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

The comedy of the story depends on the absolute clarity of the underlying theology and metaphysics. This world is a trial for the next. Death is the day of reckoning, after which it is hell or heaven (purgatory being just a more or less extended annex of the latter). To tell lies, then, in a final confession is madness. It turns the world upside down. Ser Ciappelletto is quite brilliant in the way he resolves an earthly problem, but utterly blind because he does so at the expense of his soul. He is going to burn. Human astuteness, which is so seductive, so funny, has no place in a vision that divides the world into good or bad and sees no space between.

It is precisely this clarity, then, and people’s complete conviction in it (atheism is unimaginable), that leads to all the equivocation when it comes to describing complicated financial activities. For everything must be declared a sin or not a sin. “He who is not for me is against me,” Christ said. In the Baptistery, Florence’s oldest, most central church, a Last Judgment divided the domed ceiling into the blessed and the damned. Nothing else. The rigid, static Byzantine style, the hard little stones of the mosaic, allowed for no confusion, or even diversion. The image is its message. The beauty of color, line, and gesture only increases the clarity. For me or against me. Your fate. What could a banker do?

We know nothing of Giovanni di Bicci’s childhood. Presumably, like other middle-class youngsters, he was signed on at a guild in his teens and was working in his uncle’s bank as an adolescent. But for his sons he chose a more sophisticated education, first at a monastery school, then under the supervision of Roberto de’ Rossi, a humanist from a patrician family, a man who introduced the young Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo to other more celebrated early humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli, and Ambrogio Traversari — men who instilled in the young banker a passion for the pre-Christian, classical world, and above all for finding, collecting, and even reading the manuscripts through which that world could be known. So while Cosimo was at the Church Council in Constance, and hence skipping his regular discussion groups with these men, he could enjoy the company of Poggio Bracciolini, who was present as secretary to Giovanni’s papal court and who took time out from his duties to visit the monasteries of Cluny and St. Gallen, where he uncovered various forgotten manuscripts of Cicero and Quintilian. About these much could be said, but for the essential, though rarely declared, inspiration that lies behind early humanism, we can go back a generation and read Boccaccio’s preface to his compendium book, De mulieribus claris, “About Famous Women.” “I have decided to exclude Christian women,” Boccaccio begins apologetically. Of course they are “resplendent in the true and unfailing light,” but, “their virginity, purity, holiness and invincible firmness in overcoming carnal desire” have already been amply praised “by pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature.” So I am going to turn elsewhere, Boccaccio tells us, to the pre-Christian world.

Christianity is duly acknowledged and revered, so that then we can concentrate elsewhere — on the women of Rome, the literature of Greece, on human qualities and values that have nothing to do with religion. This, more than any particular content, is the sense of humanism: to carve out a space that need not be understood in the urgent and inconvenient tensions of Christian metaphysics — heaven or hell — while still remaining within the Christian world. Dogmatism is abandoned, but not the faith. Is it really okay, Boccaccio had asked his mentor Petrarch some years before that preface, for a Christian to spend so much time with profane literature? So long, Petrarch assures him, as the literature is instructive, educates the young to serve the community, and turns the soul toward beauty and truth. This is the breakthrough: the idea of a secular space where one can have such moral values, but independently of Church teaching. What would-be honest banker dealing in dry exchanges would not yearn for such a thing, would not contribute to a culture that recognized other qualities than strict adherence to canon law? It is the space we live in today. Much of it was first staked out in fifteenth-century Florence.