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

A few days later — and this is a coup within the coup — it is Luca Pitti, not Piero de’ Medici, who proposes the inevitable “parliament.” Two thousand Milanese troops preside. Joining them, armed and on horseback, is Piero’s son, the seventeen-year-old Lorenzo. It’s quite a show. In very short order, all the regime’s old electoral controls are reintroduced. And more. Seeing the makeup of the new police commission, which once again has special powers, Dietisalvi Neroni, Niccolò Soderini, and Agnolo Acciaiuoli flee the city before the inevitable sentence of exile is passed. If the 1458 crisis served to define the relationship between the regime and the institutions, the 1466 parliament settled the Medici’s position within the regime: total domination.

Ghirlandaio’s Birth of John the Baptist (detail), in Santa Maria Novella (Tornabuoni chapel). Acting on instructions from Giovanni Tornabuoni, the painter seems more interested in his portrayal of these fifteenth-century spectators — the women of the Tornabuoni family — than in the biblical scene itself. The older of the two women wearing white headscarves is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s mother.

Despised and ignored, the turncoat Luca Pitti got his position of accoppiatore as promised, and with his brother on the Eight of the Guard, he was spared exile. But his young daughter, Francesca, did not get to marry Lorenzo. Instead she was given to Lorenzo’s uncle, Piero’s brother-in-law, the thirty-six-year-old Giovanni Tornabuoni, head of the Medici bank in Rome and already well advanced in negotiations to bring that Orsini girl to Florence for his nephew.

“She walks with her head a little stooped,” complained Lucrezia Tornabuoni. A bare six months after the political crisis, Lorenzo’s mother was down in Rome to size up her future daughter-in-law. “I believe this comes from shyness.” Did the child have breasts? “Hard to tell the way these Romans dress.” Anyway, “as well as half of Monte Ritondo,” Lucrezia writes home to Piero, “the family also owns three other castles and … are better off every day because, apart from being maternal nephews of the Cardinal, of the Archbishop Napoleone, and of the knight, they are also related as cousins via their father for he is second cousin to the aforesaid Lords who love them greatly.” This was what mattered. The girl was sixteen. Oh, her name is Clarice, the future mother-in-law remembers to say halfway through a second letter. Only eighteen, Lorenzo was taken down south to view the goods and said they would do. The Medici were about to move into a different class. The trend behind that move would be the ruin of the bank.

“THIS COMPANY USED to promote everyone who was good at his job, without any regard to family or privilege.” Back in 1453, Leonardo Vernacci, deputy director of the Rome branch, had written to Giovanni di Cosimo, then deputy director of the Medici holding, to complain about the promotion of Giovanni Tornabuoni. Tornabuoni had joined the company at the age of fifteen in 1443, the same year Piero di Cosimo married his sister, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Vernacci accused young Giovanni of slacking. Now he was being promoted over the head of the talented young Alessandro Bardi, who quit as a result. Tornabuoni wrote to his sister’s husband, Piero (not to Giovanni), to complain about the complaints. “And Vernacci spies on me and reads my post!” In 1465 it would be Vernacci who now left the bank in disgust when Piero promoted his brother-in-law to the directorship of the Rome branch.

Giovanni Tornabuoni had no special talents; he was obstinate, touchy, and self-important, but as a relative of the family he did appear in that Magi procession that Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the chapel in the Palazzo Medici, and later in life he actually commissioned a number of fine frescoes himself — first in Rome, when the young wife whom Luca Pitti had given him died in 1477, and again back in Florence in Santa Maria Novella, where the painter Ghirlandaio depicted a now-elderly Tornabuoni and his friends and relatives in decidedly patriarchal poses. Here the religious themes, in a fresco such as The Angel Appearing to Zacharias, fade discreetly into the background, while the senatorial figures of the contemporary Florentines in their robes and caps dominate the scene in what is now almost a work of journalism.