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

Fortunately, Cosimo had an eye for the gifted artist, as he had a nose for the trusty bank manager. Donatello might be a sodomist, but who else could make you feel you were so close to the Divine in bas-relief? His reliquary bust of San Rossore was the man himself in bronze. Fra Filippo Lippi might be a fornicator, liar, and cheat, but how real your patron saints were when painted in pride of place either side of the pure Virgin in the Church of Santa Croce. Cosma, Cosimo. The proximity of those names had meaning (all branches of the Medici bank observed a holiday on September 27, St. Cosma’s Day). The cloak San Cosma wore in Lippi’s painting was the same crimson as Cosimo’s. He looked out at the devout viewer. The Virgin prayed for the saint, the saint for the viewer. Cosimo paid for prayers for the Florentines, prayers for his family, prayers for himself. Every day. The monks took the Medici bank’s money, lived with the paintings, and prayed. A magical community had been formed — real, virtual, metaphysical. Pay, pray. This was the early Renaissance. Pagare, pregare. Wealth, devotion, and technique reconciled in the sorcery of art. Money rehabilitated. Antonino and Cosimo could get on.

Or perhaps not. “I invoke God’s curse and mine on the introduction of possessions into this order.” The words appear on a scroll held by a saint in another of Fra Angelico’s depictions of the Virgin in San Marco, this time in a dormitory corridor where the only viewers would be the monks. Someone wasn’t happy. Cosimo had asked for the restriction on bequeathing money to the Dominican order to be lifted, but the monks were resisting. They hadn’t committed their lives to the severest of disciplines in order to grow rich. Was it right for a moneychanger to occupy such a position in their community? There was a sell-by date, it seemed, on much of what Cosimo did. Whether in the field of banking, or religious art, or politics, the magical balancing act, the expensive reconciliation of the irreconcilable, could last only so long.

IN 1438, HARD-PRESSED by the Turkish war machine, the leaders of the Eastern Church had come to Ferrara to see if they could resolve their doctrinal differences with the pope, accept his authority, and in return get help to raise the long siege of Constantinople. When Ferrara was hit by the plague, Cosimo took advantage to invite the Church leaders to Florence. Medici money brought the Orient to town, their strange clothes, their Greek manuscripts. Medici money paid for their lodgings, their food, their meeting places, as banking money today pays for so many well-meaning conferences.

Does the Holy Spirit proceed only from God the Father, as the Eastern Church maintained, or from both God the Father and God the Son, as Rome insisted? That was the issue under debate. It must have seemed child’s play to a man used to the stubborn complexities of international trade. Surely one just decided, this or that. And after months of bitter dispute, the priests did in fact agree that Rome was right. Christendom rejoiced. Cosimo had played his part in resolving the schism that was the shame of every believer. But back in Constantinople, the Greek holy men were told they had exceeded their mandate, they had conceded too much, they had merely accepted the authority of the pope. The pact broke down. Even at the expense of annihilation, the Greeks didn’t want to accept that they had got it wrong about the Holy Spirit. And if they persisted in such grave errors, Western Christendom could hardly be blamed if it left their eastern cousins alone against the mighty Turk. Even the most pious of bankers could do nothing about such determined integrity.

And there was very little Cosimo could do when the company of Giovanni Venturi and Riccardo Davanzati failed in Barcelona in 1447. Venturi & Davanzati, one of many Italian trading companies in Spain, had played a critical part in the process by which the Medici bank sought to keep money circulating among its various branches. The Barcelona company bought cloth from the Bruges branch of the Medici bank. The money it owed Bruges was then held in the Spanish city, to be drawn on by the Venice branch of the Medici bank to honor letters of credit issued to Venetian merchants who were importing saffron and Spanish wool. The merchant handed in his money to the Medici branch in Venice and Venturi & Davanzati paid it out to his suppliers in Barcelona. In this way, Bruges reduced its debt with Venice and with Italy in general.