The Ugly Renaissance (29 page)

I bequeath 100 florins to the bishop as compensation for money which I may have gained illegally, and this should be used in benefit of the souls of those from whom I received the money.

Just to make sure, he also lavished a similar amount of money on the
Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Carmelites of Florence.

There was, however, a nagging doubt. Even if money was bequeathed to the Church—sometimes with an explicit statement of how many prayers and masses were to be said for the deceased—this only went a certain way to guaranteeing that ecclesiastics and the faithful would keep the soul of a dead banker in mind. Thankfully, art came to the rescue.

Perhaps the simplest and most straightforward means of keeping a banker’s memory alive was for him to commission a lavish
tomb, either directly or by instructing his relatives to make the necessary arrangements. Commonly including a carefully designed effigy of the
deceased and a series of accompanying inscriptions stressing his or her qualities, such sepulchres were obviously intended to ensure that the patron would be remembered after death, not merely by passersby or even by the city at large, but also—and most specifically—by those whose prayers would be necessary for the dead man or woman to merit a place in heaven. Thus,
Niccolò Acciaiuoli—the scion of his family’s banking house, the chancellor of the kingdom of Naples, and a friend of Petrarch’s—not only had an elaborate tomb carved for himself in the
certosa
of San Lorenzo, outside Florence, but also made doubly sure that the monks would pray for his soul by leaving them a huge bequest on the condition that a thousand masses would be said for him in the first year after his death. No amount of money was too much for such sepulchral endeavors. In 1471, for example, the Florentine merchant
Piero del Tovaglia summarized contemporary opinion when he observed, “
If I spend 2,000 florins on my house, my dwelling on earth, then five hundred devoted to my residence in the next life seems to me money well spent.”

As art gradually began to gain in stature, however, other—more obviously demonstrative—options also emerged.
At least from the beginning of the fourteenth century, bequests were often made with the stipulation that the money be spent on commissioning an altarpiece or on decorating a chapel, especially for the churches of the mendicant orders. In this way, it was thought, there would be almost no way that the faithful could forget to pray for the donor.

Particularly in the first half of the fourteenth century, this proved an amazingly popular solution to the immorality of usury, especially among Florentine bankers. Indeed, the more money banking generated, the more intense was the competition between families to display their moral credentials through such artistic bequests. Heated games of devotional one-upmanship blew up around the patronage of chapels in major churches, and nowhere more so than in Florence.
In the years after the Black Death, for example, Santa Maria Novella “had chapels endowed by the Rucellai, Bardi, Guidalotti, and Strozzi, while patronage rights in the choir behind the main altar were claimed by the Ricci and Tornaquinci,” and in 1348 Turino Baldesi left the church the enormous sum of more than 300 florins to have the whole Old Testament painted “from beginning to end.” Even more strikingly, in the same
period, the “
Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Cavalcanti, Tolosini, Cerchi, Velluti, Castellani, Rinuccini, Ricasoli, Alberti, Machiavelli, and several other families all had chapels” in Santa Croce, and the
Bardi family alone had secured rights over a further four.

Not uncommonly, such bequests divided responsibility for large-scale commissions between the family of the deceased and the church or monastery in which the work would be housed.
The Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence is a particularly good example. A noted banker from a distinguished and wealthy family,
Rosello Strozzi set aside money in his will to atone for his sins in this manner. His youngest son, Tommaso, then arranged to fund the adornment of a chapel in the left transept, with frescoes showing Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory by
Nardo di Cione and a magnificent altarpiece by
Orcagna (Andrea di Cione) in 1354. Throughout the proceedings, however,
Tommaso Strozzi—like many early patrons—worked in harmony with the Dominican friars to ensure that the works commissioned were mutually acceptable.

But if bankers were going to spend good money on works of art in the hope of atoning for their sins, they increasingly wanted to make sure they would be in full control, even from beyond the grave. From the beginning of the fourteenth century onward, bankers and patrons began to tussle for influence over the direction that commissions would take. Perhaps inevitably, the men holding the purse strings rapidly gained the upper hand, and works designed to wipe away the stain of greed, avarice, and usury came to be more closely tailored to the patrons’ immediate moral needs.

The
Arena Chapel in Padua is perhaps the clearest case in point.
A towering jewel of early Renaissance art, the chapel harks back to Dante’s condemnation of the Paduan banker
Reginaldo degli Scrovegni. Tormented by the immorality of his father’s usury, Reginaldo’s son, Enrico, decided that the only way for the family to free itself from the stain of sin was for him to push patronage to its absolute limits. After purchasing a piece of land from the Dalesmanini family, Enrico acquired permission to erect a family chapel on the site and immediately commissioned
Giotto di Bondone to adorn the interior with a dazzling cycle of frescoes depicting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary.
And to ensure that the devout would offer prayers for him and his father,
Enrico took the added precaution of soliciting a papal indulgence for all those who visited the chapel, much to the annoyance of the monks at the nearby Eremitani Church.

But to say that Renaissance bankers were concerned for the fate of their souls is not to tell the whole story. Although they were extremely worried about what would happen to them after death, they were equally concerned that the Church’s tough stance on
usury gave them a very bad name. And if you were a banker, no amount of artistic “death insurance” could make up for the fact that the average man on the street thought you were irredeemably immoral. Bankers needed not just to atone for their sins but to be
seen
to atone for their sins.

One of the great advantages of the new forms of
patronage that had begun to appear at the start of the fourteenth century was that bankers were able to project a powerful image of piety and repentance while actively bidding for the prayers of the faithful. Art, in other words, allowed bankers to subvert reality and gloss over their misdeeds. Even if people attending Mass in Santa Maria Novella did not actually pray for the soul of
Rosello Strozzi, for example, the visual impact of the family chapel would have gone a long way toward convincing them that
Tommaso Strozzi was actually a very devout individual concerned to make reparation for his sins. So, too, it was difficult for anyone visiting the Arena Chapel not to be persuaded that Enrico degli Scrovegni nurtured a sincere faith and was earnestly striving to reconcile himself with God.

As the relationship between artists and patrons became ever closer, bankers were able to push the bounds of “moral PR” even further. Taking active control over the design and composition of the works they commissioned, bankers were able to emphasize their piety and contrition by having themselves included as participants in or witnesses to scenes from Christian history, ensuring that the works’ intended audience would perceive them as more moral individuals than their business practices would otherwise suggest. It was with this in mind that Enrico degli Scrovegni, for example, had a portrait of himself offering a model of the chapel to the Virgin included in the
Last Judgment
, on the entrance wall of the Arena Chapel, and that
Giovanni Tornabuoni had a portrait of himself kneeling in prayer, with his hands crossed piously across his chest, included in Ghirlandaio’s frescoes for the family chapel in Santa Maria Novella late in the next century.

The early Medici appear to have had only a
limited involvement in artistic patronage, but from the very beginning of their careers as bankers they were highly conscious of the sinfulness of usury and the extent to which they could atone for their sins through patronage of the arts. Having watched and learned from others throughout the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they later embraced—and mastered—all forms of artistic atonement, not least insofar as their patronage of
Benozzo Gozzoli was concerned. That Cosimo de’ Medici chose to have himself depicted as a penitent in the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
was a powerful expression of the Medici’s quest for redemption. This dimension of his portrait was entirely in keeping with his family’s development of a long-standing trend among Florence’s shady bankers and wholly reflective of his own awareness of the perceived immorality of his own usury.

F
ROM
B
ANKERS TO
M
ERCHANT
B
ANKERS

Despite Cosimo’s subsequent wealth, the Medici were—comparatively speaking—late starters when it came to the banking trade. By the mid-fourteenth century, they had become affluent, but they were still far from rich and were perhaps even knocked back a little by the advent of the
Black Death.
Although a respected member of communal society,
Foligno di Conte de’ Medici, for example, complained bitterly about the modesty of the family’s means in 1373. At around this time, “
a large proportion of the Medici were in very modest economic circumstances,” and “only five or six could be classified as moderately wealthy.” Indeed, in 1363, the tax assessments for two members of the family revealed them to be no better off than ordinary cloth workers and substantially worse off than many shopkeepers.

The Medici’s problem was that they were still thinking too small. Despite their tentative investments in other sectors, they hadn’t actually made the leap from being relatively modest bankers to being colossally ambitious
merchant
bankers. And it was in merchant banking that the real money was to be made.

The essence of the merchant banker’s art lay not in making loans per se but in using loans to serve much greater purposes. As its acknowledged masters—the
Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the
Acciaiuoli—knew, truly gigantic loans could be exchanged for trading concessions abroad. These
concessions could then be used as the basis for dealing in large-scale and highly profitable exports.
The Peruzzi, for example, agreed to lend the cash-strapped Edward III of England huge sums of money (Villani estimated that they handed over around 780,000 florins through the years) in return for lucrative privileges that allowed them to circumvent customs duties and corner the enormously valuable wool trade. By the same token, the
grain trade with southern Italy opened up similarly profitable opportunities, and many Florentine merchant bankers turned their lending potential toward the exploitation of the kingdom of
Sicily. Perhaps the shadiest opening was, however, the prospect of gaining lucrative tax farming privileges. Instead of paying back loans directly, cities or rulers could offer merchant bankers the opportunity to recoup the money they lent by collecting certain taxes for a given period of time; in this case, the banker’s objective was to collect more than he had lent, by whatever means necessary.

Whichever mechanism was chosen, a merchant bank needed four things to make this whole idea work. First, it needed an established network of foreign branches or agents able both to tender loans and to manage the trading side of the venture on the ground. Second, it needed enormous deposits from reliable investors. Third, it needed the ability to sustain huge loans. And fourth, it needed to be willing to strike rather questionable deals with unpredictable foreign potentates and to gamble on the shifting outcomes of international politics. If these were in place, there was no limit to the money that could be made. The only real danger was the temptation to lend too much to bad debtors in pursuit of ever-larger concessions, as the
Bardi and the Peruzzi found to their cost when Edward III “defaulted” on his loans in 1339. Unlike today, no merchant bank—no matter how huge—was too big to fail. But provided loans and trade were managed astutely, merchant banking was a recipe for printing money.

By acting both as bankers and as merchants in the international arena, and by launching themselves into the shady world of big-time deals, such “super-companies” rode the crest of Italy’s commercial wave and took wealth to a whole new level. The Peruzzi company, for example, saw its net capital grow from an already huge
124,000
lire a fiorino
in 1300–1308 to a massive 149,000
lire a fiorino
in 1310–12, and even on the edge of bankruptcy the family firm had assets worth some 90,000
lire a fiorino
in 1331–35. Indeed, so massive were their resources that they were
able to loan Edward III no less than 175,000 florins in 1337 alone (about $31.5 million in gold terms; about $164,937,500 measured against wages). Even after the cataclysmic crash that followed the English default, Florence’s merchant bankers could still expect to make vast amounts of money very quickly. One of the greatest Florentine success stories of the period was that of the Serristori. Despite only starting out as merchant bankers in the early years of the fifteenth century, the Serristori were catapulted to the very pinnacles of wealth within a few decades.
In 1427,
Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro personally declared net assets of around 35,000 florins (about $6.3 million in gold terms; about $16,240,000 measured against wages) and used his loans to leverage his interest in exporting textiles and importing wood, silver, alum, sugar, and all manner of other things. Within a few years, Antonio’s resources had grown so large that he—the grandson of a humble notary—was able to marry his sons into the greatest of Florence’s patrician families, the Strozzi, the Pazzi, and the Capponi.