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

But a considerable number of court cases were now underway. Lorenzo was being pursued for the money he had taken from his young cousins, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. In 1485, the precious country villas had to be sold to make amends. It was a huge loss of prestige. The legal battle over the seizure of the Bruges galleys would go on into the second decade of the next century. With justice on his mind, Tommaso Portinari had Hans Memling paint him kneeling, naked, on one side of a pair of giant weighing scales held up by a great black Angel of Death. It is extraordinary that the Last Judgment scene, the final assessment of a man’s moral worth, something that had been so disturbing to the merchants of Cosimo’s time, should have become a vehicle for this sort of confident exhibitionism, as if the man were quite sure he was on his way to paradise. Weighing up Portinari’s performance in Bruges, Lorenzo calculated a loss of 70,000 florins. “Such are the great earnings that the management of Tommaso Portinari has brought,” he noted ironically. He was wrong. Losses were well over 100,000 florins.

Avignon closed down in 1478. Likewise Milan. The famous palazzo was sold. One of the two wool workshops had already gone. The silk workshop closed in 1480. That same year, the London and Bruges branches with all their debts were formally handed over to Portinari. Venice closed in 1481. In 1482, a proposal for restructuring the whole bank was drawn up. There would be two holdings, one under Tornabuoni, running Rome and Naples, the other under Sassetti, running Florence, Lyon, and Pisa. Two barons, two entirely separate entities to satisfy two considerable egos. Total capital would be only about 52,000 florins, of which Lorenzo’s part was under 20,000, the merest trifle compared with the vast sums he had inherited. Nothing became of the plan. Nothing was done to coordinate the remaining branches or to have their directors care about each other’s losses. Making no serious contribution to economic activity, serving only to finance wars and the consumption of luxury goods on the part of a debt-ridden aristocracy, the Medici bank continued its inglorious decline through those years that would soon be referred to as “golden.” Pisa closed in 1489. Which left just Florence, Rome, Naples, and Lyon.

FORTUNATELY, THERE WERE other things for bankers to do aside from banking. Cosimo had used his staff to hunt down ancient manuscripts. Piero had bought paintings, tapestries, ponies for the kids. After 1483, Lorenzo began to send his bank managers on a hunt for lucrative Church appointments for his fourth child and second son, Giovanni, who had just received the tonsure and ordination into the priesthood. He was eight years old. Almost immediately, the Lyon branch of the bank entered into negotiations that would make the boy abbot of Fontdouce in western France. Later he acquired the priory of Saint Gemme, near Chartres. Ecclesiastical incomes were steady and risk-free. The monks of the Abbey of Le Pin, near Poitiers, barricaded themselves inside when Cosimo Sassetti arrived with orders to take possession in the name of the infant bishop. Having lost so much through banking, Lorenzo had finally found a way of making money in which he excelled. It was a question of connections, favors, gifts, promises. One by one the Church benefices fell into his son’s lap: the Abbey of Passignano on the road to Siena, churches in Prato, the Arno Valley, the Mugello; the Abbey of Monte Cassino near Naples, Morimondo, near Milan. By the time the bank collapsed, the Church incomes would be there to give the family a new economic base.