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

The figure of the so-called veduto was important. When the podestà pulled a name from an electoral bag — for prior perhaps, or for one of the Twelve Good Men — the electoral officials had to check whether the person chosen wasn’t in some way barred from holding office. Had he paid his taxes? Had he, or a member of his family, served in a similar office within the last two years? Was he presently resident in Florence? Was he, or any of his relatives, already sitting on another council or commission? In the old days, when the election really was an honest lottery, many names might be pulled from the bag before one was eligible. To be pulled from the bag was to be veduto: “seen.” Actually to take office was to be seduto: “seated.” Since the results of the scrutinies that decided which names were in which bags were kept secret, to be veduto for the position of prior — or, better still, gonfaloniere della giustizia—was a great honor. It meant you had passed the tough selection procedure, you were a respected citizen. When new consultative commissions were convened, being a veduto was often a criterion of eligibility.

With the new form of “elections”—just ten names in each bag, rather than hundreds — there had been no veduti, or very few. People were disappointed. Resuming control of the elections in 1443, after a brief return to the constitutional procedure, the accoppiatori began to arrange matters so that there would be plenty of veduti, as if the election had been carried out in properly random fashion. In short, they had names pulled out of the hat, names they knew were ineligible, not in order to take office but to be veduti. The trick was painfully obvious, but people were pleased all the same. They received an honor and were not burdened with responsibility. Such is the special humiliation of the fake democracy: the invitation to participate in farce. We have all sensed it. Cosimo, in fact, is creating a new kind of public figure: the person who declares his belief in the fairness of the system because it offers him a small sop, a public recognition. It treats him as though he were an equal. Among the eight priors, most of them Medici men who had served over and over again on all kinds of powerful commissions, there would often be one fellow who knew he was there for the only time in his life. A special favor. He would spend around a hundred florins, more than a year’s salary perhaps, to buy the prior’s expensive gown of saturated crimson; he would be feted and congratulated by all his relatives. But for the two months of his “power,” he knew to ask no questions, nor to seek to influence decisions. From now on, he would always support the Medici. “Many were called to office,” wrote one commentator, “but few were chosen to govern.”

However secret the mechanisms by which the regime kept its grip on power, the results were now clear to everybody. A group of initiates from Cosimo’s inner circle was fixing everything. And growing richer. Foreign ambassadors did their business at Cosimo’s palazzo, rather than at the Palazzo della Signoria. The Milanese ambassador actually lived in Cosimo’s house. Every decision required Medici consent. The man is a prince in everything but name, thought the other leaders in Italy. But there is a great deal in a name. Why else would princes worry so much about their coronations? Despite analogies, the Florentine citizen’s condition was not quite the same as that of a subject in, say, the Papal States, or Milan. Equally powerless, he was mocked, or flattered, by the rhetoric of republicanism. He could not bow before his monarch in dignified fashion, saying, This is God’s will, nor, alternatively, tell himself: This man is a usurper and I only bow down because brute force obliges me to. Why did he bow down, then? At the end of the day, the Councils of the Commune and of the People did still exist. They could veto legislation. Under the Medici, the Florentine mind was constantly fired by ideals of political freedom that were forever frustrated. A fizz of excited political thought frothed over the submerged reality of protracted dictatorship. If the war ever came to an end, a domestic showdown was inevitable.