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

In The Birth of John the Baptist, the Tornabuoni women stand center stage, entirely displacing the biblical scene to show off their modern, carefully tailored clothes and clearly identifiable household jewelry. It is an arrogant though always elegant parody of the early days of Cosimo’s church patronage, where at best a banker might creep into the frame through his name-saint. If the frescoes of San Marco in the 1430s made the sacred space a little less forbidding, a little more breathable for the busy dealer in dry exchanges, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella that space has been unequivocally commandeered, utterly confused with the world of the contemporary Italian patrician. But then, as director of the Medici bank in Rome, Giovanni had spent his entire adult life in a papal court increasingly concerned with luxury, prestige, and power, not theology. And the irony is that the more worldly the Church became, the less attractive it was for bankers like Tornabuoni — as a customer, that is. The cost of the papal bureaucracy was soaring (500 employees had become 2,000), the price of nepotism likewise. Not to mention the expansionist wars. From the 1460s onward, the Medici bank was lending out more to the Curia than it was taking in with the commission on papal tributes. All too soon, the classic situation would be reached where the indebted client has the upper hand, the bank is too deeply involved to pull out.

Another man painted together with the Medici family in Gozzoli’s famous Magi procession was Francesco Sassetti, who had been appointed deputy general director of the bank’s holding in 1453, when Giovanni di Cosimo clearly was not pulling his considerable weight in the top position. Like Tornabuoni, Francesco Sassetti married an upper-class fifteen-year-old when in his late thirties, and again like Tornabuoni he had Ghirlandaio paint him (standing beside Lorenzo de’ Medici) for his family chapel, this time the Church of Santa Trinità. Was this a competition? If the Medici were to become aristocrats through marriage, education, and patronage, those around them clearly assumed that they themselves must take on a greater importance too.

A change now occurred in the bank’s structure that would eventually allow this trend to get out of hand. Whenever one of the parties involved in a company contract died, the contract was dissolved. As general manager of the Medici holding in the halcyon years from 1443 to 1455, Giovanni Benci had been signatory to all the company’s branch contracts; hence, on his death, all the bank’s contracts had to be rewritten. At this point, the idea of the holding company was dropped. There is no letter or report to explain this fatal decision. From now on, the Medici share in each branch of the bank would be held directly by members of the family in partnership with the local managers and not through the holding. This meant that the general manager of the bank as a whole — when not a Medici, and it would never again be a Medici — no longer had a personal, financial interest in each separate branch through his share in the holding. Francesco Sassetti, for example, who held the top position for most of the rest of the bank’s life, from 1458 to 1490, only had shares in the Avignon and Geneva branches. As far as he personally was concerned, all the others could run at a loss. And during the three decades of his leadership, most of them did. Dramatically. At the same time, Sassetti himself became extraordinarily rich. By 1462, aside from house, farms, jewels, and other valuables, he had built up a fortune of 45,000 florins. All made with the bank. Four years later, in a period in which the bank was losing heavily, that fortune had gone up to 97,000 florins, enough to start a major bank of his own. It included large sums of money held in “discretionary” (interest-bearing) Medici accounts under such names as “The Convent of the Celestini,” or “a friend in Florence.” And since everyone had now understood that a show of learning reinforced claims to nobility, Sassetti had built up a library too, a very considerable library. In each book was a bookplate with his name and the little motto: À mon pouvoir (in my power…).

Yet one thing that was never in Sassetti’s power were the decisions of the Medici bank’s distant branches, decisions that he was supposed to be coordinating. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that without the holding system, he felt no pressing personal need to bring those branches into line. But this state of affairs was exacerbated by the fact that the branches’ managers now shared Sassetti’s and the Medici’s aspirations to grandeur. “Most of them do what they want,” Sassetti complained, “with no regard, and take too much freedom.” What these men were mostly doing was lending far too much of the bank’s money to the people they wished to spend time with and resemble: kings, princes, dukes, lords, and cardinals.