Filthy lucre
Michael Vestey
The historian Bettany Hughes, presenter of Amongst the Medici on Radio Four this week (Wednesday), seemed in her first programme — one of three — a bit sniffy about the Medici family and talk of the Renaissance. She said she wanted to show it wasn’t a Renaissance at all, pointing at Giorgio Vasari, the spin doctor for the later Medici, who was their main propagandist. To me, it was a remarkable period in history, when one family over roughly four generations rose from obscurity to make money from banking and sponsored some of the finest architecture and art ever seen. The dynamic of the family lasted about 100 years and it finally died out in 1737 as a result of decadence, barrenness and homosexuality, allowing Florence to become part of the disastrous Austrian empire. No wonder the people of Florence lamented the end of the Medici era.
It’s true that usury was such a sin at the end of the 14th century and, according to Dante’s Inferno, on a par with blasphemy and sodomy that the bankers feared going to hell and sought to appease God by doing good. That was the view of the novelist Tim Parks, who’s written a book about the Medici money, but with this family I think he overstates it. The two most important members of the dynasty, Cosimo ‘il vecchio’ (the old) and his grandson Lorenzo ‘the magnificent’, were extremely well educated in the period when rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics was in full swing after the Dark Ages. Parks told Hughes that interest rates of any kind were a sin, that making money without working meant going against God’s natural law. Despite this, Giovanni de’ Medici continued to build up a network of banks across Europe (including London) which Cosimo consolidated, prudently financing the Vatican for a time. While the latter might well have eased his guilty conscience, as Hughes suggested, his humanism had led to his love of art. He was a major collector of rare and forgotten Greek, Latin and Hebrew manuscripts, many of which have largely disappeared.
The Medici were also interested in power and influence, of course. Such things mattered in warring, violent 15thcentury Italy, which was run by regional or foreign families. They made sure they infiltrated the various committees governing the Florentine republic and those that were responsible for public works so that they could control the hiring of artists. Their dominance upset rival families who were forever plotting the downfall of the Medici, leading to the murder of Lorenzo’s younger brother Giuliano in the cathedral, stabbed to death by members of the Pazzi family who also wanted to take control of Florence. They and their hired thugs from Perugia (yes, it was that sort of place, I’m afraid) were thwarted and died in a hideous fashion. Life then in Italy, as in other European countries, could be brutal but look what it gave us: the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Botticelli, Brunelleschi’s Duomo, then the second largest dome in the world after the Roman Pantheon, and the greatest architectural work of the early Renaissance. In fact, breathtaking when you consider that the Romans didn’t leave a clue about how they constructed the Pantheon dome and Brunelleschi had to work it out for himself, partly by guesswork.
The Medici seem now to invite inordi nate scepticism, which seems barmy to me when you place it in the historical context. Quentin Skinner, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, thought their contribution to humanism was ‘wholly selfcentred’. Of course, much of it was selfinterest but that’s what promotes great art. Look what happened to the Roman Forum once later generations lost interest in it. It decayed, but mercifully our modern age has saved — and still is saving — what’s left and we have an idea of what the heart of the Roman Empire was like. It’s always a thrill to stand amid the ruins and experience parts of buildings that are so real in our imagination. Hughes ended her programme by saying dismissively that if the ‘Renaissance was a myth’ it was the fault of of later British writers. While it is true that young aristocrats taking part in the arduous 18th-century Grand Tours romanticised Florence, it wouldn’t have taken much exaggeration, such is the wealth of stunning art and architecture there. I suspect that Hughes can’t believe that mere money-makers, bankers, can be cultivated people; in my experience, many of them are. Having said that, I enjoyed the programme and look forward to the next two. The producer was Philip Sellars.
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