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

Then in March 1466, with exquisite bad timing, Francesco Sforza died. The duke’s wife and son immediately begged the Florentine signoria for a loan of 60,000 florins to pay for the military presence that would guarantee the Sforza family’s succession throughout Milan’s subject territories. Dietisalvi Neroni and Agnolo Acciaiuoli immediately changed position on Milan. After years of currying Sforza’s support, they now would not give a loan to his successors, who, of course, represented Piero’s potential army.

The slide accelerates. In May 1465, four hundred leading citizens of Florence swear and sign an oath to uphold the old republican system of government with election by lottery. Piero’s cousin, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, signs. Has he been pushed to make the gesture by his Acciaiuoli wife, his persuasive father-in-law? Does he perhaps believe the bank would do better if it retreated from politics? The reasons can hardly matter to Piero. He is so paralyzed by gout these days that there are times when the only thing he can move is his tongue. His main business partner is undermining him. Everybody can see how weak he is.

Then in June 1465, the government starts debating the dissolution of the so-called Council of 100, the permanent balia of Medici men set up after the 1458 parliament to ratify everything the Medici governments wanted. With its departure, the return to the old constitution will be complete and the family’s power at an end. The change that Palla Strozzi foresaw after Cosimo’s death is at hand. Piero is beaten, unless … unless he himself can bring about a different kind of change, a metamorphosis of the family and its relationship with the other patriarchal families in the regime. In this long and no doubt suffocatingly hot Tuscan summer, political emergency accelerates a trend that has been underway for decades, and at last creates something new.

THE REAL SCANDAL of money, as we have already said, is that it does not respect traditional hierarchies. The merest artisan can make a fortune and start strutting around in expensive crimson. The feudal order breaks down. But once made, money notoriously seeks that which cannot — supposedly — be bought. Perhaps the first generation is happy to have acquired material wealth, but the second yearns for a distinction that is not based on money, a distinction that in the past only birth could give. In the end, the individual, even the richest, resists the idea that his worth is to be quantified in money terms, especially if it wasn’t he who earned the cash. So we come back to Achilles’s conviction that human uniqueness has no price, and we arrive at the roots of every snobbery: I wish to be distinguished, but how?

Education is a good place to start. Money buys it and it then generates a value that goes beyond money. Art achieves the same alchemy. “Money alone,” remarked the wondering Galeazzo Sforza (Francesco’s son), when shown around the art treasures of the Palazzo Medici, “would not be able to compete with what has been done here.” Yet everything had been bought with money.

What was the proper education for a rich banker? Giovanni di Bicci had done no more than follow fashion when he gave Cosimo his humanist tutors. Steeped in Cicero, the young man was seduced by the ideal of the noble leader. He wanted to be such a man. The Florentine constitution, with its system of election by lottery, forbade these ambitions, yet was so weak that it more or less invited a rich man to spend his way to an ambiguous, covert sort of power. If one of the huge problems of any democracy is what to do with big money and its attendant political ambitions, squalid or noble, Florence had clearly got it wrong.

No doubt aware of the many conflicts within himself, between private and public interest, between moneymaking and getting to heaven, Cosimo decided to educate his three sons for different and separate careers. Piero, the eldest, would be groomed for government; Giovanni, the favorite, for the bank; Carlo, the illegitimate boy with the foreign features, could go to the Church. It was as if the three strands of Cosimo’s achievements could be separated out. Though Cosimo’s genius had lain in intertwining those strands.

Carefully laid, the plans made no allowance for character and circumstance. Carlo was happy enough as a bishop, but fat Giovanni couldn’t get excited about banking. Jolly, well loved, and vain, he chose the peacock as his personal emblem. “For the view,” he explained to Cosimo, who couldn’t understand why his son was building a villa in Fiesole with no agricultural land around it. A villa was always a farmhouse for Cosimo. You give your children an expensive education and their values start to shift. Cosimo should have been ready for this, since his own education had led to radical departures from his father’s lifestyle.