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

Cosimo was thirty-one. It was 1420, and his father, turning sixty, retired from the bank. Piero di Cosimo, first of the next generation, was four. A second son, Giovanni, was on the way. The wife and mother, Contessina de’ Bardi, was jolly, tubby, and practical. Uneducated, she was not allowed in Cosimo’s study. Away on business, he rarely wrote. Marriages were arranged and that was that. She was a Bardi and he a Medici. Neither complained. On the contrary.

Taking over the bank, Cosimo went down to Rome for three years where Martin V’s preferred bankers had just failed and the Medici were back in the papal saddle again. A relief. What kind of man is Cosimo? Polite, unostentatious. He prefers a mule to a horse. Challenged, he is pithy and cryptic. “Cosimo, I wish you would say things clearly so I could understand you.” “First learn my language,” he replies. “Cosimo, how should I behave on this diplomatic mission?” “Dress like a lord and say as little as possible.” It’s a style that allows you to be smart, without giving much away. To confide in a man is to become his slave.

Cosimo loves collecting books, religious and profane. Reading one entitled Monastic Institutes, he marks passages stressing patience and discretion, and what to do about the temptations of the flesh. In Cicero’s On Oratory, he notes that an audience may often be won over if you appear to take the majority opinion. Interesting reflection. He’s not interested in jousting or piazza sports. But he is a member of a religious confraternity. People get together once a week to sing praises to God, give each other a penitential whipping, and plan street processions in honor of patron saints. Cosimo commissions a fancy bas-relief chest from Ghiberti to hold the relics of three obscure martyrs. He’s fascinated by astrology and magic, but he loves banking. “Even if money could be made by waving a wand,” he says, “I would still be a banker.” Why? Banking involves manipulation, risk, power. It’s magic that works.

Cosimo is immensely ambitious. The Medici family was once second to none. He is also immensely cautious. The Medici family was disgraced. In 1421, his father, Giovanni di Bicci, is elected gonfaloniere della giustizia (standard-bearer of justice), head of the Florentine government. It’s the first time the honor (a two-month appointment) has gone to a Medici since Silvestro sided with the woolworkers’ revolt in 1378. The family is on the up again, third richest in the city. Who knows what might be possible? But Cosimo is also constantly aware of his mortality. He was born a twin, his brother Damiano died at birth. And death means eternal judgment. What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul? However many fine sculptures were made showing beautiful human figures, this ultimate truth could not be avoided. Cosimo’s destiny was to steer a course between conflicting aspirations — power and security, earthly wealth and paradise. With patience. Discretion. Hiding ambitions behind majority opinion. “Semper,” was the motto he eventually came up with for himself, “always,” together with the diamond as a symbol, something precious and extremely resistant. Nothing in the history books gives us a sense of the man’s ever having been young. Unless perhaps during those three years down in Rome.

Thou shalt not gamble. This was one of the commandments a Medici employee signed up to when he went to serve the bank in some distant branch. Years later, when Archbishop Antonino asked Cosimo to support a drive to stop the clergy from gambling, the banker replied, “Maybe first we should stop ’em using loaded dice.” It was a religious age in love with transgression. There is no contradiction. Article seven of the Medici employee’s contract said, “Thou shalt not keep a woman in the house.” Your Florentine wife didn’t travel, of course, and local liaisons meant scandal.