Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

Giovanni di Bicci must capitalize on that circulation, on the particular turbulence that seems to occur when money meets metaphysics. In 1393 his elder cousin Vieri de’ Medici retired, and Giovanni bought out the Rome branch of the bank. But why, four years later, did he move back to Florence to make the decisive gesture of forming his own bank? And why did Florence become the headquarters of that bank, though it would never begin to equal the profits generated in Rome?

As with the cardinals and their discretionary gifts, the answer has to do with family. How is it, asks an anonymous Genoese writer of the early fourteenth century, that a man will do everything “to acquire power, possessions, lands and goods for the sake of his children, thereby condemning himself to eternal damnation?” It is an interesting question. Just as it’s intriguing in the Divina commedia how many of Dante’s damned seem more concerned with the honor of their family name back in Florence than their eternal torment in hell. Leon Battista Alberti answers the question in Della famiglia, written in the 1430s. Since the family is the social unit par excellence, Alberti says, any attitude or investment that benefits your family or serves to increase its honor is acceptable, for this is the determining purpose of life.

In short — though Alberti would never have put it like this — if making money has become an addiction, nevertheless family allows you to think of your moneymaking as a means to an end. Family offers a value, a reason for living at once more noble than mere accumulation, and more immediate than the pleasures of paradise. And while wealth in money terms might now be cut free from place, family could not. The Medici family was deeply rooted in Florence. There was property and a network of old alliances. If Giovanni had left his wife and children back in Florence when he went to Rome, it was because he himself always meant to return. Doing so, he would cease to be at the outpost of a network and place himself firmly at its center. He would once again exercise his political rights as a Florentine citizen and become a full and feared member of society, something that could never have happened in Rome. The injunction, “keep away from the public eye,” did not necessarily mean, “deny yourself political power.” In fact, one might keep out of the public eye precisely in order to accumulate power. Added to which, unlike the Romans, the Tuscans had a long tradition in running international banks, which were the key to making money, from Rome.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, as portrayed by Bronzino. The founder of the bank, Giovanni warned his children to “stay out of the public eye,” as if he had already appreciated the dangers of mixing politics and finance.

2. The Art of Exchange

“Bank,” Italian banco (later banca): a bench, table, or board, something to write on, to count over, to divide two people engaged in a transaction. That was all the furniture you needed. For some people a bank was just a tavola, a table. The Medici have their table in via Porta Rossa, they would say. Some things passed above board, and some below.

Since the bankers often did business together, they set up these tables in the same neighborhood — Orsanmichele, around what is now the Mercato Nuovo. There were about seventy all told. Halfway between Ponte Vecchio and the still-unfinished duomo, under shaded porticoes, or behind the massive doors of the palazzi, the moneymen stood or sat, wrapped in their long red gowns, bags of coins at their sides.

Above the table, on a green cloth, lay the big official ledger. The Exchangers’ Guild rules that every transaction must be written down. The banker has ink-stained fingers. “In the name of God and of profit!” the book begins. Or: “In the name of the Holy Trinity and of all the saints and angels of Paradise.” Every angle was covered.

The written check existed but was not the norm. Too risky. Every transaction must be ordered orally by the client in person and written down in his presence, with Roman numerals, in careful columns, because these are more difficult to alter. No sooner does money project itself through time and space than it generates vast quantities of writing. It becomes a thing of the mind, fluid and fickle. Write it down!