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

Piero returned to Florence on November 8. The next day, in an apparently unplanned incident, someone decided to bar the doors to the signoria when he arrived there with a number of armed men. In a matter of hours, the town was in an uproar, the cries of “popolo” and “libertà” had begun. Piero panicked, got on his horse, and headed out of town. The Palazzo Medici was sacked. Suddenly the silk sheets, the precious sculptures, the painted reliquaries were being dragged out into the street. A hundred years of careful accumulation was lost in a matter of hours. On November 10, the very day after Piero’s departure, all Medici innovations in the republic’s constitution were dismantled, all Medici enemies exiled since 1434 were recalled; the hated new heavyweight coin for customs taxes was abolished, and, of course, the Medici bank and all its assets were confiscated. To have moved so fast, there must have been those who couldn’t wait to see the back of the family. A month later, Savonarola declared Jesus Christ king of Florence, as if the Savior himself had pushed over the bank’s changing tables.

It wouldn’t last. In 1498, accused of heresy by the official Church and abandoned by much of his congregation, Savonarola was burned at the stake. Fundamentalism is one thing in the pulpit, another in government. And fourteen years later, having finally infiltrated to the highest levels the institution that had been the source of so much of their wealth, the Medici returned to Florence on the back of Vatican power and overturned the republic. In 1529, they were officially recognized as dukes and ready to serve the Counter-Reformation in that long war of retrenchment that would keep an imitation of the older world — complete with those two complicit conundrums, the divine right of princes and the temporal power of the Church — in suffocating place for more than three hundred years.

These new Medici of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ordered monuments of tax-funded magnificence to establish an aura of legitimacy. All the fruitful ambiguity that had characterized old Cosimo’s commissions, all the urgent tension between money and metaphysics, was gone. With the grand dukes of Tuscany, we are in the world of larger-than-life equestrian statues, flattering official portraits, imagined military glory, and extravagant, though always breathtaking mannerism. In such circumstances, there was no need to revive the bank. In fact, the sooner people forgot that the family had ever sat behind their tables in via Porta Rossa, copying down the details of dubious exchange deals, the better.

Bibliographic Notes

Exercising power to which no one in Florence was constitutionally entitled, the Medici of the fifteenth century were obliged to be great propagandists, to present themselves as special, gifted, worthy. Perhaps this is one reason why there is such an extraordinary amount of literature about them. There are those historians who buy into the Medici’s flattering vision of themselves, those who react and reject, and those who try to sort out the wood from the trees. Nothing breeds interest like an ongoing argument.

Most modern readers will come to the subject through the more popular books, such as Christopher Hibbert’s The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, or J. R. Hale’s Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control. Hibbert’s book invests enthusiastically in the Medici myth and is the kind of thing tourists are reading while visiting the Uffizi gallery and generally falling in love with Renaissance Florence. In fact, it can be found stacked up in many of the city’s museum bookshops. It’s fun but not always accurate. Just as readable, but less colorful and more credible, Hale pays the price for his sobriety by not being so widely available.

The more academic the book, the more likely it is to be resisting the myth and looking for an ugly truth. Lauro Martines’s Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, gives really excellent background to the Medici story, but Martines is not one to allow special pleading and condemns the banking family as the ruin of Florentine republicanism. He has recently tried to popularize this view in the highly readable April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici, where he argues that all in all it would have been a good thing if the Pazzi family had managed to murder Lorenzo il Magnifico in the duomo in 1478. Martines is a moralist who likes to be out on a limb but is nonetheless interesting for that.