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

Tomb of Pope (or anti-pope) Giovanni XXIII, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici from Donatello and Michelozzo, in the Florence Baptistery. Warned not to disturb the Byzantine austerity of the space, the architects built upward rather than outward, but lavishly. The sculpted words, IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA (“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope”), offered disturbing food for thought for Florentine worshippers.

In the medium of writing, creating this territory must have seemed easy enough: one rediscovered the literature of Rome and later Greece, made new copies, discussed it, wrote books about it. But the visual arts were almost entirely devotional in nature. How would the secular ever find some elbow room here? Slowly, is the answer, by stealth. The Medici played their part.

Of the four illustrious men appointed as executors of Baldassarre/Giovanni XXIII’s will, one was his banker, Giovanni di Bicci. The ex-pope wanted to be buried in the Baptistery, the oldest, the most holy place of worship right in the center of Florence. Only three other bishops had ever been buried there, and only in the simplest and sparest of stone boxes. Decoration on the walls was a rigid black-and-white marble patterning. Nothing must distract attention from the final division of the blessed and the damned on the ceiling.

Cosimo took over the venture and got together the young architect and sculptor Michelozzo and the versatile genius Donatello. The Merchants’ Guild, which was responsible for the church’s interior decoration, expressed scepticism. No fancy stuff, they warned. The tomb must not project into the floor space. The artists placed their work between two existing pillars that stood against the wall. It did not project, but rose, through a loophole in the rules, twenty-four magnificent feet up the side of the church. Above three marble bas-reliefs showing standing female figures — Faith, Hope, and Charity — rested the sarcophagus, on the side of which two naked angels unfurled a scroll. Above the sarcophagus, carved in marble, was a narrow bed complete with mattress and pillow; and lying on the bed, entirely human and apparently asleep, his handsome, intelligent face turned toward the congregation, lay Baldassarre/Giovanni, cast in gleaming bronze. Above the reclining figure, taking the monument even higher, rises the most elegant bedroom canopy, again carved in stone and with its curtains apparently just drawn apart, and at the apex of the canopy, a ring appears to fix the whole structure to a point where the wall of the church juts out. The scroll, held by the angels on the side of the sarcophagus, announced IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA—“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope.”

Was the monument obtrusive? It obeyed orders about depth. But the bronze did gleam so brightly in the early sunlight while morning mass was recited; the reclining figure was so very human, so clearly a man of character, and so evidently neither in heaven or hell, that it was hard not to be distracted. Above all, that inscription, “erstwhile Pope,” brought a gust of schism and ambiguity into the eternally still air of the Byzantine mosaics. Had he been pope or not? Nothing is more inimical to the diktat of revealed truth than the complexity of human history. Martin V hated the monument. Baldassarre was never pope, he insisted. The Giovanni XXIII domain was still available. This man was the Medici’s friend, people whispered. They paid for this tomb. How fascinating it all was! As if, in the niche of the medieval church, where one expected to find a rigid symbolic representation of this or that virtue, a real person appears, not easily judged or categorized. The effect is not unlike those moments in Dante’s Inferno when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic toward.

Did the Medici banker know what he would be getting when he commissioned Baldassarre Cossa’s tomb? We do not know. But whatever his intentions may have been — to honor a family friend, to embellish a church, to suggest the power of Medici money — Cosimo was a man who saw when there was a lesson to be learned. Something had shifted in the hitherto-timeless stasis of the church. From now on, Donatello would be Cosimo’s favorite sculptor, Michelozzo his preferred architect.

3. The Rise to Power