The Ugly Renaissance (33 page)

The city decided to remedy its growing cash-flow crisis by borrowing large sums from its wealthiest citizens. A body of merchant bankers known as the
Officials of the Bank was charged with raising and setting the terms of these loans, and in the majority of cases they too were major lenders. Much like the board of the Federal Reserve, the Officials were responsible for keeping Florence solvent, and it has been calculated that they secured loans of about 200,000 florins each year.

It was this combination of war, crippling
catasto
collections, and government borrowing that transformed the character of Florentine politics and catapulted
Cosimo de’ Medici to power. The
catasto
did not hit the Medici quite as hard as it hit other prominent merchant-banking families. Their investments in land and property were limited, and they carefully kept their money moving around, so that their tax liabilities were lower, and their assets were less seriously damaged by the collections. Nevertheless, Cosimo de’
Medici and his business associates not only dominated the Officials of the Bank but also accounted for the greater part of the loans made to the
Signoria. Surviving records show that no less than 46 percent of all loans came from just ten people either drawn from the Medici’s ranks or allied with them by business and patronage. Cosimo and his brother, Lorenzo, personally accounted for no less than 28 percent. It is no exaggeration to say that Florence was financially dependent on the Medici—and most particularly on Cosimo.

Although Cosimo shared his father’s distaste for holding public office, his financial resources ensured that he was rapidly emerging as the dominant force in Florentine politics. Consciously or not, he was effectively buying Florence wholesale. In the faction-ridden and fiercely competitive world of politics, rumors began spreading that he was planning to seize control of the government.

By the summer of 1433,
Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi had become frightened by Cosimo’s growing influence. Concerned that they were about to be “bought” out of power in the very near future, they decided they had to act. As soon as Cosimo was out of the city at his estate at
Il Trebbio, they packed the Signoria with their own partisans and prepared to get rid of him for good. Summoned back to Florence from his vacation at short notice, Cosimo was arrested and locked in a
cell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria. At the bidding of Albizzi and Strozzi, a special committee (
balìa
) was then hastily set up to act as the kangaroo court they needed to dispose of Cosimo. But things didn’t go entirely to plan. Although Albizzi argued passionately for execution, the
balìa
shrank from imposing the death sentence. After weeks of heated debates, on September 28, Cosimo, his brother, Lorenzo, and his cousin Averardo were exiled.

Rinaldo degli Albizzi was exultant. He would, of course, have preferred to have had Cosimo killed, but the mere fact that Cosimo was out of the way seemed to provide a good enough reason for celebration. It was a grotesque mistake. No sooner had he receded from sight than it became clear that Florence was now stuck. With the Medici in exile, the city over which Rinaldo degli Albizzi presided was quite simply unable to pay its bills. What was more, the economy as a whole was dealt a hammer blow by Cosimo’s absence. Without Medici money lubricating the wheels of commerce, business was grinding to a halt. The Signoria couldn’t even content itself with confiscating Cosimo’s legendary sacks of money, as these, too, had been hidden away months before. Only when it was too late did Albizzi realize that Cosimo was effectively blackmailing the city.

Disaster followed. Within months, economic troubles, tax hikes, and a series of cataclysmic military defeats had made Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s regime hideously unpopular. His allies began to abandon him. Even Palla Strozzi grew colder. His grip on the Signoria weakened, and—forced to choose between civic bankruptcy and a Medici hegemony—the city’s mercantile elite selected a decidedly pro-Cosimo Signoria in August 1434.

Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s political career was over. The new Signoria immediately sent him into exile along with Palla Strozzi and overturned his “reforms.” Most important of all, Cosimo de’ Medici and his relatives were recalled with honor. The city needed his money more than it needed the “liberty” that Albizzi had claimed to defend.

When he arrived back in Florence in the autumn of 1434, Cosimo found himself the unchallenged master of the city. Broken by war, strapped for cash, and with no other source of loans, the Florentines needed Cosimo to act as their godfather, and though he was to be granted the title of
pater patriae
(Father of the Nation) after his death, he was
nothing more than a very wealthy
padrino
.

Cosimo used his position to the full and consolidated his grip on power. He brought some former enemies over to his side, exiled others with ruthless efficiency, enlarged his networks of control, and centralized decision-making processes within his own household. He even pushed through a new constitution that placed authority in “his” council, and struck a deal with the Sforza of Milan to guarantee military support in the event of any unforeseen opposition. By 1459, he had achieved the kind of security that Mafia godfathers can only dream of.

The plots, counterplots, and brutal reprisals that facilitated Cosimo’s rise to the top of the political food chain were certainly unique, but the trajectory he followed exemplified the degree to which the wealth of the merchant bankers had become synonymous with raw power. By virtue of the trade they plied, merchant bankers were obliged to form broad-based networks that combined business interests and familial ties, and thus assumed a naturally dominant role in the practices of communal politics. At the center of these overlapping circles of influence, the wealthiest merchant bankers—such as Cosimo de’ Medici—had at their disposal a ready-made political machine that could easily be translated into government itself. Similarly, the parlous state of civic finances in communes up and down Italy virtually guaranteed that the richest merchant bankers would become the very cornerstone of political action. Escalating costs, inflexible systems of tax collection, and hopelessly inadequate revenues meant that enormous loans were the only way that many cities could hope to remain solvent, and since merchant bankers—and the tightly knit networks of which they were a part—were the only people who had the kind of money needed, it was inevitable that governments would sell out to their wishes. But perhaps most important of all, the stakes that were involved and the rivalries that emerged out of this situation ensured that if a merchant banker was to survive, he needed a very particular set of skills. If he were rich, but not colossally so, he needed to throw moral scruples to the wind and throw his lot in with the biggest fish in the pond. If he were very rich, however, he needed to ensure not only that his moneybags were bigger than anyone else’s but also that he would always be the most ruthless and cunning man in town. Greed may have been good in the world of the Renaissance merchant banker, but insofar as the big prizes were concerned, Gordon Gekko wouldn’t have been a patch on Cosimo de’ Medici.

T
HE
A
RT OF
D
ISSIMULATION

The merchant bankers’ rise from business moguls to political masters was undoubtedly a matter of great satisfaction for those who made it to the top. Having secured control of government, they had equipped themselves with the ideal tools with which to further their commercial interests, and had opened the doors to untold wealth and influence. Yet at the same time, they encountered a fresh series of challenges that went to the heart of their own nefarious methods. Lacking the security that noble titles conferred on other despots, they were unable to indulge the art of magnificence too much. It was dangerous to publicize their preeminence in cities that were—officially at least—republican, where ordinary citizens were liable to take umbrage at having their political impotence made too obvious. And the fact that authority resided in a network of personal relationships operating behind the organs of government meant they had to take care not to alienate their allies.

As the uncrowned king of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici was highly aware of these concerns. He had, in fact, learned the hard way. Early in his political career, as part of his campaign of investing lavishly in magnificent palaces and grand ecclesiastical projects, he had made the mistake of having his family coat of arms (which consisted of seven red balls, or
palle
, on a gold background) displayed prominently on everything he paid for. Before long, it was almost impossible to walk down a street without feeling Cosimo’s influence. Not surprisingly, many Florentines—especially those from the Albizzi faction—took offense, and the irascible
Francesco Filelfo launched a series of bitter attacks on him for this reason. The “art of magnificence” could be taken too far. Referring to the ubiquity of the Medici arms, Filelfo joked that Cosimo’s pride was said to be so overweening that he had emblazoned “
even the monks’ privies with his balls.”

Like many other merchant bankers in a similar position, Cosimo learned that he had to appear to remain in the background and to communicate a sense that he was just one part of a broad network of power by using art to represent political alliances and to forge new ties. He needed an “art of
dissimulation.”

There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
. The fact that Cosimo the penitent shrank from the center stage and had himself depicted surrounded by a host of influential
and powerful figures vividly testifies to his desire to give the impression that he was a humble man who nevertheless found himself at the center of an almost accidental web of political, intellectual, and financial ties.

But while Cosimo may have been an unusually prominent case in point, the same desire to use art to display political connections was shared by merchant bankers of rather more modest means. Family chapels were the ideal settings for this art of dissimulation, and Florence is literally packed with vivid examples, but three works in particular repay closer examination, each concealing a murky political drama of its own.

Filippino Lippi’s fresco
Raising of the Son of Theophilus and Saint Peter Enthroned
in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (
Fig. 20
) is not so much a depiction of a religious scene as a visual expression of the dynamics of power in Renaissance Florence. The patron,
Felice di Michele Brancacci, was a prosperous silk trader whose prominence as one of the city’s maritime consuls derived both from his wealth and from his marriage to the daughter of Palla Strozzi. But he was also a somewhat nervous fellow. Although he was sufficiently rich and well connected to carry a certain political weight, he was not so important a figure that he did not feel threatened by the dramatic shifts occurring in Florentine politics in the early 1420s. Needing to appear both powerfully “wired in” and somehow distant, he entrusted Filippino Lippi with casting him and a panoply of well-known Florentines in the role of witnesses to the miraculous resurrection of Theophilus’s son. Among the crowd of bystanders, it is possible to glimpse the faces not merely of Brancacci himself but also of the chancellor
Coluccio Salutati, the poet
Luigi Pulci, the merchant
Piero di Francesco del Pugliese,
Piero di Iacopo Guicciardini (father of Francesco, the historian), and
Tommaso Soderini (father of Piero, later to become
gonfaloniere a vita
).

The conceit was impressive, but it did not do Brancacci much good. Despite the clever, double-handed visual game in Lippi’s fresco, Felice di Michele Brancacci ended up on the wrong side of the Albizzi-Medici struggle and was eventually exiled alongside his kinsman Palla Strozzi in 1434.

More successful, and perhaps more ambitious, was the manner in which
Giovanni Tornabuoni had himself depicted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the frescoes of his family chapel in Santa Maria Novella some
decades later (ca. 1485–90). Tornabuoni was an unusually well-placed individual and was—by any standard—at the center of Florentine political life during
Cosimo de’ Medici’s ascendancy. He was a wealthy merchant, and his business connections had led him to become the Medici bank’s treasurer to
Pope Sixtus IV, a Florentine ambassador, and
gonfaloniere di giustizia
. What was more, he was also the uncle of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In commissioning Ghirlandaio to decorate the walls of the chapel, however, Tornabuoni took care to ensure that he and his kinsmen were shown not as dominant figures but as members of a much wider group. In the
Expulsion of Joachim
(
Fig. 21
), for example, his son, Lorenzo, is shown standing alongside
Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici and two figures who may represent
Alessandro Nasi and either
Giannozzo Pucci (later to be accused of leading a pro-Medici plot against Savonarola) or a certain
Bartolini Salimbene. So, too, in the
Apparition of the Angel to Zechariah
(
Fig. 22
), almost all of the male members of the
Tornabuoni family are depicted surrounded by powerful individuals closely involved with the running of the Medici bank, including
Andrea de’ Medici,
Federico Sassetti, and Gianfrancesco Ridolfi, and others with intimate ties to the governing elite, such as the chronicler
Benedetto Dei. To further emphasize the cultural bonds between the Tornabuoni and the Medici, Ghirlandaio was also requested to include portraits of the humanists
Marsilio Ficino,
Cristoforo Landino,
Angelo Poliziano, and (most likely)
Demetrius Chalcondyles in the left foreground.

A similar—if rather more aspirational—approach was adopted by the Cambio broker Gaspare (or Guasparre) di Zanobi del Lama. A rather shady character with more than a few stains on his reputation, Lama was a relatively modest banker with only very tenuous links to the Medici. His ambition, however, far outstripped both his accomplishments and his moral standing, and he sought to use art to give an artificially inflated impression of his ties to the dominant merchant-banking elite.
After commissioning
Sandro Botticelli to paint the
Adoration of the Magi
(ca. 1475) (
Fig. 5
) for his family’s chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Lama took a leaf out of Tornabuoni’s book and instructed the artist to fill the scene with prominent figures from the world of politics and banking as a means of signaling his “intimacy” with Florence’s most influential personalities. The Medici are cast in the roles of the three kings. Although dead, Cosimo is given pride of place, shown kneeling directly before the Virgin and Child, and is depicted with an arresting
vividness (indeed, Vasari later commented that it was “
the most convincing and natural of all the surviving portraits” of the old
padrino
). Kneeling farther toward the foreground are Cosimo’s sons, Piero (in a red robe) and Giovanni (in a long white robe). By way of completing the Medici “set,” Lama also had Piero’s own sons, Lorenzo il Magnifico (left) and Giuliano (right, next to Giovanni) shown flanking the central scene. Just to make sure his links with the Medici circle were clear, portraits of
Filippo Strozzi and
Lorenzo Tornabuoni were also inserted alongside images of noted cultural figures including Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, and even Botticelli himself. Yet for all his heavy-handed showiness, Lama had enough political sense not to have himself set on a par with the Medici. Evidently acquainted with the subtlety that was appropriate to the “art of dissimulation,” he had himself depicted as just one of the many figures in the group on the right of the painting. His curly gray hair clearly showing, he is peeking out from behind
Giuliano de’ Medici, in a light blue tunic. And though he fixes the viewer with a piercing gaze, his intention was to hint at his supposed connections rather than to broadcast his ambitions too boldly.