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

But this fundamentalism was indeed only a streak — only a would-be severity, if you like — otherwise the priest could hardly have worked together with the banker for as long as he did. For the story of Cosimo’s relationship with Antonino, who oversaw the lavish San Marco renovation project and then became head of the Florentine church for most of Cosimo’s period of power, is the story of the Church’s uneasy accommodation with patronage of dubious origin. “True charity should be anonymous,” Giovanni Dominici, militant leader of the Dominican order, had insisted. “Take heed,” Jesus says, “that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.” The position is clear: no earthly honor through Christian patronage. But Antonino and Cosimo were both sufficiently intelligent to preserve those blind spots that allow for some useful exchange between metaphysics and money: in the ambiguous territory of art. In return for his cash, the banker would be allowed to display his piety and power. And superior aesthetic taste. The Church would pretend that all this beauty was exclusively for the glory of God, as it readily pretended that the building of the duomo’s cupola had nothing to do with Brunelleschi’s megalomania. Without such dishonesty, the world would be a duller place.

Michelozzo, more than ever Cosimo’s personal friend after sharing his period of exile, was the architect. The monks’ cells would be suitably austere. The library, with its rows of slim columns supporting clean white vaults, was a miracle of grace and light. Cosimo donated the books. Many were copied specifically for the purpose. Many were beautifully illuminated. The main artist in the project was Fra Angelico, otherwise known as Beato Angelico, a man who wept as he painted the crucifixions in all the novices’ cells. Quarrel with that if you will. Antonino insisted on crucifixions, especially for novices. The true purpose of art is to allow the Christian to contemplate Christ’s agony in every awful detail. But at the top of the stairs leading to those cold cells, Angelico’s Annunciation presents two sublimely feminine figures generously dressed as if by Florence’s best tailors. And in the church below, the monastery’s main altarpiece, The Coronation of the Virgin, shows just how far Cosimo has come since the tomb of Giovanni XXIII.

Holding her unexpected child, the Virgin sits crowned with banker’s gold in a strangely artificial space, as if her throne were on a stage, but open to trees behind. It was the kind of scene the city’s confraternities liked to set up for their celebrations, funded of course by benefactors such as the Medici. Aside from San Marco and San Domenico (patron saints of the monastery and of its newly incumbent order), the figures grouped around the Holy Mother are all Medici name-saints: San Lorenzo, for Cosimo’s brother, who had recently died; San Giovanni and San Pietro for Cosimo’s sons. Kneeling at the front of the picture, in the finest crimson gowns of the Florentine well-to-do, are San Cosma and San Damiano. Cosma on the left, wearing the same red cap that Cosimo prefers, turns the most doleful and supplicating face to the viewer, the Florentine congregation. Apparently he mediates between the people and the Divine, as Cosimo himself had done the day he got the pope to hand out ten years’ worth of indulgences instead of six. Damiano instead has his back to us and seems to hold the Virgin’s eyes.

In later years, other managers of the Medici bank — Francesco Sassetti, Tommaso Portinari, Giovanni Tornabuoni — would have themselves introduced directly into biblical scenes. Solemn in senatorial Roman robes as they gazed on the holy mysteries, they showed that at least in art there need be no contradiction between classical republic and city of God, between banker and beatitude. Cosimo had more tact. He appeared only by proxy, in his patron saint. Or saints. For he never forgot to include brother Damiano, perhaps half hidden by Cosma’s body, turned toward the Virgin, or the crucifixion, as if half of the living Cosimo were already beyond this earth, in heaven, with his dead twin brother. No doubt this generated a certain pathos. “Cosimo was always in a hurry to have his commissions finished,” said Vespasiano da Bisticci, “because with his gout he feared he would die young.” He was in a hurry to finish San Marco, in a hurry to finish the huge renovation of his local church, San Lorenzo, then the beautiful Badia di Fiesole, the Santissima Annunziata, and many others as the years and decades flew by, including the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Ever in a hurry, he grew old fearing he would die young. Perhaps it was this that made him such a master of the ad hoc.