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

At which point, reenter the Portinari brothers. Cosimo had taken the three boys, Pigello, Accerito, and Tommaso, into his home when their father, head of the Florence branch, died in 1431. At that point the eldest was ten, the same age as Giovanni di Cosimo, Piero’s younger brother. But while the Medici boys got their expensive humanist education, reading Cicero and Caesar, Pigello Portinari left the Medici household at thirteen to start work in the bank — first in Rome, then in Venice — until in 1452 he was given the directorship of the newly opened branch in Milan, which immediately took on an aristocratic air. Francesco Sforza had given Cosimo various buildings in disrepair to house the bank. Cosimo brought in Michelozzo, who transformed them into a wonderful and very grand palazzo. Pigello Portinari thus spent his early years as director concerning himself to a large degree with interior decorating, importing tapestries, and commissioning artists. After all, much of the bank’s capital was taken up in loans to the duke, loans repaid by allowing the bank to collect local taxes. So high was the interest rate on these loans that Pigello was able to attract capital from other Medici branches in order to keep funding the duke and his family’s lavish expenditures. Milan thus soaked up considerable resources without producing any wealth. Everybody was living extravagantly on borrowed time. When that time began to run out, and even the duchy’s tax revenues were not enough to repay the interest owed, the bank simply took back, as collateral, many of the jewels that the Sforzas had been persuaded to buy and sent them off to safes in Venice, in case the local authorities in Milan should ever decide to seize them.

This pointless tying-up of capital was hardly satisfactory, but at least Pigello was honest. In 1464, however, against all past practices of the bank, he was allowed to take on his brother Accerito as his deputy. It was the core of an entourage, the kind of thing Cosimo had always been careful to avoid. After Pigello died in 1468, Accerito was furious when Piero sent a mere employee from Florence to examine the branch’s books. Accerito refused to show them. The bank had made all kinds of unwise loans and expenses. Francesco Sforza had died, leaving massive debts. “Accerito puffs up more and more every day,” complained Francesco Nori, the would-be inspector. “My dear brother Pigello is already forgotten,” wrote the third brother, Tommaso Portinari, from the bank in Bruges to Piero. “It’s disgraceful your checking up on him.” The veiled appeal to family connections did the job. Piero caved in and gave the directorship of Milan to Accerito, who proceeded to lose more and more money in interminable loans to the duke’s family until the branch was finally closed in 1478.

MEANWHILE, OTHER FLORENTINE banks were going under altogether. In the mid-1420s, there had been seventy-two; in 1470, there were only thirty-three, with a half-dozen failures in the mid-1460s around the time Piero was calling in loans. The main reason for these failures, no doubt, was falling trade — a decline for which historians have yet to provide a complete explanation — and the bad debts of extravagant princes. Yet one can’t help feeling that at a very deep level the whole Florentine attitude to banking had changed. The old humility, the old enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of moneymaking, was gone. The families traditionally involved in banking were now used to their wealth and looking for other forms of excitement. Tommaso Portinari is emblematic.

If Cosimo’s mind had reached out across Europe — planning, calculating, spinning his web across the continent’s financial centers — his son Piero’s poor head, when obliged to take his father’s position at the center, was simply pained by the many tugs on that web. Piero, in the end, did no more than react to bad news. Most of it was coming from Tommaso Portinari in Bruges.

Having been part of the Medici household since he was three, Tommaso started work in the Bruges branch in 1445 at sixteen. This was shortly before the crisis brought about by the collapse of Venturi & Davanzati in Barcelona in 1447 and then the firing of his older cousin, Bernardo Portinari, who had set up the branch. The 1447 crisis, as we have seen, had to do with the bank’s traditional business of interest-bearing exchange deals linked to triangular trading patterns. Brought up in the Palazzo Medici amid some of the city’s finest artworks and in a constant back-and-forth of politicians, ambassadors, and heads of state, Tommaso set his sights instead on grander things. “Stop spending so much time at court,” Piero was already writing to warn him when he was still a mere clerk. “Who could have spread such a vicious slander?” Tommaso replied. He was trying, he claimed, to secure a first sale of Florentine silk to the duke. “Will you give me an assistant?” he coolly adds. Piero wouldn’t.