the capacity of the work to last for a long time. Without art, in truth, nothing, whether large or small, will merit true praise. Thus if something is tawdry and lacking in ornament, or made in a low-cost material which will not guarantee longevity, it truly cannot be great, nor should it be held to be so.
The success of this new conception of wealth and spending is easy to gauge. So seductive is the humanistic theory of magnificence that even today merchant bankers like Cosimo de’ Medici seem to be cloaked in the same aura of superhuman cultivation as artists. But it is nevertheless important to remember that the theory of magnificence was nothing more than a way of dressing reality up in more socially acceptable terms. However much humanists like Alberti and Maffei endeavored to celebrate the chapels, churches, and palazzi springing up around Florence as manifestations of a deep-seated sense of public virtue, they were writing with the express intention of defending super-wealthy merchant bankers against the accusations of what we might today call the 99 percent. They were definitely not describing reality.
For all the humanistic window dressing, the “art of magnificence” was nothing more than a gigantic exercise in conspicuous consumption and self-glorification. By endowing chapels, funding the reconstruction of churches and monasteries, building great palaces, and decorating their homes with the finest art that money could buy, merchant bankers like Cosimo de’ Medici were consciously endeavoring to show off their immense wealth and to provide a very visible affirmation of their own financial dominance.
Yet precisely because the “art of magnificence” was the product of wealth, it also concealed the dark and unpleasant methods on which merchant banking was founded. Every brick, every brushstroke, testified to the usury, extortion, and downright dirtiness that was essential to every fortune made.
Despite its rather seedy underside, it is the “art of magnificence” that features most prominently in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem. Although Cosimo was careful to ensure he was portrayed in the penitential manner appropriate to atonement, the glittering finery of the frescoes is a testimony to the merchant bankers’ longing to show off their wealth and use their filthy lucre to portray themselves—rather deceptively—as virtuous citizens of the republic.
FROM MERCHANT BANKERS TO MASTERS
In the years between their first appearance in the historical record and Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s visit to Florence, the Medici had gone from being humble money changers to being enormously wealthy merchant bankers capable of lavishing huge sums on the arts of atonement and magnificence. Yet this was only part of the story. As their commercial fortunes changed, they saw their political fortunes alter at the same time. Although they had begun as mere bit players in the drama of communal life, by 1459, Cosimo de’ Medici had emerged not only as the richest man in the city but also as the uncrowned king of Florence. It was a remarkable journey for any family, but the factors that propelled him and his family from obscurity to the very pinnacles of power and influence were emblematic of the intimate relationship that developed between merchant banking and politics in the early Renaissance. And if the commercial practices of merchant bankers seemed dark and murky, the political world they inhabited was even darker. Strikingly modern in many ways, it was a world far removed from our familiar conceptions of the Renaissance. What is really significant, however, is not so much the political shenanigans in which merchant bankers became involved as the economic factors that allowed them to carve out a dominant position in the world of politics.
Given the guild-based structure of Florentine politics, bankers and merchant bankers found themselves drawn inexorably into public life. It was, however, more than a matter of institutional ties. The more successful merchant bankers became, the more heavily their affairs became entangled with the politics of the Renaissance city. More so even than today, their fortunes were bound up with the actions of government. There’s no doubt they had the most to gain from government. As Gene Brucker has rightly observed, the most striking feature of the Signoria is that “it governed for the benefit of the rich and powerful, and often to the disadvantage of the poor and the lowly.” It was the urban elite who received the lion’s share of lucrative sinecures, who benefited most from the manifest inequalities of the tax system, and who received secure dividends from shares in the Monte (Florence’s funded debt). But at the same time, they also had the most to lose. As the worrying effects of the Ciompi Revolt had suggested, slight alterations to tax rates, wage levels, or the management of the Monte could have far-reaching implications for the most modestly sized enterprises, while decisions about foreign affairs, war and peace, and the levying of forced loans could have a truly monumental impact on the fortunes of the city’s merchant bankers.
As far as Florence’s richest citizens were concerned, business and politics were two sides of the same coin, and given how high the stakes could be, they were in no doubt that government was quite simply too important to be left to chance, or worse, to common tradesmen. Although the structure of Florentine government was already heavily geared toward the interests of the wealthiest by the late fourteenth century (see chapter 3), there emerged a narrow group of super-rich patricians bent on annexing public policy to their own interests and on keeping the reins of power in their grasp.
Conscious that the Florentine constitution was ostensibly “republican,” these patricians knew that if they were to control government, they had to find a way to bend the rules. They began by rigging elections. Unlike today, however, there were no ballot boxes to stuff. Officeholders were chosen in a deliberately “random” way, with the names of successful candidates being drawn from a sack. Yet chance could still be nudged in the right direction. Although all guild members were theoretically eligible for office, committees of scrutiny decided whose names should be put in the sack. Composed entirely of guild patricians, these committees thus determined who would be in and who would be out. But too much was still being left to chance. After 1387, two—and later three—of the eight seats on the priorate were reserved for a special class of preferred candidates whose names were drawn from separate, smaller pouches (borsellini) and who had all been preselected by the committees. Even if selections were still officially done by chance and new families were progressively introduced into the ranks of officeholders in the years following the Ciompi Revolt, Florence’s patricians could be sure of having “preselected” a majority of the priors.
It was all very well to rig elections. But bitter experience had taught the patricians that restricting office holding too tightly could lead to disaster. Too narrow a base of power looked much too suspicious to be credible. It was clear that the “right sorts of people” had to include a wider range of citizens than in the past. Still, there was no point in having the right sorts of people selected for office if you couldn’t be sure of controlling them. The key to making the committees of scrutiny an effective instrument of power was the transposition of personal, business relationships to the political sphere. Although they often served as priors, the top patricians would ensure that even if they weren’t personally selected, the Signoria would be packed with their relations, their business partners, or their dependents—in Mafia terms, people they could describe as “friends of ours,” “made men.” By stacking the government with handpicked individuals who were bound to them either by commercial ties or by the bonds of marriage, the mercantile elite could be certain that their placemen would be absolutely loyal to their interests. As the insightful chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti put it, “Many were elected to the offices, but few to the government.” The business of politics and the politics of business had thus become one, with patronage and family providing the crucial mechanisms of control from behind the scenes.
Merchant bankers swiftly found that they were unusually well placed in this system. Although far from dominant, their involvement in a wide variety of trading concerns and their unique role as providers of credit not only allowed them to nurture peculiarly extensive networks of clients, but also gave them a disproportionate influence in affairs of state. Simply by virtue of their financial clout they rapidly became some of the strongest and most nimble players in communal politics.
Florence stands out as the most striking example of a city dominated by mercantile elites who were themselves overshadowed by merchant bankers, but it was far from unique. Despite being subject to foreign powers at various points during the Renaissance, the maritime republic of Genoa was similarly governed by a narrow clique of merchants and—most important—merchant bankers. After a destructive civil war and especially following the exclusion of old, aristocratic families from the political process by the first doge, Simone Boccanegra, in 1339, the city was all but run by a “popular” junta of mercantile families such as the Montaldo and the Adorno. Even Venice—which, in 1297, restricted access to the Great Council to a limited and hereditary nobility—found itself increasingly dominated by the interests of long-distance traders and merchant bankers, including Marco Corner (doge 1365–68) and Niccolò Tron (doge 1471–73), whose magnificent tomb can still be seen in the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.
In Florence, it was no surprise that the Medici gradually found themselves drawn into the political world and slowly gravitated from the fringes of the “ruling class” to the centers of power. The first member of the family to be elected to the Signoria had assumed office as far back as 1291, and over the next century they were chosen to serve on a further fifty-two occasions. At times, they had stumbled into the middle of some of Florence’s most dramatic political storms. One of their number, Salvestro de’ Medici, had beengonfaloniere di giustizia in the turbid months leading up to the Ciompi Revolt in 1378, and another, Vieri di Cambio, had been part of the tightly knit group of magnates who set themselves to rebuilding the shattered republic after the rising had been crushed.
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was no exception. As the first member of the family to become truly wealthy, he was received into the inner circle of Florentine politics almost as a matter of course. Ushered into government by his distant cousin Vieri di Cambio, he was selected as a member of the Signoria in 1408 and 1411 and was later chosen to serve as gonfaloniere di giustizia in 1421. He entered the Signoria at a key moment. Between the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, Florence embarked upon an age of what has become known as “consensus politics.” The effect of the cunning constitutional cheats developed in the years following the Ciompi Revolt had been to consolidate the position of a relatively small group of super-rich families as a ruling class. Composed largely of merchant bankers bound together by common interests and the common cause of war against Milan, it was more clearly defined and cohesive than ever before. And since it combined broad-based support, rigorous electoral oversight, and complex networks of social control, the regime established by the ruling elite was, in many senses, much more secure than anything Florence had ever seen. A telling illustration of this is provided by Cavalcanti’s tale of how the patrician Niccolò da Uzzano, having slept through the majority of a crucial debate on foreign affairs, suddenly woke up and announced a policy that he had already decided upon with “other powerful men” and that was unanimously approved without further discussion. “Consensus”—both within the patrician class and between the elite and its lower-status placemen—was the order of the day: everyone could feel involved, and the leadership group could put faith in the stability of its hegemony. So great was the confidence of this patrician elite that it consciously propagated an image of a united and harmonious Florence prospering under the rule of a “better” class of people. In his Panegyric to the City of Florence (1403–4), for example, Leonardo Bruni affirmed that “in Florence, it has always happened that the majority view has been identical with [that of] the best citizens.”
Giovanni di Bicci was, however, unusually reluctant to be drawn too deeply into the political fray. Preoccupied with his business, he was well-known for his intensely private nature. He made a show of withdrawing as far as possible from the rough-and-tumble of political debate and shied away from the limelight as far as he was able. He accepted his election as a prior and as gonfaloniere only with serious reservations and avoided taking part in the pratiche (advisory meetings). As he advised his sons on his deathbed:
Do not appear to give advice, but put forward your views discreetly in conversation. Be wary of going to the Palazzo della Signoria; wait to be summoned, and when you are summoned, do what you are asked and never display any pride should you receive a lot of votes … Avoid … political controversy, and always keep out of the public eye.
Given the choice, he claimed he would have preferred to steer clear of politics altogether.
Far from being a shy and misanthropic aberration, however, Giovanni di Bicci was actually a rather cunning realist. Despite the rhetoric of unity and harmony, Florence’s patricians were deeply divided by the time he was coerced into office for the first time. Although the city’s richest men were united by certain common interests, this was insufficient to sustain long-term coherence within the ruling class. While they may have had some objectives in common, this did not mean either that they agreed about the means to be employed or that they did not have a whole host of other, more important goals that competed with one another.
Conflict was inevitable. Business rivalries rapidly blurred into political rivalries, and as new factions formed, disputes boiled over into civil disturbances that harked back to the dark days of the early fourteenth century. The stakes were high, and the struggles were bitterly, if not always violently, fought. In the mid-1390s, for example, Maso degli Albizzi and Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi succeeded in gaining a momentary hold over the Signoria and immediately had their rivals Filippo Bastari and Donato Acciaiuoli exiled. Only a few years later, in 1400, a “conspiracy” was uncovered, and two members of the Ricci family were accused of heading a plot to kill the Albizzi-Gianfigliazzi faction, a drama vividly recounted by an anonymous Florentine diarist. A sequence of similar such “coups,” banishments, and confiscations followed as the Albizzi warred with their rivals for control of government.
As an ambitious merchant banker, Giovanni di Bicci saw how easily he could be drawn into such factional disputes and how devastating the effects could be. His own relatives had got caught up in the maelstrom on several occasions, often in the most damaging way possible. The family was not immune to dividing against itself. In the 1370s, for instance, Vieri di Cambio had ended up on the opposite side to his cousin Salvestro. And when the Medici did take sides, they often ended up on the wrong one. In the aftermath of the Ricci conspiracy, several of their number had been implicated. Unwilling to risk exile or the confiscation of his property, Giovanni preferred to keep his distance.
The big problem was that although Florence had a lot of wealthy merchant bankers, none of them was dominant. As long as the financial clout of the major families remained broadly comparable, none could expect to acquire an unquestionable hold on political power. All that was about to change. By the 1420s—that is, just as Cosimo de’ Medici was taking over control of the family bank—the center of gravity was shifting. Cosimo discovered that as management of the papal accounts swelled his coffers, he was in control of an extremely large network of clients working in a wide range of industries and including people who were exceptionally wealthy in their own right. At the same time, financial pressures on the Florentine Signoria were about to ensure not only that merchant bankers were to be consecrated as the dominant figures in civic politics, but also that power would be concentrated in the hands of a rapidly narrowing group of the super-wealthy.
The key issue was debt. Although the relatively limited role played by communal governments in the late Middle Ages had kept budgets mostly balanced, the spiraling costs of prolonged wars and the increasing complexity of the administrative apparatus of emergent states contrived to send overheads skyrocketing. While trade continued to boom, ordinary tax revenues were simply inadequate to keep up, and the city-states scrabbled around desperately for a solution to a mounting cash-flow crisis. It was in this heady atmosphere of impending financial disaster that the idea of government debt was born. Communes had no option but to borrow money wherever they could, and while the first green shoots of the modern bond market burst forth from the sterile soils of the cities’ empty coffers, the notion of the bailout was also given its first airing. But whereas in today’s world, governments staring bankruptcy in the face can pin their hope on avaricious bond traders or, at worst, a hefty injection of capital from the International Monetary Fund or the European Central Bank, in the Renaissance the cash-strapped communes of northern Italy had only one recourse—the seemingly bottomless reserves of the merchant bankers. More than anything else, it was debt that catapulted the merchant bankers to the forefront of urban politics and catalyzed the gradual collapse of broad-based “republican” regimes into barely concealed tyrannies.
Almost every state in northern Italy experienced a debt crisis of one sort or another during the Renaissance, and none appear to have been more vulnerable than the city-republics. Genoa—often unjustly overlooked by historians of the period—was convulsed by a series of crippling financial crises from the first dogate of Simone Boccanegra through the very beginnings of the fifteenth century, and it is no understatement to say that its chronic inability to meet its financial obligations not only underpinned the growing dominance of the new mercantile elite, but also inspired the city’s decision to submit itself to foreign domination at various points. No city is, however, a better illustration of the impact of debt on the position of the merchant bankers than Florence.
In 1424, Florence had become embroiled in a major conflict with Milan that lasted—on and off—for the next nine years. Things went badly from the beginning, and as the war spiraled out of control, the city found itself increasingly dependent on the services of mercenaries. The costs of maintaining a largely mercenary army were exorbitantly high, and although Florence was no stranger to paying enormous sums for its military adventures, this was on an altogether different scale. For much of the war, Florence faced bills of almost 500,000 florins per year, far above the sums it could raise from taxation. Running a deficit that peaked at 682,000 florins in 1426, the city needed to find a way of raising more money, and fast.
Despite its unpopularity, the catasto—a new form of property taxation—was the obvious solution. From 1427 on, every household in Florence was compelled to submit a declaration of its net worth (less exemptions), which the city would then use as the basis for its assessment of tax liabilities. A household’s net assets were taxed at a rate of 0.5 percent at each collection, and the city could announce collections several times a year. As the surviving records show, it was one of the more equitable forms of tax ever to be seen in Florence. Many poorer households did not pay any tax at all, and the greater part of the burden fell on the richest members of society, that is, on the merchant bankers. Whereas some owed no more than a few soldi, Palla Strozzi’s declared net wealth of 101,422 florins meant he owed 507 florins at each collection, and Giovanni di Bicci’s declared assets of over 79,000 florins lumbered him with a bill of 397 florins.
The only problem was that because the cost of war was so high, the city had to impose many collections each year. Between 1428 and 1433, it has been calculated that a grand total of 152 collections were gathered in. And because the catasto evaluated tax in relation to assets rather than income, the sheer number of collections meant that—even at a low rate of taxation—tax bills were becoming a crippling burden for many Florentines. As John Najemy has observed, “entire patrimonies were being consumed” as families tried desperately to sell property off just to pay what was demanded of them. Even the famously rich Palla Strozzi, whose wealth was tied up in land, had to beg for a reduction in his assessment in 1431. Florence was bankrupting itself.
The city decided to remedy its growing cash-flow crisis by borrowing large sums from its wealthiest citizens. A body of merchant bankers known as the Officials of the Bank was charged with raising and setting the terms of these loans, and in the majority of cases they too were major lenders. Much like the board of the Federal Reserve, the Officials were responsible for keeping Florence solvent, and it has been calculated that they secured loans of about 200,000 florins each year.
It was this combination of war, crippling catasto collections, and government borrowing that transformed the character of Florentine politics and catapulted Cosimo de’ Medici to power. The catasto did not hit the Medici quite as hard as it hit other prominent merchant-banking families. Their investments in land and property were limited, and they carefully kept their money moving around, so that their tax liabilities were lower, and their assets were less seriously damaged by the collections. Nevertheless, Cosimo de’Medici and his business associates not only dominated the Officials of the Bank but also accounted for the greater part of the loans made to the Signoria. Surviving records show that no less than 46 percent of all loans came from just ten people either drawn from the Medici’s ranks or allied with them by business and patronage. Cosimo and his brother, Lorenzo, personally accounted for no less than 28 percent. It is no exaggeration to say that Florence was financially dependent on the Medici—and most particularly on Cosimo.
Although Cosimo shared his father’s distaste for holding public office, his financial resources ensured that he was rapidly emerging as the dominant force in Florentine politics. Consciously or not, he was effectively buying Florence wholesale. In the faction-ridden and fiercely competitive world of politics, rumors began spreading that he was planning to seize control of the government.
By the summer of 1433, Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi had become frightened by Cosimo’s growing influence. Concerned that they were about to be “bought” out of power in the very near future, they decided they had to act. As soon as Cosimo was out of the city at his estate at Il Trebbio, they packed the Signoria with their own partisans and prepared to get rid of him for good. Summoned back to Florence from his vacation at short notice, Cosimo was arrested and locked in a cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria. At the bidding of Albizzi and Strozzi, a special committee (balìa) was then hastily set up to act as the kangaroo court they needed to dispose of Cosimo. But things didn’t go entirely to plan. Although Albizzi argued passionately for execution, thebalìashrank from imposing the death sentence. After weeks of heated debates, on September 28, Cosimo, his brother, Lorenzo, and his cousin Averardo were exiled.
Rinaldo degli Albizzi was exultant. He would, of course, have preferred to have had Cosimo killed, but the mere fact that Cosimo was out of the way seemed to provide a good enough reason for celebration. It was a grotesque mistake. No sooner had he receded from sight than it became clear that Florence was now stuck. With the Medici in exile, the city over which Rinaldo degli Albizzi presided was quite simply unable to pay its bills. What was more, the economy as a whole was dealt a hammer blow by Cosimo’s absence. Without Medici money lubricating the wheels of commerce, business was grinding to a halt. The Signoria couldn’t even content itself with confiscating Cosimo’s legendary sacks of money, as these, too, had been hidden away months before. Only when it was too late did Albizzi realize that Cosimo was effectively blackmailing the city.
Disaster followed. Within months, economic troubles, tax hikes, and a series of cataclysmic military defeats had made Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s regime hideously unpopular. His allies began to abandon him. Even Palla Strozzi grew colder. His grip on the Signoria weakened, and—forced to choose between civic bankruptcy and a Medici hegemony—the city’s mercantile elite selected a decidedly pro-Cosimo Signoria in August 1434.
Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s political career was over. The new Signoria immediately sent him into exile along with Palla Strozzi and overturned his “reforms.” Most important of all, Cosimo de’ Medici and his relatives were recalled with honor. The city needed his money more than it needed the “liberty” that Albizzi had claimed to defend.
When he arrived back in Florence in the autumn of 1434, Cosimo found himself the unchallenged master of the city. Broken by war, strapped for cash, and with no other source of loans, the Florentines needed Cosimo to act as their godfather, and though he was to be granted the title of pater patriae (Father of the Nation) after his death, he was nothing more than a very wealthy padrino.
Cosimo used his position to the full and consolidated his grip on power. He brought some former enemies over to his side, exiled others with ruthless efficiency, enlarged his networks of control, and centralized decision-making processes within his own household. He even pushed through a new constitution that placed authority in “his” council, and struck a deal with the Sforza of Milan to guarantee military support in the event of any unforeseen opposition. By 1459, he had achieved the kind of security that Mafia godfathers can only dream of.
The plots, counterplots, and brutal reprisals that facilitated Cosimo’s rise to the top of the political food chain were certainly unique, but the trajectory he followed exemplified the degree to which the wealth of the merchant bankers had become synonymous with raw power. By virtue of the trade they plied, merchant bankers were obliged to form broad-based networks that combined business interests and familial ties, and thus assumed a naturally dominant role in the practices of communal politics. At the center of these overlapping circles of influence, the wealthiest merchant bankers—such as Cosimo de’ Medici—had at their disposal a ready-made political machine that could easily be translated into government itself. Similarly, the parlous state of civic finances in communes up and down Italy virtually guaranteed that the richest merchant bankers would become the very cornerstone of political action. Escalating costs, inflexible systems of tax collection, and hopelessly inadequate revenues meant that enormous loans were the only way that many cities could hope to remain solvent, and since merchant bankers—and the tightly knit networks of which they were a part—were the only people who had the kind of money needed, it was inevitable that governments would sell out to their wishes. But perhaps most important of all, the stakes that were involved and the rivalries that emerged out of this situation ensured that if a merchant banker was to survive, he needed a very particular set of skills. If he were rich, but not colossally so, he needed to throw moral scruples to the wind and throw his lot in with the biggest fish in the pond. If he were very rich, however, he needed to ensure not only that his moneybags were bigger than anyone else’s but also that he would always be the most ruthless and cunning man in town. Greed may have been good in the world of the Renaissance merchant banker, but insofar as the big prizes were concerned, Gordon Gekko wouldn’t have been a patch on Cosimo de’ Medici.
THE ART OF DISSIMULATION
The merchant bankers’ rise from business moguls to political masters was undoubtedly a matter of great satisfaction for those who made it to the top. Having secured control of government, they had equipped themselves with the ideal tools with which to further their commercial interests, and had opened the doors to untold wealth and influence. Yet at the same time, they encountered a fresh series of challenges that went to the heart of their own nefarious methods. Lacking the security that noble titles conferred on other despots, they were unable to indulge the art of magnificence too much. It was dangerous to publicize their preeminence in cities that were—officially at least—republican, where ordinary citizens were liable to take umbrage at having their political impotence made too obvious. And the fact that authority resided in a network of personal relationships operating behind the organs of government meant they had to take care not to alienate their allies.
As the uncrowned king of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici was highly aware of these concerns. He had, in fact, learned the hard way. Early in his political career, as part of his campaign of investing lavishly in magnificent palaces and grand ecclesiastical projects, he had made the mistake of having his family coat of arms (which consisted of seven red balls, or palle, on a gold background) displayed prominently on everything he paid for. Before long, it was almost impossible to walk down a street without feeling Cosimo’s influence. Not surprisingly, many Florentines—especially those from the Albizzi faction—took offense, and the irascible Francesco Filelfo launched a series of bitter attacks on him for this reason. The “art of magnificence” could be taken too far. Referring to the ubiquity of the Medici arms, Filelfo joked that Cosimo’s pride was said to be so overweening that he had emblazoned “even the monks’ privies with his balls.”
Like many other merchant bankers in a similar position, Cosimo learned that he had to appear to remain in the background and to communicate a sense that he was just one part of a broad network of power by using art to represent political alliances and to forge new ties. He needed an “art of dissimulation.”
There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem. The fact that Cosimo the penitent shrank from the center stage and had himself depicted surrounded by a host of influential and powerful figures vividly testifies to his desire to give the impression that he was a humble man who nevertheless found himself at the center of an almost accidental web of political, intellectual, and financial ties.
But while Cosimo may have been an unusually prominent case in point, the same desire to use art to display political connections was shared by merchant bankers of rather more modest means. Family chapels were the ideal settings for this art of dissimulation, and Florence is literally packed with vivid examples, but three works in particular repay closer examination, each concealing a murky political drama of its own.
Filippino Lippi’s fresco Raising of the Son of Theophilus and Saint Peter Enthroned in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (Fig. 20) is not so much a depiction of a religious scene as a visual expression of the dynamics of power in Renaissance Florence. The patron, Felice di Michele Brancacci, was a prosperous silk trader whose prominence as one of the city’s maritime consuls derived both from his wealth and from his marriage to the daughter of Palla Strozzi. But he was also a somewhat nervous fellow. Although he was sufficiently rich and well connected to carry a certain political weight, he was not so important a figure that he did not feel threatened by the dramatic shifts occurring in Florentine politics in the early 1420s. Needing to appear both powerfully “wired in” and somehow distant, he entrusted Filippino Lippi with casting him and a panoply of well-known Florentines in the role of witnesses to the miraculous resurrection of Theophilus’s son. Among the crowd of bystanders, it is possible to glimpse the faces not merely of Brancacci himself but also of the chancellor Coluccio Salutati, the poet Luigi Pulci, the merchant Piero di Francesco del Pugliese, Piero di Iacopo Guicciardini (father of Francesco, the historian), and Tommaso Soderini (father of Piero, later to becomegonfaloniere a vita).
The conceit was impressive, but it did not do Brancacci much good. Despite the clever, double-handed visual game in Lippi’s fresco, Felice di Michele Brancacci ended up on the wrong side of the Albizzi-Medici struggle and was eventually exiled alongside his kinsman Palla Strozzi in 1434.
More successful, and perhaps more ambitious, was the manner in which Giovanni Tornabuoni had himself depicted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the frescoes of his family chapel in Santa Maria Novella some decades later (ca. 1485–90). Tornabuoni was an unusually well-placed individual and was—by any standard—at the center of Florentine political life during Cosimo de’ Medici’s ascendancy. He was a wealthy merchant, and his business connections had led him to become the Medici bank’s treasurer to Pope Sixtus IV, a Florentine ambassador, and gonfaloniere di giustizia. What was more, he was also the uncle of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In commissioning Ghirlandaio to decorate the walls of the chapel, however, Tornabuoni took care to ensure that he and his kinsmen were shown not as dominant figures but as members of a much wider group. In the Expulsion of Joachim (Fig. 21), for example, his son, Lorenzo, is shown standing alongside Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici and two figures who may represent Alessandro Nasi and either Giannozzo Pucci (later to be accused of leading a pro-Medici plot against Savonarola) or a certain Bartolini Salimbene. So, too, in the Apparition of the Angel to Zechariah (Fig. 22), almost all of the male members of the Tornabuoni family are depicted surrounded by powerful individuals closely involved with the running of the Medici bank, including Andrea de’ Medici, Federico Sassetti, and Gianfrancesco Ridolfi, and others with intimate ties to the governing elite, such as the chronicler Benedetto Dei. To further emphasize the cultural bonds between the Tornabuoni and the Medici, Ghirlandaio was also requested to include portraits of the humanists Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, and (most likely) Demetrius Chalcondyles in the left foreground.
A similar—if rather more aspirational—approach was adopted by the Cambio broker Gaspare (or Guasparre) di Zanobi del Lama. A rather shady character with more than a few stains on his reputation, Lama was a relatively modest banker with only very tenuous links to the Medici. His ambition, however, far outstripped both his accomplishments and his moral standing, and he sought to use art to give an artificially inflated impression of his ties to the dominant merchant-banking elite. After commissioning Sandro Botticelli to paint the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1475) (Fig. 5) for his family’s chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Lama took a leaf out of Tornabuoni’s book and instructed the artist to fill the scene with prominent figures from the world of politics and banking as a means of signaling his “intimacy” with Florence’s most influential personalities. The Medici are cast in the roles of the three kings. Although dead, Cosimo is given pride of place, shown kneeling directly before the Virgin and Child, and is depicted with an arrestingvividness (indeed, Vasari later commented that it was “the most convincing and natural of all the surviving portraits” of the old padrino). Kneeling farther toward the foreground are Cosimo’s sons, Piero (in a red robe) and Giovanni (in a long white robe). By way of completing the Medici “set,” Lama also had Piero’s own sons, Lorenzo il Magnifico (left) and Giuliano (right, next to Giovanni) shown flanking the central scene. Just to make sure his links with the Medici circle were clear, portraits of Filippo Strozzi and Lorenzo Tornabuoni were also inserted alongside images of noted cultural figures including Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, and even Botticelli himself. Yet for all his heavy-handed showiness, Lama had enough political sense not to have himself set on a par with the Medici. Evidently acquainted with the subtlety that was appropriate to the “art of dissimulation,” he had himself depicted as just one of the many figures in the group on the right of the painting. His curly gray hair clearly showing, he is peeking out from behindGiuliano de’ Medici, in a light blue tunic. And though he fixes the viewer with a piercing gaze, his intention was to hint at his supposed connections rather than to broadcast his ambitions too boldly.
This, indeed, was the essence of the “art of dissimulation.” However strong the impulse toward magnificence may have been, Renaissance merchant bankers knew that too overt a display of political influence was bad for business. Carefully managed, patronage of a skillful artist allowed them to represent and create networks of power on a canvas or in a fresco in such a way that an individual could project an aura of prominence yet still remain among the crowd.
Quite apart from the artistic achievements that this form of patronage generated, the beauty of the “art of dissimulation” was that it proclaimed and concealed the dodgy practices that had allowed merchant bankers to dominate the urban politics of the Renaissance. In revealing the networks that controlled government, it highlighted the incestuous relationship between business and politics. In doing so, it also discreetly hinted at the role that debt had played in handing near-absolute power to the individuals who stood at the center of those networks. And in emphasizing such networks over individual status, the “art of dissimulation” discreetly acknowledged the moral stain that accrued to those who had bought their way to the top. Like Mafia consiglieri, bankers like Tornabuoni and the embarrassingly ambitious Lama showed off that they were “made men” by signaling their ties to their Medici bosses, while the Medici themselves—the capi dei tutti capi—ensured that there was always a raft of dependent “friends” between them and the public gaze.
Although he could not entirely overlook the broader message he was intended to derive from the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, Galeazzo Maria Sforza would have recognized in the portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici a neat encapsulation of the evolution of the merchant banker’s craft, and of the manner in which merchant bankers had adapted their patronage of the arts to address the moral challenges they faced.
In Cosimo’s portrait was inscribed the path that had led the Medici from humble beginnings as money changers to an unrivaled position as bankers to the papacy, and thence to the mastery of Florence. At the same time, his portrait was also testimony to the tremendous guilt of usury, the embarrassment of riches, the allure of ostentation, and the annexation of government to business interests. But most of all, the different layers of meaning embedded in the wizened old man’s painted figure showed that merchant bankers like Cosimo knew how to use the arts to craft a public image far removed from the seamy realities of life.
As Gozzoli’s frescoes show, nothing was quite what it seemed. The more powerful the penitence written into a piece of art, the more greedily the patron had exploited, extorted, and embezzled the money of his clients; the more magnificent the decoration of a chapel or altarpiece, the more prominently bribery and coercion had underpinned profit-making schemes; and the more determinedly a patron hid among his friends and associates, the more certainly had he used his wealth to buy into government itself.