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

While men such as Agnolo Tani, Leonardo Vernacci, and Francesco Nori (the man who had tried to inspect Accerito Portinari’s accounts in Milan) were serious and attentive bankers of the old Florentine school, ever anxious about the bottom line, others, it seemed, were only playing at banking in order to be close to kings and queens. Resurrecting the Medici business in this world was not of great importance to men like Canigiani and Tommaso Portinari, so long as they themselves could be reborn in the next: the world of royalty, art, and luxury clothing. As a major shareholder in Bruges, Tani was furious when he heard that, behind his back, Tommaso Portinari, in his role as director, had agreed that the branch would take on all London’s debts when the English operation was wound up. Why on earth had Portinari done such a stupid thing? The only answer is: to be close to the London bank’s major debtor, King Edward IV, now in military alliance with his rash Burgundy brother-in-law, planning the great invasion of France, which would eventually be launched in 1475.

THERE IS A moment, a written statement, in the history of the Medici that all the history books quote. On the evening after Piero’s death, December 2, 1469, some seven hundred citizens met in the Convent of Sant’Antonio and agreed that the “reputation and greatness” of the Medici family must be preserved. “By which they mean,” explained the ambassador of Ferrara to his lord, “that the secret things of this government will pass through Lorenzo’s hands as before through his father’s.” The following day, a group of leading citizens went to the Palazzo Medici to give Lorenzo, who was about to turn twenty-one, the news. And we come to the famous quotation, from Lorenzo’s brief ricordi, or memoirs:

Though I, Lorenzo, was very young, being twenty years of age, the principal men of the city and of the regime came to us in our house to mourn our loss and to encourage me to take charge of the city and the regime as my grandfather and my father had done. The which being contrary to my age and involving great responsibilities and perils, I accepted with reluctance, and only to preserve our friends and possessions, for in Florence things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state.

The history books then take sides. Fifteenth-century Florentine factionalism has proved a remarkably resilient disease. Five hundred years on, hardly a scholar escapes infection. So the detractors point out that only two days before Piero’s death, Lorenzo had written to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, to ask for military help to guarantee his succession. This hardly looks like reluctance. The supporters, on the other hand, note that as an accomplished poet, Lorenzo did indeed have other interests. In the future, various poems would speak eloquently of the desire to abandon power and responsibility, which are seen as a prison rather than a privilege.

In the heat of this debate, the most intriguing aspect of the statement passes without comment: the words in the quotation sound as though written decades after the event from the vantage point of middle age and maturity; in fact, Lorenzo wrote them when he was only twenty-four. Still at the beginning of his rule, that is, he was already imagining how it would be seen later; he was inventing his persona, preparing material for the historians. “He behaves like an old man,” remarked the ambassador to Milan approvingly in 1469 when Lorenzo was only twenty. But then, as Piero’s son, the boy had been sent on his first diplomatic missions when still in his early teens. Power, together with a humanist education that concentrated on the great political leaders of antiquity, had created something Cosimo could not have foreseen: an extraordinary self-consciousness. Aware of his special situation, equipped with an abundance of role models, Lorenzo was playing a part. Not a real prince, he must act the prince. There were so many adults to impress.

“WITHOUT PLATONISM MAN can be neither a good citizen, nor a good Christian,” Lorenzo de’ Medici would one day claim. What on earth did he mean by that? And why, though his grandfather would never have made such a claim, did the old Cosimo become so interested in Plato in the last years of his life?