The Ugly Renaissance (31 page)

On the one hand, there was the problem of wealth itself. Put simply, money bred resentment and moral disapproval. Regardless of how it had been obtained, it had long been regarded as an obstacle to virtue and as an impediment to public-spiritedness. The Franciscan ideals that had dominated civic spiritualism in the fourteenth century had led to a certain popular disdain for riches.
In the
De seculo et religione
(1381), for example,
Coluccio Salutati had captured the tenor of contemporary opinion in praising poverty as the status most befitting piety, and in associating wealth with greed. But despite the profound economic changes of the early fifteenth century, this contempt for Mammon’s fruits remained deeply entrenched in the religious imagination. Writing in either 1445 or 1446, for example,
Bartolomeo Facio contended that “
riches bring no satiety to man, but greater greed, rather, and thirst,” and consequently opined that no one “who practices commerce and profit-making” could attain the true “riches” of the Christian faith “even if he possesses the fortune of Cosimo.” This fed into a long-running social mistrust of riches. Although the
Ciompi Revolt (1378) had been comprehensively crushed, the humble folk of Florence who flocked to hear firebrand preachers attack the opulence of the rich retained a deep resentment of the
grassi
(fat cats) simply because they were wealthy.

On the other hand, ostentatious spending was itself problematic. Still deeply attached to the ideal of poverty, the stricter of the mendicant orders continued to denounce showy expenditure as nothing more than an expression of self-love. Large palaces, richly decorated chambers, fine clothing, and eye-popping jewels were all condemned. Indeed,
preachers such as Fra
Giovanni Dominici and Cosimo’s own friend Antonino Pierozzi even denounced those who gave large amounts of
money to charity on the grounds that such gifts were inspired more by pride than by Christian
caritas
.

The key to legitimating wealth and lavish spending lay in the manner in which both were presented. As many of the humanists who gathered around Florentine merchant bankers in the early fifteenth century realized, half of the problem lay with the common conflation of riches with greed. Artificial though the distinction might have been, it was argued that the two did not always go hand in hand, least of all at a moral level. Wealth was, after all, just a pile of cash. It wasn’t a process but a fact. However a person’s fortune had been obtained, therefore, it was illogical to have any disdain for money itself. The mere fact of being rich didn’t make a merchant banker a bad person.
In his commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian
Economics
(1419), for example,
Leonardo Bruni suggested that far from being an impediment to Christian virtue, riches were “neither good nor bad in themselves.” As Poggio Bracciolini argued in his
De nobilitate
(1440) and as
Francesco Filelfo explained in his
De paupertate
(ca. 1445), wealth was morally indifferent, and it was impossible to judge a merchant banker for being filthy rich.

Nevertheless, it was still possible to judge the wealthy for the manner in which they spent their money. Clearly, some forms of expenditure were considered immoral. By virtue of the contempt in which usury was held, few denied that the idea of reinvesting profits to make money “breed” was anathema. By the same token, truly excessive spending was equally undesirable. But at the same time, it was also clear that the total avoidance of expenditure was to be shunned. The miserly tendency to hoard cash for its own sake was a classic paradigm of senseless greed, every bit as bad as wanton profligacy.

There was, however, a middle way. A certain level of spending was regarded as socially acceptable. For
Leon Battista Alberti—who was himself the illegitimate child of a Florentine merchant banker—there was no harm at all in money being spent on extensions to churches or in decorating private houses with a cheerful liberality. Such playful indulgences could, he argued, only bring pleasure, and no one could possibly find anything amiss about a bit of pleasure, provided it remained within the bounds of propriety.

But some spending could actually be presented as a manifestation of public virtue. Perhaps inspired by
the efforts to justify the lavishness of signorial courts in the previous century, the humanists of the early
fifteenth century came to develop a
complete “theory of magnificence” that attributed a definite moral value to merchant bankers’ patronage of the arts, and especially to architecture.

Perhaps the fullest and most forceful defense of “magnificence” (which literally means “doing great things”) was offered by the Augustinian canon Fra
Timoteo Maffei (ca. 1415–70) in his
In magnificentiae Cosmi Medicei Florentini detractores
(ca. 1454–56). Grounded in the forms of patronage that Maffei saw springing up around him, this dialogue was intended specifically to rebut the criticisms that had been leveled against the enormous sums Cosimo de’ Medici had already spent on his ecclesiastical building projects. Drawing heavily on
Saint Thomas Aquinas’s
Summa theologiae
, Maffei argued that Cosimo’s construction and decoration of Florentine churches and monasteries could be viewed not as an expression of his overweening pride and arrogance but as manifestations of a desire to celebrate God’s majesty and incite men to virtue. Far from being contemptible, Cosimo’s extravagant patronage only testified to his virtue and merited the approval of all true believers. As Maffei put it:

All these things deserve extraordinary praise and should be recommended to posterity with the utmost enthusiasm, since from Cosimo’s Magnificence in building monasteries and temples it will have had divine excellence before its eyes, and it will consider with how much piety and with how much thankfulness we are indebted to God.

The more merchant bankers like Cosimo spent on ecclesiastical building projects, the more they revealed themselves to be truly virtuous and devout men.

It should, of course, be noted that Maffei limited himself to talking only about churches and monasteries; but it did not take too much imagination to transpose the basic thrust of his argument to the more secular setting of civic society. As both
Francesco Filelfo and
Leon Battista Alberti argued, “magnificence”—that is, a willingness and capacity to spend on a grand scale—was a virtue that could be applied to all forms of artistic patronage, provided only that the viewer could believe that the patron had been driven by motives other than mere self-glorification. In constructing an enormous palazzo, for example, a merchant
banker, it was thought, was not simply serving his own ends but also conferring great honor on his family and on his city. Families and cities were, after all, known by their monuments.
Splendor was thus thought of as a profoundly social virtue that manifested both a familial devotion and a public-spirited commitment to enhancing the prestige of the commune. Indeed, the more fabulously decorated and grandly conceived a palace was, the greater the owner’s virtue was thought to be. This was expressed with unusual clarity and force by Giovanni Pontano, writing in 1498:

The magnificent man is made great through great expenditure. Thus the works of the magnificent man consist in illustrious palaces, in churches of excellent manufacture, in theatres, in porticoes, in streets, in sea-ports … But since magnificence consists in great expense, it is necessary that the size of the object itself be sumptuous, and imposing, otherwise it will not justifiably excite either admiration or praise. And impressiveness, in turn, is obtained through ornamentation, the extent and the excellence of the material, and the capacity of the work to last for a long time. Without art, in truth, nothing, whether large or small, will merit true praise. Thus if something is tawdry and lacking in ornament, or made in a low-cost material which will not guarantee longevity, it truly cannot be great, nor should it be held to be so.

The success of this new conception of wealth and spending is easy to gauge. So seductive is the humanistic theory of magnificence that even today merchant bankers like Cosimo de’ Medici seem to be cloaked in the same aura of superhuman cultivation as artists. But it is nevertheless important to remember that the theory of magnificence was nothing more than a way of dressing reality up in more socially acceptable terms. However much humanists like
Alberti and Maffei endeavored to celebrate the chapels, churches, and palazzi springing up around Florence as manifestations of a deep-seated sense of public virtue, they were writing with the express intention of defending super-wealthy merchant bankers against the accusations of what we might today call the 99 percent. They were definitely not describing reality.

For all the humanistic window dressing, the “art of magnificence” was nothing more than a gigantic exercise in conspicuous consumption
and self-glorification. By endowing chapels, funding the reconstruction of churches and monasteries, building great palaces, and decorating their homes with the finest art that money could buy, merchant bankers like Cosimo de’ Medici were consciously endeavoring to show off their immense wealth and to provide a very visible affirmation of their own financial dominance.

Yet precisely because the “art of magnificence” was the product of wealth, it also concealed the dark and unpleasant methods on which merchant banking was founded. Every brick, every brushstroke, testified to the usury, extortion, and downright dirtiness that was essential to every fortune made.

Despite its rather seedy underside, it is the “art of magnificence” that features most prominently in the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
. Although Cosimo was careful to ensure he was portrayed in the penitential manner appropriate to
atonement, the glittering finery of the frescoes is a testimony to the merchant bankers’ longing to show off their wealth and use their filthy lucre to portray themselves—rather deceptively—as virtuous citizens of the republic.

F
ROM
M
ERCHANT
B
ANKERS TO
M
ASTERS

In the years between their first appearance in the historical record and Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s visit to Florence, the Medici had gone from being humble money changers to being enormously wealthy merchant bankers capable of lavishing huge sums on the arts of atonement and magnificence. Yet this was only part of the story. As their commercial fortunes changed, they saw their political fortunes alter at the same time. Although they had begun as mere bit players in the drama of communal life, by 1459, Cosimo de’ Medici had emerged not only as the richest man in the city but also as the uncrowned king of Florence. It was a remarkable journey for any family, but the factors that propelled him and his family from obscurity to the very pinnacles of power and influence were emblematic of the intimate relationship that developed between merchant banking and politics in the early Renaissance. And if the commercial practices of merchant bankers seemed dark and murky, the political world they inhabited was even darker. Strikingly modern in many ways, it was a world far removed from our familiar conceptions of the Renaissance. What is really significant, however, is not so much
the political shenanigans in which merchant bankers became involved as the economic factors that allowed them to carve out a dominant position in the world of politics.

Given the guild-based structure of Florentine politics, bankers and merchant bankers found themselves drawn inexorably into public life. It was, however, more than a matter of institutional ties. The more successful merchant bankers became, the more heavily their affairs became entangled with the politics of the Renaissance city. More so even than today, their fortunes were bound up with the actions of government. There’s no doubt they had the most to gain from government. As
Gene Brucker has rightly observed, the most striking feature of the
Signoria is that “
it governed for the benefit of the rich and powerful, and often to the disadvantage of the poor and the lowly.” It was the urban elite who received the lion’s share of lucrative sinecures, who benefited most from the manifest inequalities of the tax system, and who received secure dividends from shares in the
Monte (Florence’s funded debt). But at the same time, they also had the most to lose. As the worrying effects of the
Ciompi Revolt had suggested, slight alterations to tax rates, wage levels, or the management of the Monte could have far-reaching implications for the most modestly sized enterprises, while decisions about foreign affairs, war and peace, and the levying of forced loans could have a truly monumental impact on the fortunes of the city’s merchant bankers.

As far as Florence’s richest citizens were concerned, business and politics were two sides of the same coin, and given how high the stakes could be, they were in no doubt that government was quite simply too important to be left to chance, or worse, to common tradesmen. Although the structure of Florentine government was already heavily geared toward the interests of the wealthiest by the late fourteenth century (see
chapter 3
), there emerged a narrow group of super-rich patricians bent on annexing public policy to their own interests and on keeping the reins of power in their grasp.

Conscious that the Florentine constitution was ostensibly “republican,” these patricians knew that if they were to control government, they had to find a way to bend the rules. They began by rigging elections. Unlike today, however, there were no ballot boxes to stuff. Officeholders were chosen in a deliberately “random” way, with the names of successful candidates being drawn from a sack. Yet chance could still
be nudged in the right direction. Although all guild members were theoretically eligible for office,
committees of scrutiny decided whose names should be put in the sack. Composed entirely of guild patricians, these committees thus determined who would be in and who would be out. But too much was still being left to chance. After 1387, two—and later three—of the eight seats on the priorate were reserved for a special class of preferred candidates whose names were drawn from separate, smaller pouches (
borsellini
) and who had all been preselected by the committees. Even if selections were still officially done by chance and new families were progressively introduced into the ranks of officeholders in the years following the
Ciompi Revolt, Florence’s patricians could be sure of having “preselected” a majority of the priors.