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

WHAT DID COSIMO do in exile? Much the same as he had done at his villa in Trebbio before imprisonment. He runs his bank and waits. He behaves. The postal service is effective enough. After two months, a newly appointed signoria allows him to move to Venice, where he stays in San Giorgio Maggiore, the old monastery of his client the pope. Immediately, he offers to build the monks a new library and supply the books. The Venice branch of the bank has been making profits of 20 percent a year on a capital outlay of 8,000 florins. What better way to spend it than by making friends and building support? Cosimo has brought his own personal architect, Michelozzo, into exile with him, almost as if this kind of project formed part of a predetermined plan. When a distant Medici relative tries to involve him in a conspiracy to engineer his return to Florence with the help of Milanese troops, Cosimo scores moral points by reporting the scheme to the government of Venice, which passes on the information to Florence. This is hardly generous to the relative, but Cosimo knows that the Florentines are bankrupt, and that no one will lend the priors “so much as a pistachio nut.” How furious they must be to think of Cosimo lavishing his money on libraries in Venice when he could be helping out in Florence. Every generous display of wealth abroad will turn minds at home. In 1433–34, the profits of the Venice bank almost double. Much of this is business lost to Florence.

And now the wars have begun again, the usual complicated mix of rebellion and opportunism. Pope Eugenius has fled an uprising in Rome and taken up residence in Florence. He needs his banker more than ever. He needs money to buy friends and pay mercenaries. The city of Bologna, part of the Papal States, likewise falls to rebels. The Venetians and Florentines form an alliance to put down the uprising. Milan wades in on the other side, and in the late summer of 1434, the Florentines are soundly defeated by the now-inevitable Piccinino near Imola. A disaster. Immediately afterward, to top it all, Rinaldo degli Albizzi commits the unpardonable error of allowing a pro-Medici group of priors to appear from the electoral bags. Why didn’t he rig the election? Cosimo is invited back. Rinaldo’s attempt at armed rebellion is headed off with pathetic ease by a few empty reassurances from Pope Eugenius. His only consolation a few days later when he himself is exiled will be a big told-you-so to the seventy other prominent men obliged to leave the city with him. Cosimo should have been killed: “Great men must either not be touched, or, if touched, eliminated.”

Taking over the reins of power, Cosimo at once exiles the dithering Palla Strozzi along with Rinaldo, thus demonstrating that to have money and not commit it politically is folly. Why else do big organizations give to political parties? In short, the banker is back, he is revered, he wields unconstitutional powers, and he hasn’t even broken the law. Such was and no doubt is the power of money. Historians choose to praise the bloodless nature of this transfer of power. “Yet it was tinged with blood in some part,” Machiavelli reminds us. Together with four other citizens, Antonio Guadagni, son of Bernardo (the gonfaloniere della giustizia who had accepted Cosimo’s bribe), left his designated place of exile to go to Venice. Given the city’s good relations with Cosimo, this was unwise. The five were arrested, sent to Florence, and beheaded.

Donatello’s David. The first we know of this extraordinary statue with its effeminate boy hero is its appearance in the courtyard of Palazzo Medici. There were those who accused Cosimo de’ Medici of approving of homosexuality.

4. “The Secret Things of Our Town”

He was accused of being friendly to sodomites. The first we know of Donatello’s David is in Cosimo’s house. It is hard to think of a better advertisement for homosexuality than this life-size naked youth in polished bronze who slays a giant to place a dainty foot on the severed head and assume an erotic pose. Hermaphroditus, a book of poems dedicated to Cosimo, was publicly burned. It promoted sodomy, said celebrity preacher Bernardino di Siena. But Cosimo never used his power to abolish the Officers of the Night, the vice police who prowled the piazzas in search of serving girls with too many buttons, perverse men in platform shoes, gay lovers caught in the unnatural act.