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

Shortly after a disastrous Florentine defeat at the hands of Milanese forces at Zagonara in 1424, an extraordinary sequence of frescoes began to appear on the walls of a chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine on the south side of the Arno River. Masaccio’s The Tribute Money shows Jesus and his disciples being challenged by the tax collector as they enter a town beside a lake. Jesus makes a commanding gesture. In response, the fisherman, Peter, is shown at the left of the picture extracting a gold coin from the mouth of a fish that has generously given itself up at the water’s edge; over to the right, the same disciple is already paying the coin to the taxman. Even Christ pays his taxes, the picture says. Even the Church. Pay up, everybody! On another wall the early Christians are shown sharing out their wealth among themselves in community spirit. But someone is lying face down in the dirt. Ananias didn’t tell the truth about the price he got when he sold his property to pool the money with that of his fellow believers. He held a little back for himself. God struck him dead. The rich silk merchant Felice Brancacci, who commissioned this most beautiful of chapels, was himself a major tax evader. Like Cosimo, he held back a great deal. But then not all of us find gold coins in the mouths of fish. Being struck dead from on high is also rare.

I can imagine no better introduction to Italy and Italian politics than Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, inaccurate and biased as much of the book may be. It is the mindset that counts. To read a few pages describing how tortuous maneuverings were cloaked in noble rhetoric is to be amused. The idea of the spin doctor is not new, it seems. Of every diplomatic policy, the fifteenth-century Italian considered its utile, the hard results, and its riputazione, how it might be presented in the best light. “Then the Pope”—or the doge or the duke of Milan, says Machiavelli—“filled all Italy with letters,” to explain why he had changed sides, perhaps, or why he couldn’t help an ally in difficulty, or that he was fighting on behalf of liberty. It’s a common refrain in Florentine Histories. Whenever somebody “fills all Italy with letters,” you can be sure they are lying.

Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, in Santa Maria del Carmine (the Brancacci chapel). In response to Jesus’ command, Peter, on the far left, recovers a coin from the mouth of a fish and, on the far right, hands it over to the taxman at the city gates. Tax evasion was endemic in fifteenth-century Florence.

But to read perhaps thirty or forty pages is to get a little bored. Isn’t there rather a lot of the same thing, of wars and betrayals and conspiracies? Even Machiavelli is weary. “While these things were toiling on in Lombardy,” he doggedly starts a new paragraph. “While this war was dragging on to no avail in the Marches….” Do I need to keep reading, you wonder? Yes. For at some point or other of the 360 pages you will be overwhelmed by a sense of vertigo, a delirium of treachery, deceit, wasted ingenuity, and inexhaustible avarice. This is the book’s revelation. Absolutely nothing is stable. People seem to be taking a certain pleasure in betrayal and complex trickery, almost as if such vices were a novelty. Yet for all the twists and turns of combat and conspiracy, at a deeper level nothing really seems to change. Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan remain independent from the beginning to the end of the century. As far as the smaller states are concerned, each new military campaign is just another shake of the kaleidoscope. It’s difficult to fix any one pattern on the mind. Here below, tortuous as they will seem, are the events from 1420 to 1434 that catapulted Cosimo de’ Medici from successful banker to political exile, then indispensable leader.

WHILE PRETTY SLAVE Maddalena treats Cosimo to Circassian pleasures in Rome, and Giovanni Benci opens the first Medici branch north of the Alps in Geneva, Filippo Visconti, duke of Milan, attacks Genoa. To avoid intervention from Florence, the Milanese duke has made a preemptive peace treaty establishing two spheres of influence: Lombardy and Genoa for Milan, Tuscany for Florence. The duke captures Brescia to the northeast and Genoa to the southwest. Fine. But all of a sudden he has an army down in Bologna as well, way over to the east, and now he’s getting involved in a succession dispute in Forlì near the Adriatic coast. Fearing encirclement, the Florentines raise taxes and hire mercenaries. The treaty is dead.