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

It’s curious reading these words of solid commercial wisdom from a man who has just launched his son into the spendthrift elite of international blue blood and who himself has spent lavishly on political ends. A certain schizophrenia is at work. Piero has one foot in the old world, one in the new. He fords the stream. Not so the young Lorenzo, who, shortly after his father’s death, will proudly confess to Agnolo Tani, still a major partner in the Bruges branch, that “I know nothing about such matters.” Meaning banking.

Tommaso Portinari had ridden on horseback all the way from Bruges to Florence to sign that new contract. And to get married. Having returned to Bruges, he felt bound to apologize to Piero for having kept this second purpose of his visit secret. Why had he done that? Why not celebrate his wedding openly? For the simple reason that, with their growing power, the Medici had taken to arranging not only their own marriages but, as in the case of Giovanni Tornabuoni, everybody else’s as well. Cosimo began it, Piero continued, and Lorenzo would excel in this department. While the Medici married up into the aristocracy, all the other noble families must marry down into the middle classes. A gap would be established. Society would thus be arranged around the Medici, for the Medici, and, most important, beneath the Medici. Tommaso, who grew up under their wing, was cutting free, as they had cut free from the Florentine mesh by having Lorenzo marry an Orsini. Piero was spared the pain of this wicked slight because he was dead when Portinari’s letter of apology arrived.

Tommaso was now forty. His bride, Maria di Francesco di Bandini Baroncelli, was fifteen. The proud husband immediately had portraits painted by Hans Memling, with the well-bred adolescent wearing the pointed hat (with drapes) of the Flemish well-to-do, plus a lavish necklace of the kind the Officers of the Night would gladly have confiscated back in Florence. Is a pattern emerging: Tornabuoni, Sassetti, Portinari? After Tommaso and Maria’s first children arrived, the whole family would appear kneeling in prayer on either side of Ugo van der Goes’s bizarre and beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds, a painting that would cause such a stir when it arrived as an altarpiece in Florence. Meantime, despite that tough new clause in his contract, the loans to the duke of Burgundy continued and, come 1473, the Medici bank was still running those miserable, loss-making galleys when they were set upon by pirates off the Channel coast at Gravelines. The San Giorgio escaped. The San Matteo was captured, thirteen of its crew killed, and its cargo seized — another big loss for the bank — including a Last Judgment by Memling commissioned by Tommaso’s ex-boss, Agnolo Tani. Instead of going to Florence, the painting ended up in Danzig, where it remains to this day.

WITH OR WITHOUT the “last judgment,” the writing was definitely on the wall for the bank. In 1467, Tani had been sent to London to see if he could turn around the now-familiar scene of excessive lending to the local monarch — in this case, Edward IV. During the financial crisis of the mid-1460s, it had been imperative for Piero to guarantee a flow of raw wool to Florence — not just for his own workshops but also to maintain employment in general and prevent the kind of labor unrest that would feed opposition to the Medici regime. Again political convenience was bad news for the bank, since to get the export licenses for the raw wool from England, the London branch had had to do endless favors for the king. “I well understand, that what I have to do here,” Tani wrote back to Piero once he had seen the accounts, “is resurrect the dead, no less.” Did he already have Memling’s commission in mind? “But if you and Tommaso do what I say, then with the grace of God….”