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

Cosimo’s extension of his Church patronage beyond his own neighborhood and eventually all over town, the numerous depictions of Saints Cosma and Damiano, the raising of the Medici arms, the red balls on a golden field, in one sacred place after another — all this has been read, rightly no doubt, as the symbolism of political ambition. Certainly it caused resentment among those who felt their territory had been invaded, those exiles who lost their family chapels to members of the Medici clan.

The slow seeping of the sensual into sacred art, the more and more accurate depiction of the human form and the contemporary secular space, the growing physical beauty of the Madonna, the awareness of her breasts, her nipples even, the elegance of her long neck — all this has been understood as evidence of a new interest in everything earthly, a more positive humanist-inspired vision of our worldly lives. Rightly, no doubt. But there is more to it. There is magic.

What were the Magi if not magicians? They came to Jesus because that proximity was important to them. The gifts they brought had magical powers. Fourteen centuries later, the Florentines might be fascinated by money and material goods, but they hadn’t reached the dull point where matter is just matter, or where symbolism is merely an artistic convention whereby abstract qualities can be evoked through this or that image. No, for the people of Cosimo’s generation, a certain kind and color of dress, a particular hat, or a diamond ring still possessed powers that went beyond their being indicators of material wealth. Treated or processed in a certain way, material things could take on magical force. What was that rhinoceros horn doing in the Medici bank’s warehouse, if not waiting to be ground up in a magic potion? The bones of a dead saint were also alive with magic. Keep them close and they will work miracles. To show reverence, to encourage the miracle, you put them in an elaborate reliquary, a work of the finest craftsmanship, of Ghiberti, or Donatello. Art and magic call to each other.

But alas, saints’ bones are scarce. And rhinoceros horns even more so. When the great preacher, misogynist, and anti-Semite Bernardino di Siena died in 1444, the popular enthusiasm to possess some object that the charismatic man had touched left his poor donkey stripped of all those hairs that had rubbed the holy backside. Afterward, when the buying and selling began, how could you tell one donkey hair from another? How can you tell a real relic from a fake? The holy foreskin of our circumcised Lord is still held in one church in Italy. In 1352 the Florentine government had bought an arm of Santa Reparata from Naples, only to find it was made of wood and plaster.

But if you couldn’t find or afford the saint himself, the real thing, there was always his painted or sculpted likeness. The faithful kissed the saint’s stone feet, brushed his painted gown with theirs. They were close to him, through art. The banker Giovanni Rucellai had his tomb made in an exact likeness of the Holy Sepulchre. This mimicry could only make the passage to heaven easier. The copied image, that is, had a virtue that went beyond an aesthetic appreciation of the sensual world. It appropriated the qualities of its model. It served to create proximity to the sacred. The craftsmanship of the reliquary and the power of the relic were fused together in the fine fresco that showed, convincingly, the saints about their miracles.

Donatello’s reliquary bust of San Rossore (museum of S. Matteo, Pisa). Renaissance high art fuses with the miracle-working power of the saint’s remains.