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

Greek philosophy was recovered and revived somewhat later than Roman. One simple reason was language. Greek was hardly taught until the middle of the fifteenth century. But even when Plato had been read, in Latin translation, by the great humanist (and Cosimo’s friend) Leonardo Bruni, for example, the old Greek wasn’t taken seriously. These self-regarding fantasies about philosopher kings, Bruni thought, were completely impractical. Plato’s notions of a hierarchical stairway of realities, with inanimate material at the bottom and a world of ideal forms at the top, had already been widely appropriated and interminably elaborated by early Christian theologians in one form or another. It was theoretical nonsense. Stepping outside of medieval scholasticism and Christian mysticism for a breath of fresh air, the early humanists were looking for clear-sighted, secular wisdom, the lucidity of historians and political commentators: Cicero, Livy.

Under Cosimo’s protection — a house and a salary — Marsilio Ficino translated the entire works of Plato into Latin in the 1460s. It was the first time they had all appeared in a form Western Christendom could read. Later to become a priest, Ficino added his own personal but crucial twist to Christian Platonism: The human soul, he decided, was “the center of nature,” the connecting link between the hierarchies of Platonic reality. Through love and intellect, the human soul naturally strives upward, away from what is base and earthly, through the hierarchy, to the pure light of perfect eternity, God.

Discussed by Florence’s best minds, while celebrating Plato’s birthday, for example, every November 7 at the Medici villa at Careggi, such ideas came at exactly the right moment for the process of upward social transformation in which the Medici were involved. Apart from giving a new sense to courtly love poetry (the mind moving from profane to divine love), all education, refinement, and intellectual achievement could now be understood as essentially moral, involved in a process of striving toward the Divine. Certain secular activities, that is, could be described as partaking of the sacred, or at least as turned toward the sacred. Nothing good (and the dangerous implication is that we know instinctively what is good) was outside the Christian framework. At which point art and poetry need no longer turn so constantly to strictly Christian subject matter, because beauty itself is close to divinity and the human soul naturally leans toward it. Creativity, which is of God, is not, in this new and optimistic version of Platonism, denied to man, though few achieve it. But when achieved, it is essentially good. Even today, there are many who believe that art is necessarily on the right side, and do not ask which bank sponsored it. Sponsored by Medici money, Botticelli can use the same pretty model for a Madonna, or for Venus. He can leave the lady’s clothes on or he can lift them off. Either way, the mind is being lifted spiritually. At this point, the gesture of penance implicit in almost all Cosimo’s patronage of the arts can be safely and happily forgotten. Art is always sacred.

But to dig a little deeper, at what wasn’t explicitly stated or perhaps even consciously meant, yet nevertheless seeps through: the process of raising yourself up, of becoming this refined, educated, artistic aristocrat, was now no longer an evil thrusting above and beyond your proper medieval station (as the treason charge against Cosimo in 1433 implied). On the contrary, it was a sign of your upward aspiration toward the Divine. This was an attractive and soothing thought. It would galvanize Lorenzo into sponsoring, and himself engaging in, a range of lavish, public artistic projects, mainly secular, which were at once beautiful and politically convenient, in that they enhanced his and the city’s image. A leader who sponsors and, as a poet, actually creates beautiful art cannot be a bad leader. A leader who employs the likes of Botticelli to make festival banners and carnival floats will not get a bad press from posterity. And the good citizen, the good Christian, must be a Platonist because only the Platonist appreciates and participates in this striving for the beautiful and better, this aestheticizing of public life. If he wasn’t a Platonist, that is, our philistine citizen might merely start counting the florins and piccioli and making dry remarks about political self-interest.