Gozzoli’s Adoration of the Magi (detail). Only in this fresco, painted around three walls of the tiny chapel in the heart of his great palazzo, did Cosimo at last allow himself to be depicted in a biblical scene. Typically unobtrusive, he wears black and rides a mule, while to his left (our right), son Piero is rather more magnificent on a white horse.
Cosimo’s extension of his Church patronage beyond his own neighborhood and eventually all over town, the numerous depictions of Saints Cosma and Damiano, the raising of the Medici arms, the red balls on a golden field, in one sacred place after another — all this has been read, rightly no doubt, as the symbolism of political ambition. Certainly it caused resentment among those who felt their territory had been invaded, those exiles who lost their family chapels to members of the Medici clan.
The slow seeping of the sensual into sacred art, the more and more accurate depiction of the human form and the contemporary secular space, the growing physical beauty of the Madonna, the awareness of her breasts, her nipples even, the elegance of her long neck — all this has been understood as evidence of a new interest in everything earthly, a more positive humanist-inspired vision of our worldly lives. Rightly, no doubt. But there is more to it. There is magic.
What were the Magi if not magicians? They came to Jesus because that proximity was important to them. The gifts they brought had magical powers. Fourteen centuries later, the Florentines might be fascinated by money and material goods, but they hadn’t reached the dull point where matter is just matter, or where symbolism is merely an artistic convention whereby abstract qualities can be evoked through this or that image. No, for the people of Cosimo’s generation, a certain kind and color of dress, a particular hat, or a diamond ring still possessed powers that went beyond their being indicators of material wealth. Treated or processed in a certain way, material things could take on magical force. What was that rhinoceros horn doing in the Medici bank’s warehouse, if not waiting to be ground up in a magic potion? The bones of a dead saint were also alive with magic. Keep them close and they will work miracles. To show reverence, to encourage the miracle, you put them in an elaborate reliquary, a work of the finest craftsmanship, of Ghiberti, or Donatello. Art and magic call to each other.
But alas, saints’ bones are scarce. And rhinoceros horns even more so. When the great preacher, misogynist, and anti-Semite Bernardino di Siena died in 1444, the popular enthusiasm to possess some object that the charismatic man had touched left his poor donkey stripped of all those hairs that had rubbed the holy backside. Afterward, when the buying and selling began, how could you tell one donkey hair from another? How can you tell a real relic from a fake? The holy foreskin of our circumcised Lord is still held in one church in Italy. In 1352 the Florentine government had bought an arm of Santa Reparata from Naples, only to find it was made of wood and plaster.
But if you couldn’t find or afford the saint himself, the real thing, there was always his painted or sculpted likeness. The faithful kissed the saint’s stone feet, brushed his painted gown with theirs. They were close to him, through art. The banker Giovanni Rucellai had his tomb made in an exact likeness of the Holy Sepulchre. This mimicry could only make the passage to heaven easier. The copied image, that is, had a virtue that went beyond an aesthetic appreciation of the sensual world. It appropriated the qualities of its model. It served to create proximity to the sacred. The craftsmanship of the reliquary and the power of the relic were fused together in the fine fresco that showed, convincingly, the saints about their miracles.
Donatello’s reliquary bust of San Rossore (museum of S. Matteo, Pisa). Renaissance high art fuses with the miracle-working power of the saint’s remains.
Fortunately, Cosimo had an eye for the gifted artist, as he had a nose for the trusty bank manager. Donatello might be a sodomist, but who else could make you feel you were so close to the Divine in bas-relief? His reliquary bust of San Rossore was the man himself in bronze. Fra Filippo Lippi might be a fornicator, liar, and cheat, but how real your patron saints were when painted in pride of place either side of the pure Virgin in the Church of Santa Croce. Cosma, Cosimo. The proximity of those names had meaning (all branches of the Medici bank observed a holiday on September 27, St. Cosma’s Day). The cloak San Cosma wore in Lippi’s painting was the same crimson as Cosimo’s. He looked out at the devout viewer. The Virgin prayed for the saint, the saint for the viewer. Cosimo paid for prayers for the Florentines, prayers for his family, prayers for himself. Every day. The monks took the Medici bank’s money, lived with the paintings, and prayed. A magical community had been formed — real, virtual, metaphysical. Pay, pray. This was the early Renaissance. Pagare, pregare. Wealth, devotion, and technique reconciled in the sorcery of art. Money rehabilitated. Antonino and Cosimo could get on.
Or perhaps not. “I invoke God’s curse and mine on the introduction of possessions into this order.” The words appear on a scroll held by a saint in another of Fra Angelico’s depictions of the Virgin in San Marco, this time in a dormitory corridor where the only viewers would be the monks. Someone wasn’t happy. Cosimo had asked for the restriction on bequeathing money to the Dominican order to be lifted, but the monks were resisting. They hadn’t committed their lives to the severest of disciplines in order to grow rich. Was it right for a moneychanger to occupy such a position in their community? There was a sell-by date, it seemed, on much of what Cosimo did. Whether in the field of banking, or religious art, or politics, the magical balancing act, the expensive reconciliation of the irreconcilable, could last only so long.
IN 1438, HARD-PRESSED by the Turkish war machine, the leaders of the Eastern Church had come to Ferrara to see if they could resolve their doctrinal differences with the pope, accept his authority, and in return get help to raise the long siege of Constantinople. When Ferrara was hit by the plague, Cosimo took advantage to invite the Church leaders to Florence. Medici money brought the Orient to town, their strange clothes, their Greek manuscripts. Medici money paid for their lodgings, their food, their meeting places, as banking money today pays for so many well-meaning conferences.
Does the Holy Spirit proceed only from God the Father, as the Eastern Church maintained, or from both God the Father and God the Son, as Rome insisted? That was the issue under debate. It must have seemed child’s play to a man used to the stubborn complexities of international trade. Surely one just decided, this or that. And after months of bitter dispute, the priests did in fact agree that Rome was right. Christendom rejoiced. Cosimo had played his part in resolving the schism that was the shame of every believer. But back in Constantinople, the Greek holy men were told they had exceeded their mandate, they had conceded too much, they had merely accepted the authority of the pope. The pact broke down. Even at the expense of annihilation, the Greeks didn’t want to accept that they had got it wrong about the Holy Spirit. And if they persisted in such grave errors, Western Christendom could hardly be blamed if it left their eastern cousins alone against the mighty Turk. Even the most pious of bankers could do nothing about such determined integrity.