As a banker, Cosimo was quite as astute as his father; and under his direction the family business continued to expand. Noted for his brilliance as an organizer, for his astonishingly retentive memory, and for a tireless industry that sometimes kept him working all through the night, Cosimo was also well known for the unquestioning loyalty he demanded and obtained from his branch managers who, wisely chosen and closely supervised, were expected to remit to Florence regular and lengthy reports of their activities and who received, in return, a generous share of profits. Finding his father’s associates, the Bardi, too old-fashioned in their methods, he took in as partners two brilliant young men, Antonio di Messer Francesco Salutati, manager of the Rome branch, and Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci, manager at Geneva. And with their help the business grew more rapidly than ever until the trade mark of the Medici bank –
– the bank’s motto, ‘Col Nome di Dio e di Bona Ventura,’ and Medici representatives could be found in almost every important capital and commercial centre in Europe: London, Naples, Cologne, Geneva, Lyons, Bâle, Avignon, Bruges, Antwerp, Lübeck, Ancona, Bologna, Rome, Pisa and Venice. Some branches of the bank were quite small; others were no more than temporary establishments, catering for the trade of some passing fair or council. None of them had a large staff. In 1470 the average number of men employed at the various branches was between nine and ten, cashiers being paid about forty florins a year, apprentices twenty. Even so, many of the Medici establishments were amongst the largest commercial enterprises in their respective cities, and their managers, as well as being astute men of business, were also political agents of the Florentine Republic. The branch in Milan, for example, was a kind of ministry of finance housed in a palazzo made available to the bank by the Duke, Francesco Sforza, and greatly enlarged at Cosimo’s expense to the designs of Michelozzo. The branch in Rome, which followed the peregrinations of the Curia, enjoyed a comparable prestige and was even more profitable. As Cosimo’s father had cultivated Baldassare Cossa, the future Pope John XXIII, so Cosimo himself had cultivated Tommaso Parentucelli, the Tuscan doctor’s son who became Bishop of Bologna and finally Pope Nicholas V. Parentucelli, who as a young man had been forced by poverty to leave the University of Bologna and to accept work as tutor in Florence to the children of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi, had distinguished himself at the Council of Florence after which he had given invaluable advice to Cosimo on the development of the Medici library. A friendly, witty man of great learning, of whom his friend and fellow humanist, Aeneas Silvius de’ Piccolomini, used to say, ‘What he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge’, Parentucelli had seemed to Cosimo a man worth backing. He had appreciated his orderly mind, his discreet yet purposeful manner; and when asked for a loan he had had no hesitation in granting the Bishop all that was required. On the Bishop’s becoming Pope, these close links with the Medici bank had been maintained to their mutual advantage. Nicholas V’s friend Piccolomini, who was elected Pope in 1458 and chose the title Pius II, kept up the papal tradition of friendship with the Medici and continued to entrust them with the Curia’s financial affairs. When he came to Florence in 1469 he stayed as a matter of course at the Palazzo Medici, where he and Cosimo seem to have become quite intimate. When bidding him good-bye, Cosimo
tried to kiss the Pope’s foot, but because he was crippled with gout was unable to bend. He laughed and said, ‘Two Florentines named Papa and Lupo returning from the country met in the Piazza and offered each other their hands and a kiss. But they were both very fat and there was such corporosity (if I may use that word) on both sides that they could only touch their stomachs. Gout now denies me what corpulence refused them.’
As well as undertaking all the customary services of a bank, the Medici houses undertook all manner of commissions for their customers, supplying tapestries, sacred relics, horses and slaves, painted panels from the fairs at Antwerp, choir boys from Douai and Cambrai for the choir of St John in Lateran, and even, on one occasion, a giraffe. They were also importers and exporters of all manner of spices, of silk and wool and cloth. They dealt in pepper and sugar, olive oil, citrus fruits, almonds, furs, brocades, dyes, jewellery, and above all, in alum, a transparent mineral salt essential to the manufacture of fast, vivid dyes and widely used in glass-making and tanning. Up till 1460 nearly all European supplies of alum came from Asia Minor, the most productive mines near Smyrna being controlled by the Genoese until 1455 and thereafter by the Turks. But in 1460 huge new deposits were discovered at Tolfa near Civitavecchia in the Papal States, where thousands of tons of alum had been deposited by vapours emitted from extinct volcanoes. No commercial concern was better placed than the Medici to exploit this valuable find. So, in 1466 the bank signed an agreement with the Pope which gave them and their partners in the Societas Aluminum the right to work these enormously profitable mines and to sell their products abroad.
Some years later the French historian, Philippe de Commines, described the bank not merely as the most profitable organization in Europe but as the greatest commercial house that there had ever been anywhere. ‘The Medici name gave their servants and agents so much credit,’ Commines wrote, ‘that what I have seen in Flanders and England almost passes belief.’
VII
ARTISTS AND MOURNERS
‘Too large a house now for so small a family’
ON PASSING through the archway in the Via Larga, the visitor to the Medici Palace entered a charming and graceful inner courtyard, a square, arcaded cortile with pillars supporting a sweep of arches above which were eight marble medallions, several of them copies of cameos and the reverse side of medals in the Medici collection. Under the arcades were classical busts, statues, columns, inscriptions and Roman sarcophagi including the fourth-century stone coffin used for Cosimo’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s cousin, Guccio de’ Medici, who had been Gonfaloniere in 1299. Perhaps there already, and certainly there later, were Donatello’s bronze statue of David1 and his Judith Slaying Holofemes.2
Donatello was born in Florence in 1386, the son of Niccolo di Betto Bardi, a merchant who had been ruined by his support of the Albizzi. Like Ghiberti he had been trained as a goldsmith and had worked for a time in Ghiberti’s studio, but rather than work on the Baptistery doors he had left with Brunelleschi for Rome where he studied classical art while working in a goldsmith’s shop. On his return to Florence he turned his hand to all manner of work, as happy to execute a coat-of-arms for a chimney-piece, or a small bronze panel in low relief, as he was to carve a big marble figure. He received commissions for work in the Cathedral, in Giotto’s campanile, in Orsanmichele and in the Basilica of San Lorenzo where he later designed the bronze pulpits. But although his works were much admired – his marble St George at Orsanmichele, in particular, was recognized as a masterpiece – it was not until his bronze David was completed that his genius and originality were fully understood. His other statues, like all statues of his time, had been made to occupy a particular position in a building as an architectural motif or ornamentation, whereas the David was not only an astonishingly beautiful and emotive work of art, it was also a remarkable innovation, the first free-standing figure cast in bronze since classical times.