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

Here, then, was another set of irreconcilables, and if the conundrum this time lay in the mind, or in metaphysics, rather than in the balance of world trade, it was no less urgent for that. Florence had two ideal visions of itself: It was the true inheritor of ancient Rome, eternal renown, wise republicanism; and it was also the city of God. Why else would the government insist that prostitutes dress as described in the Book of Isaiah? Why would there be talk of a crusade to bring the Holy Sepulchre to Florence? Centuries later, England would entertain the same delirium of piety and empire, producing that curious hybrid, the Christian gentleman. Some Americans still think these thoughts today, trying not to see the contradictions between Christian Puritanism and world domination.

Enamored of both visions, Cosimo attended regular discussions with Bracciolini, Niccoli, and other avant-garde humanists, and likewise regular meetings of the religious confraternity dedicated to the Magi. That he did sense a contradiction between political ambition and religious belief is evident from his famous remark, upon being accused of cruelty in exiling so many enemies, that “you can’t run a state with paternosters.” Christian charity takes the back seat when you’re dealing with political necessity.

But contradictions, of course, were there to be overcome. That had always been Cosimo’s attitude. And when it came to the conflicting claims of Christian devotion and secular fame, the most effective way to resolve the problem, as Cosimo had learned from the commissioning of Giovanni XXIII’s tomb, was through art and architecture. “I know the Florentines,” Cosimo told his bookseller and later biographer, Vespasiano da Bisticci. “Before fifty years are up we’ll be expelled, but my buildings will remain.” Most of those buildings were religious. You lavished money on the sacred, to gain earthly fame. And a place in heaven. Apparently you could have your cake and eat it too. Or have your wife drunk and the wine keg full, as the Italians say.

Having “accumulated quite a bit on his conscience,” Vespasiano tells us, “as most men do who govern states and want to be ahead of the rest,” Cosimo consulted his bank’s client, Pope Eugenius, conveniently present in Florence (hence more or less under Cosimo’s protection) as to how God might “have mercy on him, and preserve him in the enjoyment of his temporal goods.” This was shortly after his return from exile.

Spend 10,000 florins restoring the Monastery of San Marco, Eugenius replied. It was the kind of capital required to set up a bank.

The monastery, however — a large, rambling, and crumbling structure within two minutes’ walk of both the duomo and Cosimo’s home — was presently run by a bunch of second-rate monks of the Silvestrine order reported as living “without poverty and without chastity.” Unforgivable. I’ll spend the money if you get rid of the Silvestrines and replace them with the Dominicans, Cosimo said. Those severe Dominicans! Only the prayers of men whose very identity was grounded in poverty and purity would be of use to a banker with an illegitimate child.

This was 1436, the year Pope Eugenius reconsecrated the duomo upon the completion, after more than fifteen years’ work, of Brunelleschi’s huge dome. With a diameter of 138 feet, the dome was the most considerable feat of architectural engineering for many hundreds of years. Its red tiles rose even higher than the white marble of Giotto’s slender ornamental tower beside the cathedral’s main entrance, and the two together completely dominated the skyline of the town in yet another ambiguous combination of local civic pride and devotion to faith. The Florentines, in fact, had for years been anxious that the dome would collapse, thereby inviting the ridicule rather than admiration of their neighbors.

On the occasion of the consecration, Cosimo bargained publicly with Eugenius to get an increase in the indulgence that the Church was handing out to all those who attended the ceremony. The pope gave way: ten years off purgatory instead of six. It cost no one anything and brought both banker and religious leader great popularity. On the matter of San Marco, the pope again proved flexible. The Silvestrines were evicted. The rigid Dominicans were moved in from Fiesole. Their leader at the time was Antonino, later Archbishop Antonino, a priest with a streak of fundamentalism about him. What would our Saint Dominic think, he wrote after the expensive renovation was complete, if he saw the houses and cells of his order “enlarged, vaulted, raised to the sky and most frivolously adorned with superfluous sculptures and paintings”?