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

Marsilio Ficino, protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, spoke little of darkness but a great deal about illumination. Sixteen years older than Lorenzo, he made, in the early 1470s, a rather more successful bid than the aging patrician Soderini to influence the young ruler, presenting himself as a philosophical father to a privileged disciple, not an interested party with advice to give on contentious issues. As a thinker, Ficino’s most characteristic gesture was conflation. Reading and translating widely, searching back in time long before Rome and abroad far east of the Aegean, he had an uncanny ability to find the same thing wherever he looked and above all to superimpose one tradition on another. The mountain Dante ascends in the Commedia is obviously the Olympus of the Greeks, the Pradesha or “supreme field” of Sanskrit, the Pardes of the Chaldeans, the Arab mountain of Qaf, and even the mons Veneris of sensual delight. The Orphic Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, was clearly akin to Plato’s metaphor of the cave and the light in The Republic, which Ficino translated, to the late classical theologian Proclus’s Hymn to the Sun, which Ficino translated, and to St. Augustine’s notion of God as “the sun of the soul,” which, in the Soliloquia, Ficino both translated and wrote a commentary on. The whole world, it seemed, had always followed a single faith whose ancient priests included Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine.

Supremely eclectic, Ficino’s humanism annihilated all divisions — this in stark contrast to the Christianity of the previous centuries, which had followed a single tradition, concentrated on an established canon of authors, yet managed to divide the world very sharply, perhaps depressingly, into good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, heaven and hell. This was why, for the humanists, the recent past had to be not so much argued with as surpassed, forgotten. It would not permit the thrill of the exotic, or a more personal selection of what to read and think. From now on instead, any argument would take place within a new zona franca where ancient met modern, East met West, and the excited mind was free to try out what it liked. Humanism, in short, unlocked the door to that supermarket of ideas we live in today.

There were aspects of Ficino’s thought that were extremely attractive to Lorenzo. One of his conflations was the fairly common one of the authoritative father figure with the prince or political leader. Following the birth of his daughter Maddalena in 1473, Lorenzo was now a father three times over. Father is a more positive word than tyrant. Never one to leave anything out of an equation, Ficino brought in God and artists too, as analogous to fathers and princes: “The son is the work of the father, and there is nothing that man loves more than his own work. And this is why God loves human nature and authors their books, and painters the people they have painted.” By the same mental process, Lorenzo would eventually be able to think of Florence as becoming — through his government, his marriage-arranging, his manipulation of available patronage to painters, poets, sculptors, and architects — his own personal work of art. He loved it because he was making it what it was. At which point, whether money flowed out of Lorenzo’s purse toward the town or, more likely, with the bank’s now-rapid decline, out of state coffers and into the Palazzo Medici, was unimportant. Father and son keep their money in common.

Nor was Ficino’s eclecticism alien to elitism. The world had always been as he described it — the soul of man yearning for the divine light — yet it was not given to everybody to understand that. Most people would remain in ignorance. And this was how it should be. Ficino translated into Latin, after all, not into the vernacular. Only the best educated could read Latin. “Religious mysteries,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, another disciple of Ficino’s, “would not be mysteries if they did not remain occult.” A fair point. The deeper truths could thus only be written about “under enigmatic veilings and poetic dissimulations.” This explained the complex, often ambiguous nature of myth, and indeed many of the somewhat puzzling paintings of nymphs and satyrs that were beginning to flow from Sandro Botticelli’s workshop. Only those already in the know, those who could afford to commission a painting, were to understand.