The Ugly Renaissance (9 page)

The industry was fragmented. By the end of the fourteenth century, there were around a hundred competing woolen companies in Florence, each of which controlled no more than 1–2 percent of the total
output. But the profits were enormous.
In the period 1346–50, the company founded by
Antonio di Lando degli Albizzi—which managed every aspect of woolen production, ran two workshops and a distribution workshop in Florence, and benefited from close links with Antonio’s merchant bank in Venice—earned an annual profit of more than 22 percent, a figure that any company would envy today. So great was the growth of the wool trade, in fact, that toward the middle of the fifteenth century the merchant
Giovanni Rucellai estimated that the city was worth around 1.5 million florins (
about $270.5 million when measured against the price of gold today and approximately $739.5 million gauged against wage rates in 1450) in money and goods, and almost certainly underestimated its true value.

As it diversified into superlative silks and affordable cotton, the Florentine cloth trade entered its greatest period of growth in around 1501, that is, at about the time that Salviati was throwing himself into the business with full vigor. When Michelangelo started work on the
David
, annual sales of woolen cloth and silk were worth in the region of 3 million lire and continued to rise for the greater part of the century. Even the Buonarroti family couldn’t resist the temptation to try their luck in the trade, and a few years later,
in 1514, Michelangelo provided 1,000 florins to start a family wool business headed by Buonarroto. Veritable rivers of gold flowed into the city, and it was the wealth of men like Salviati that went to pay for major civic projects like
Il Gigante
.

As he proudly proclaimed to virtually anyone who would listen, Salviati was certainly one of Florence’s richest men, riding high on the tide of commercial expansion. Yet his prosperity—and that of Florence as a whole—concealed some very ugly truths. His wealth relied on running his cloth business in such a way that appalling economic inequalities were inevitable and endemic poverty was unavoidable.

The overwhelming majority of the city’s inhabitants were colossally poor. In 1427, roughly 25 percent of the city’s total wealth was owned by 1 percent of households. Even more surprisingly, little more than 5 percent of the city’s capital was owned by the poorest 60 percent of the population.
Most people listed in the commune’s tax records actually owned nothing at all.

This was a function of how Salviati’s business worked. Like many other large-scale manufacturing industries, the cloth trade—which paid for the
David
and which
accounted for the employment of 21 percent of
the heads of all Florentine households in 1427—demanded a high level of specialization. In order to produce the cloths and silks, Salviati was obliged to break the entire process of production into a mass of small tasks, such as spinning, carding, dyeing, and weaving. Although some firms—such as
Antonio di Lando degli Albizzi’s company—managed to control most of the stages in cloth production, it was far more common that firms like Salviati’s contracted out particular tasks to smaller workshops or individuals. Specialized workshops tended to operate out of cramped, rented premises—often part of a house in which one of the partners lived—clustered in particular quarters of the city.
Individual artisans, such as weavers or spinners, almost always worked from home.

The “putting-out” system, as this is known, was commercially versatile and responsive. Salviati could react to fluctuating circumstances in an instant by changing whom he contracted to work on specific aspects of production, without risking the profitability of his venture as a whole. But by the system’s very nature, Salviati had dozens of workshops and artisans at his mercy. His word was law, and he could make or break hundreds of individuals in a heartbeat. At the very least, it was in his interests to keep the people in his employ as poor as possible, and he had the bargaining power to ensure that he would always pay the lowest rates. In this, he was certainly not untypical.
Niccolò Strozzi and
Giovanni di Credi, for example, ran a highly successful cloth workshop together between 1386 and 1390, and the bulk of their costs went toward paying their various subcontractors on a piecework basis. The disparity in wages was huge. The carder Fruosino and the German weavers Anichino and Gherardo of Cologne were paid well, even handsomely, but others were not so lucky. Worse paid even than Giovanni di Neri, the shop boy, and Antonio di Bonsignore, an apprentice, were the twenty or so women who worked from home as spinners. But even here there seems little evidence of fairness. Whereas a certain Margherita received 2 lire for ten pounds of spun wool, Nicolosa was paid 2 lire 13 soldi for forty-three pounds. We can only guess at the reasons for this arbitrary behavior, but it does at least illustrate how piecework laborers—especially
women, who accounted for a growing percentage of the cloth workforce—were entirely at the mercy of their employers.

Yet however frightening Salviati’s phenomenal power over his employees may have been, cloth workers of all stripes were still at the better end of the scale. In 1344, two carpenters wrote to a friend
in Avignon asking for work because “
the condition of the artisans and lower classes in Florence today is miserable, for they can earn nothing.” Although this was written at a particularly low moment in the labor market’s history, the sentiment was not untypical of the position of both skilled and unskilled laborers more generally. Many of those with whom
Michelangelo was most closely acquainted—and whom he actually employed—were at the very bottom of the economic pile in Renaissance Florence. Michelangelo’s stone-carver friends
Topolino and
Michele di Piero Pippo were skilled artisans, and most likely worked for cash for between ten and twelve hours a day, five days a week, but their
wages consistently failed to keep pace with prices. For semiskilled or unskilled construction workers—such as
the laborers known as “Stumpy” and “Knobby” whom Michelangelo employed on work at San Lorenzo years later—the situation was worse. They were generally employed either on an entirely piecework basis or on a day-by-day basis and were always paid worse in winter. Even in summer, construction workers’ wages were so low that modern historians use them as a measure of poverty in Renaissance Florence.

J
ACOPO
S
ALVIATI
: S
TRUCTURING
I
NEQUALITY

What made Jacopo Salviati so powerful a member of Florentine society and so important to the creation of the
David
, however, was not merely his wealth but his dominant position within the city’s guilds (
arti
). The
operai
who commissioned Michelangelo to carve
Il Gigante
were, after all, drawn from the wool guild—the
Arte della Lana—and their responsibility for this most important of projects reflects the broader importance of both guilds and their members to urban society. It was the guilds that were the real puppet masters of the Florentine economy, and having served as the prior of the entire guild system (that is, its representative in government) in 1499, Salviati was, in a sense, the master of them all.

The Arte della Lana was just one of Florence’s twenty-one guilds. At its most basic, the guild was a highly exclusive self-preservation society for tradesmen. Within a particular trade, the guild regulated standards of workmanship, proficiency, and training and represented the interests of its members to the commune. But it was also much more than this. Possessed of wide-ranging powers, the guild performed a variety
of other functions, including crisis management, arbitration, and discipline. In the event of a slump, it could limit the output of particular workshops or move the labor force around to avoid unnecessary disruptions. Similarly, if a quarrel arose between members, or between a member and someone outside, the guild could step in as a mediator. Perhaps most important, the guilds’ emphasis on standards meant that a large proportion of their energies were spent ensuring obedience to regulations. Those who dared to pay their laborers too much or whose work was of an inadequate quality would find themselves prosecuted.

Florence’s twenty-one guilds covered virtually every aspect of skilled or specialized trade. There were guilds for butchers (Beccai), bakers (Fornai), woodworkers and furniture makers (Legnaioli), lawyers and notaries (Giudici e Notai), stoneworkers, carpenters, and brick makers (Maestri di Pietra e Legname), traders in leather, skins, and fur (Vaiai e Pellicciai), and blacksmiths and toolmakers (Fabbri).

Not all of the guilds were, however, equal. The guilds were divided into fourteen “minor” and seven “major” guilds. The reasons for this were principally political, but the division reflected the comparative importance attributed to different trades within the Florentine economy. Those for local bankers (Cambio), international merchants (Calimala), and silk workers (Seta; Por Santa Maria) were, for example, accorded a higher status than those for hostelers (Albergatori) or locksmiths (Chiavaioli).

The highly exclusive and rigidly hierarchical
Arte della Lana—the wool guild—was by far the most important and influential of all the Florentine guilds, and its activities are emblematic of the kind of business environment within which Michelangelo undertook his commission.

Insofar as it regulated the activities of the Florentine wool industry, the Arte della Lana was largely responsible for ensuring that the city remained at the absolute pinnacle of the European cloth trade. With its headquarters (the imposing Palazzo dell’Arte della Lana) opposite Orsanmichele and a stone’s throw from the Piazza della Signoria, the guild was dominated by the wealthiest manufacturers in Florence and persistently strove to prioritize their concerns. Humbler workers, such as fullers, stretchers, and carders, were consistently excluded from the ranks of the Arte della Lana and were precluded from forming their own trade organization. As a result, they were at the mercy of the merchants and were in constant tension with the guild.

For those whose roles gave them some limited economic clout, strike action was always a possibility when conditions proved particularly difficult, and in 1370 the dyers used this as a means of demanding higher prices for colored cloths. But for the more menial laborers whose work involved only a limited amount of specialized skills and who possessed almost no economic leverage, the options were more limited. Beaters (who used willow branches to beat impurities out of recently washed raw wool and to help disentangle the fibers) and carders (who used flat combs to separate woolen fibers ready for spinning), for example, were crucial to the production of woolen cloth but were paid the bare minimum and constantly hovered on the threshold of destitution, especially when times were tough. Despite numbering around fifteen thousand in the 1370s and 1380s, these occupants of the lowest rung on the economic ladder—known as the
popolo minuto
—were categorically denied the chance to form the organizations that would have allowed them to bargain collectively and lacked the weight to have any effect in small numbers.

The persistent inequalities of the guild system were a recipe for conflict, especially in the wool industry. Early signs began to appear in the mid-fourteenth century, when the depletion of the population contrived to empower the dispossessed. In 1345, a certain
Ciuto Brandini was convicted of organizing a guild for the
popolo minuto
of the wool industry. As the court records reported,

Together with many others who were seduced by him, he planned to organize an association … of carders, combers, and other laborers in the woolen cloth industry, in the largest number possible. In order that they might have the means to congregate and to elect consuls and leaders of their association … he organized meetings on several occasions and on various days of many persons of lowly condition. And among other things done in these meetings, Ciuto ordered that there should be a collection of money from those who attended these assemblies … so that they would be stronger and more durable.

Manifestly designed for collective bargaining, Ciuto’s organization seems comparatively harmless to modern eyes. But to contemporary
merchants, it was anathema. Ciuto’s proto-guild was denigrated by the court as “wicked” and its objectives decried as aiming at committing “
outrages … [against] those citizens of good condition who wished to prevent Ciuto … from accomplishing those objectives.” For “outrages” read “reasonable pay,” and for “citizens of good condition” read “greedy merchants.”

This was just a taste of things to come. In the summer of 1378, these lingering resentments burst forth into new mutiny in the
Ciompi Revolt. Still angry at being excluded from the guilds and distressed by the apparent impotence of civic government, the
popolo minuto
met in much the same way as in 1345 and drew up a list of grievances that they presented to the priors on July 21. Although the demands included clauses relating to debt and forced loans, the principal clauses sought to establish a separate guild for the “
combers, carders, trimmers, washers, and other cloth workers” who had until that point been under the thumb of the
Arte della Lana. Their demands were summarily dismissed by the priors.

Furious, the
popolo minuto
stormed the Palazzo Vecchio. There, they “threw out and burned … every document which they found” and refused to budge. The next morning, they elected
Michele di Lando, “
a wool-comber … who sold provisions to the prisoners in the Stinche,” as the
gonfaloniere di giustizia
and began electing a completely new set of priors from their own ranks. After the bells were rung in jubilation, the freshly installed
Signoria immediately set about enacting
an even more dramatic reorganization of the guild structure than they had originally demanded.

Despite attracting support from some other quarters, it was a popular government, and in more ways than one it was truly revolutionary. But it couldn’t last. The collective bargaining power of Michele di Lando’s new guilds was simply not up to resisting the accumulated
wealth of the Florentine merchant elite. Members of the Arte della Lana ceased trading, thus preventing Ciompi from the wool industry from earning their bread and butter. The coalition of interests that had underpinned the revolt shattered. A last-ditch effort was made by the Ciompi, but that too was smashed by the assembled might of bankers, merchants, and artisans in a violent pitched battle on August 31, 1378. The revolution was over, and the bitter inequalities of the guild system, baptized
with the tears of the dispossessed, were consecrated as a permanent feature of the Florentine economy until the
arti
were finally—and totally—reorganized by Duke Alessandro de’ Medici in 1534.