The Ugly Renaissance (30 page)

It was Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci, who transformed the Medici’s fortunes by taking the next step. He did not, it must be admitted, immediately strike his contemporaries as a pioneering go-getter. With a high forehead, bulging, heavily hooded eyes, and tight lips, he was quiet, retiring, and ineloquent. He was almost forgettable. What was more, his beginnings were far from auspicious. Giovanni had inherited only very little from his father, Averardo, and had started out in a modest way as a petty moneylender in Florence. Yet in contrast to many of his predecessors, his unassuming appearance concealed a burning ambition and a clear knowledge of where the future was pointing. More than anything else, however, his sudden jump up from mere banking helps to illustrate just how shady Renaissance merchant banking could be.

Giovanni got his big opportunity when he went to work as a managing partner in the Rome branch of the bank owned by his father’s second cousin Vieri di Cambio. This experience opened his eyes for the first time to the full possibilities of merchant banking. Equipped with a clear vision of how money was to be made, he founded his own company in Rome after Vieri’s death in 1395. He then returned to set up a new partnership in Florence in 1397 and a new branch in Venice a few years later.

It was, however, in Rome that Giovanni made his money. On striking
out on his own, he had set his eyes on the Church. It was a shrewd move. The Church had a uniquely attractive combination of attributes. On the one hand, it had colossal holdings and reliable revenues streaming in from every corner of Europe. And on the other hand, the papacy’s need for cash often far outstripped the Church’s short-term income. It was the ideal client, and its vast territorial resources meant there were plenty of commercial privileges to be traded. The only problem was that in the past only a single banker had been appointed to handle Church business; and it wasn’t the Medici.

Giovanni’s strategy revealed not only his astuteness in taking advantage of opportunities but also the shallow, underhanded methods that merchant bankers had to employ. In 1378, the Great Schism tore the Church apart. Instead of there being only one pope, there were suddenly two, and then three, rival pontiffs vying for primacy, each of whom needed a banker.

When
Pope Alexander V (who headed the Pisan Obedience) died in 1410, Giovanni saw his chance. For more than a decade, he had been banker to the Neapolitan cardinal Baldassare Cossa, and having become fast friends, the two men seem to have struck a deal. Lending him the 10,000 florins he needed to bribe the other cardinals, Giovanni allowed Cossa to buy his way to the papacy. In return, Cossa—now enthroned as
Pope John XXIII—entrusted Giovanni with the massive resources of the Pisan papacy, widely acknowledged to be the most “legitimate” of the three. So successful was Giovanni at handling papal finances that even after John XXIII’s deposition and the reunification of the Church in 1415, the Medici were ultimately confirmed as the Church’s sole bankers in 1420.

It was corrupt, deceitful, and cunning. But from that moment on, the profits that could be made were almost limitless.
Taking over the family’s business interests on his father’s retirement in 1420, Cosimo pushed the Medici bank to ever greater heights of success and profitability. Making the most of his control of papal banking, Cosimo ensured that Church business accounted for an amazing 63 percent of the company’s profits between 1420 and 1435.
Reestablishing the bank on a new footing, he then massively expanded its operations, opening branches in Ancona, Avignon, Basel, Bruges, London, Geneva, and Pisa to make the most of
international trade.

Although he was shrewd enough to avoid investing too much of his
money in (taxable) assets such as land or property, Cosimo’s wealth soon outstripped that of those who had hitherto been regarded as the richest men in Florence. Even the famously rich
Palla Strozzi was overshadowed by his Medici rival by the third decade of the century. Indeed, so fantastically prosperous had Cosimo become by 1459 that
Giovanni Rucellai observed that he was “
probably not only the richest Florentine, but the richest Italian of all time.” It is, however, revealing that while Rucellai praises Palla Strozzi for having earned his wealth “honestly,” he remains pointedly silent about the manner in which Cosimo had made his money.

T
HE
A
RT OF
M
AGNIFICENCE

The art of merchant banking made the ethical problems of moneymaking much more serious. Although the profits were huge, there was no getting around the fact that they depended on a more relentless pursuit of usury than had ever been attempted before. What was more, the underhanded methods, backroom deals, and outright extortion that were part and parcel of the game of international finance left merchant banking open to accusations of outright immorality.

When Cosimo de’ Medici took over control of the family business in 1420, he assumed responsibility for a commercial enterprise that was not only more profitable but also more heavily tainted by wickedness than ever before. Cosimo’s fortune was inescapably marked by the moral stigma attached to usury, and the richer he grew, the more indelible the stain of sin became. What was worse, not merely was he a usurer, but he also used usury to bribe or blackmail cash-strapped potentates. He was holding the Church to ransom and was even encouraging
simony and corruption in the
Curia itself. Whichever way you looked at it, Cosimo’s mastery of merchant banking was every bit as morally bankrupt as it was financially rewarding.

It was perhaps inevitable that the new breed of merchant bankers should have felt an especially intense need to spend ever greater sums of money on the “art of
atonement,” and it is no exaggeration to say that the superabundance of richly decorated chapels and churches for which Florence, in particular, is famed testifies both to the guilt felt by patrons and to the desperation with which they clamored to save their blackened souls through art.

Being richer than any others, the Medici felt the need for artistic atonement more acutely than most, and they led the field in terms of the variety and scale of their bequests. Having watched and learned from others throughout the fourteenth century, Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo embraced—and mastered—the practice of using patronage for this purpose in the early fifteenth century. They positively lavished money on bequests and gifts. Works such as
Fra Angelico’s
Madonna and Saints
were given to convents and churches, and individual chapels (such as that in Santa Croce) were funded after the manner of the
Bardi and the Peruzzi by other members of the family. Similarly, they took very great care to ensure that their
tombs were placed in locations that would virtually guarantee the prayers of the faithful. Giovanni di Bicci was buried in the middle of the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo, while Cosimo went one step further in having himself interred right in front of the high altar in the main church.

Yet it would be mistaken to believe that Italy’s super-rich merchant bankers patronized the arts purely for the sake of their rotten souls. Even in the early fourteenth century, the more affluent members of the mercantile elite had begun to feel the need to show off a little, and it was certainly not uncommon for atonement to shade off into display. The endowment of family chapels and the inclusion of portraits in fresco cycles, in particular, could easily be interpreted as expressions of a latent desire to exhibit wealth to the public. By the early decades of the fifteenth century, however, merchant bankers found themselves in possession of fortunes so vast that their wealth rivaled—and, in some cases, even exceeded—that of the crowned heads of Europe. With money also came status, and—finding that kings, popes, and princes were dependent on the credit they could offer—they had difficulty resisting the feeling that they were a cut above the ordinary citizen. Their pockets bulging with cash and their chests puffed out with pride, merchant bankers simply could not resist the temptation to display their wealth and prestige through ever more inventive displays of
conspicuous consumption.

Embarking on one of the greatest spending sprees in history, the merchant bankers of Renaissance Italy rapidly found that there were no limits either to the money they could spend or to the things they could spend it on. Of course, like many of the modern world’s richest men and women, they found a certain satisfaction in giving large and very
public donations to charitable institutions. But there were more gratifying and direct ways of satisfying their need for recognition. Dazzling jewels, fine brocades, clothes embroidered with golden thread, rich silks, and the finest Arabian horses were purchased with almost wanton abandon. Vast banquets with dozens of dishes for hundreds of guests were given day after day; huge, bacchanalian dances were thrown on the smallest pretext; and households thronged with armies of liveried servants. Splendor was the only thing that really mattered.

Most of all, however, merchant bankers poured money into the patronage of the arts. Eager to have their wealth displayed for posterity, they commissioned carefully arranged portraits in greater numbers than ever before: the example of
Antonio Rossellino’s bust of
Francesco Sassetti is a typical early case in point. Latching onto the growing social value attached to classical learning, they paid artists to produce playful paintings on ancient themes, or statues of nymphs and gods in stone and bronze, and began collecting antique originals with unbridled enthusiasm.

But at least in the early years of the fifteenth century, merchant bankers focused their attention most especially on architecture and sought to use this medium as the most dramatic and impressive means of showing off their wealth. As shared social spaces that served as focal points for community activity, churches in particular caught their eye as offering rich potential for the affirmation of status. More concerned with prestige than with atonement per se, they sought out every opportunity to rebuild and extend churches and monasteries in as public a manner as possible.
Although contemporaries such as
Palla Strozzi,
Tommaso Spinelli, and the
Pazzi family all contributed lavishly to the construction of new chapels, cloisters, and convents, Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo de’ Medici stood head and shoulders over everyone else.
In 1419, Giovanni agreed to pay for the construction of the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo—employing Brunelleschi for the task—and
after 1440, Cosimo assumed responsibility for rebuilding the entire church, thus transforming the whole into
a gigantic shrine to the Medici family. Only a few years earlier,
Cosimo had paid for the remodeling of San Marco and had stacked its library with the choicest manuscripts that money could buy. Not long after, he followed this up by taking on the task of rebuilding the
Badia Fiesolana in comparable style.
The competition between merchant bankers for a financial interest in the
Badia Fiorentina was, however, so intense that not even Cosimo could get a look in.

Yet despite the enormous sums spent on ecclesiastical building projects, nothing compared with the amount of money that was poured into
palazzi and
villas. At the end of the fourteenth century, the homes of even the richest merchant bankers had been relatively unprepossessing, even if they were a little larger than most.
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, for example, spent most of his adult life in a
comparatively unremarkable
house in the via Larga, and even when he moved to a fractionally bigger house in the Piazza del Duomo, the family residence remained modest. The explosion in merchant bankers’ fortunes in the early fifteenth century, however, catalyzed a sudden vogue for enormous and richly decorated palazzi. Their worth was vast. According to some recent estimates,
the average merchant banker’s palazzo had a value of between 1,500 and 2,500 florins, while the most elaborate, built by
Filippo Strozzi and his heirs, cost almost 40,000 florins, more than a thousand times the annual wage of the most skilled workman. No price, indeed, was too high. As
Giovanni Rucellai put it, “
I think I have given myself more honor, and my soul more satisfaction, by having spent money than by having earned it, above all with regard to the building I have done.” In size and richness, these family palazzi were no less impressive. Significantly bigger even than the White House, the Palazzo Strozzi is reflective of the heights to which palatial ambition and ostentation could rise, and the fact that the Rucellai (whose palace was designed by
Leon Battista Alberti in ca. 1446–51), the Pitti (who commissioned their palazzo in 1458), and the Tornabuoni later strove to outdo one another in grandeur testifies to the extent to which the prestige of a merchant banker was bound up with the size of his home. None, however, came close to Cosimo de’ Medici as far as scale and opulence were concerned. Even though Cosimo rejected Brunelleschi’s original plans as being “too sumptuous and magnificent,” the Palazzo Medici Riccardi was so grandly appointed and luxuriously decorated that, as Vasari later recorded, “
it has comfortably accommodated kings, emperors, popes, and as illustrious princes as there are to be found in Europe, and won endless praise for the magnificence of Cosimo and for Michelozzo’s outstanding talent in architecture.” Nor was the Palazzo Medici Riccardi Cosimo’s only home. Again employing Michelozzo for the task, he “
restored the palace of Careggi [two miles from Florence],
richly and magnificently,” and built a completely new, fortresslike villa at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello.

It was obvious to anyone who cared to look around the streets of Florence that having rapidly acquired colossal fortunes, Renaissance merchant bankers—much like modern-day hedge fund managers or Russian oligarchs—wanted nothing more than to spend their money on showing off their wealth and status. Yet having begun to splurge on art and architecture on an altogether new scale, they ran into an entirely new set of problems. Quite apart from the perceived immorality of usury, it became clear that both wealth and spending came with their own, rather troubling, ethical issues.