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

Which brings us to the chief drawback of these exciting ideas: They had little to say about moneymaking and the price of things. The underlying contradiction here is quite different from Cosimo’s dilemma: How do I get my soul to heaven while amassing a fortune with supposedly sinful banking practices. The problem now is that while wealth is actually more important than ever — for how else can you get the best artists, the best teachers, a decent translation of Plato, not to mention the wherewithal to throw a lavish party for a dead philosopher’s birthday? — nevertheless the actual process of moneymaking is passed over as something base, something on the lowest level of the Platonic hierarchy, something the nobler soul would gladly leave behind in its struggle to be free from mere matter.

To this frame of mind, then, the complexities of accountancy, the intricate technicalities by which the sin of usury can be avoided, are no longer things to dwell on with pleasure, as Cosimo doubtless did dwell on them — Cosimo who said he would be a banker even if money could be made by waving a wand. No, now the cultured man wants to wave whatever wand comes to hand and get the problem of a good income out of the way as soon as possible: by lending money to the duke of Milan at the highest possible rate of interest, for example; by getting the concession to collect import duties at the customs post of Gravelines; or, most dramatically, in the case of the Medici bank, by the attempt to establish a permanent gold mine with the alum affair.

What was the alum affair? “It makes me think of the Holy Spirit,” wrote Gentile Becchi, Lorenzo’s tutor. “I don’t understand it.” Ironically, the two extremes of Christian Platonism’s hierarchy of realities — base matter, divine essence — seem to have become equally incomprehensible to the educated mind located somewhere in between. In any event, the eagerness to have the money problem out of the way thanks to this base material, alum — an aluminum sulfate used, among other things, for dyeing cloth — would plunge Lorenzo into the great defining dramas of his life, where the part he was learning to play would demand a divine performance.

6. The Magnificent Decline

First son after three sisters, his mere arrival was a triumph. Vast resources stooped over him, anxious to be of use. Even his wet nurse received begging letters.

Spectacularly ugly, he was brought up to seduce. At the age of five, he was dressed as a little French boy to greet Prince Jean d’Anjou. Alas, his nose was flattened on his face. At the age of ten, he recited poems for the visiting Galeazzo Maria Sforza, for Pope Pius II. His protruding jaw pushed the lower lip above the upper. He learned to play the viola and the lute. He learned to ride on horseback and to hold the falcon. Deprived of any sense of smell, he began to write poetry full of flowers and bees. It was love poetry. At the age of sixteen, his bumpy forehead and bushy eyebrows had won the heart of pretty Lucrezia Donati. Hoarse and unpleasantly high-pitched to the ear, in verse his voice chimed with precocious harmony. “Tender age will not forego to follow Love.” He knew his models: Petrarch, Dante, Ovid. With charming assurance, he elaborated his pain. “So cruel the first wound was!” Young Lucrezia was promised to someone else.

Already men wrote to him begging favors: stonecutters, farmers, painters, poets. And Lorenzo interceded with his father on their behalf: I trust you will “honor me in this,” the Medici heir solemnly writes, when gouty Piero is no more than a couple of rooms away. Other people’s anxieties prompt exercises in style. Surrounded by some of the finest minds of the time, the young man discussed the consolations of philosophy, the nature of good government. “He stays out late,” complained his tutor in a letter to the boy’s parents, “flirting with the girls and playing pranks.”

Formal visits to other courts began when he was in his early teens. Aware of that ugly face, that grating voice, he dazzled with an extraordinary intellectual energy. In Milan, he threw parties in the bank’s magnificent premises and met Ippolita Sforza, the duke’s daughter, who was about to marry the son of the king of Naples. The two adolescents exchanged letters, on literary matters, and later Ippolita asked for a loan of 2,000 ducats. “I promise on my honor I will pay it back.”

In 1466, now seventeen, he was sent down to Rome to sign some dull contract regarding the merchandising of alum, a mineral essential to the wool trade. It is his first involvement in banking business. Fortunately, the death of Francesco Sforza turns the trip into a dramatic diplomatic mission. He must convince the pope that the duke’s son should be allowed to succeed as lord of Milan. Sforza had been a usurper. Sforza is the Medici’s main ally. Lorenzo must hurry down to Naples to check that King Ferrante has no alternative arrangements in mind.