Campbell – Florence the Beautiful City
Florence the
Beautiful City
William F. Campbell
Professor Emeritus
Louisiana State University
Christian Economics Conference
Baylor University
November 10, 2002
Wealth and poverty will continue to be our guides
in Florence. The first slide is the
gold Florin, a metal alloy whose composition had always to contain a standard
amount of gold. Although a
numerical measure of wealth, it was symbolically a celebration of poverty. On
one side was represented the lily of the Virgin at the Annunciation and on the
other side, John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence.
This gave rise to a local saying: "St. John will have no
cheating." Because of its stability it became the currency of Europe.
John the Baptist’s Romanesque baptistery in the
Piazza del Duomo was constructed from about 1059-1150 has one set of doors
sculpted by Andrea Pisano with scenes from the Baptist’s life, the four
Cardinal Virtues and the Four Theological Virtues.
Another set of doors by Ghiberti contains scenes from the Bible selected
by the humanist, Lionardo Bruni.
The florin was first minted in 1252 after the first
defeat of the Ghibellines (feudal nobility and powerful merchants) by the Guelph
party (an emerging but cultured middle-class with commercial origins). They had
been pitted against each other since 1215.
Again in 1266 after the battle of Benevento, the
Florentines expelled the Ghibellines. The
Guelfs were then divided into the Black party (bankers, merchants, and artisans)
and the White party (declining nobility). Dante
(1265-1321) was part of the White party and they were also forced into exile.
The first video of Florence is to acquaint you with
the sheer beauty and magnificence of the city.
The city’s motto was “Pi˘ bello che si puÚ” (as beautiful as
possible). Although we shall see an
overview of the city, I would like to draw attention to certain landmarks.
The Cathedral, aptly named Santa Maria del Fiore,
Saint Mary of the Flowers which captures the name of Florence as well as the
beautiful images connected with Mary. The
Cathedral is also shown with the Campanile or Bell Tower of Florence.
Campanilismo, or loyalty to the
local, also characterized Florence as well as Siena.
The bell tower or campanile in this case was designed by
Giotto c. 1334. The sculptures are
said to depict “in the lower zone the life of man from his creation to the
development of civilization through the arts and sciences; and in the upper
zones the planets, which influence the virtues, the liberal arts, and the
sacraments that discipline and sanctify man.” (Francesca Flores D’Arcais, Giotto,
New York: Abbeville Press, 1995) In
short, we have a coherent order and integration of human and divine knowledge.
Another image that you will see in
this segment is a painting of the architect Brunelleschi presenting a model of
San Lorenzo to Cosimo de’ Medici. The
painting was done by Vasari in 1553 but captures the spirit of the previous
century. It was the same
Brunelleschi who put the dome on the Cathedral.
It is not insignificant that this was decided by a major competition
which was the method of choosing many of the artists for such things as the
Baptistery Doors and other monumental objects of beauty.
Furthermore the criteria and methods were not simply aesthetic but like
the Campanile involved a technological and scientific mind requiring careful
measurement. The explorations of
time, space, and the universe were part of the Florentine mind.
Competition was crucial to the
life of Florence both artistically and economically.
When they redesigned the Cathedral, to make it a fitting New
Jerusalem, they were looking to make it the biggest and best cathedral in all of
Italy. In particular, the
Florentines were in rivalry with Siena, but also drew on many of their artists
and craftsmen. The rivalry between
city-states has almost always been productive of fine art and great projects
when it did not descend into open violence.
Notice that in the case of Florence they also drew on the skills of
foreigners and immigrants which ties in with the music that I have chosen for
this video.
The music for this segment is Ne
Piu Bella di Queste composed by Heinrich Isaac who was born in the Low
Countries but moved to Italy and was the composer for the Medicis from
1484-1495. It is a song in praise
of Florence and as the liner notes states, it “reads in places like something
commissioned by the Tuscan Tourist Board.”
(An Evening at the Medici’s: Festival Music of Florence, MCA
Classics, London Pro Musica, Director, Bernard Thomas)
It also is bursting with urban pride.
The only music that would have
been more appropriate to this video would have been Antonio Pucci’s 13th
century “love lyric to commerce, ëOn the beauties of the Merchato Vecchio.'”
In a certain sense, the old market is an ironic commentary on my approach
here.
Cosimo Medici and I see the market as a social institution
and not a cold economic piece of machinery.
It cannot be solely judged as an efficiency producer, but has to be put
in the context of social and moral considerations.
“Heinrich Isaac’s two Florentine
pieces, the carnival song Ne piu bella di queste and the remarkable Palle,
palle, convey a strong sense of urban pride. As Allan Atlas noted 20 years
ago, Palle, palle is built on a transposing eight-note ostinato in the
tenor, whose melody visually symbolized the palle (balls) in the
coat-of-arms of the Medici family, Isaac’s patrons and the rulers of the
city.” (Liner notes from Canzoni e Danze
Wind Music from
Renaissance Italy, 1500-1600, Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft Archiv Produktion,
1995 #445 883-2 AH)
The best picture of Florence as a
whole as it appeared in the early Renaissance is the chain map of Florence which
captures the smallness of the city-state, its beauty, and its fortifications
against the despots of Milan, the Visconti, as well as the intended protection
against the powerful, centralized monarchies of France, the Holy Roman Empire,
and even the Papacy.
Poverty Series
Certainly no one
can quarrel with the ideal of poverty as long as it is purely voluntary.
The important question is whether the monastery doors are closed or
opened on the world, who came in and who came out.
The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were counsels of perfection;
they were also taken voluntarily. They
were chosen because men and women aimed at perfection. They were spiritual
athletes and thus had to be ascetics, i.e. persons in training to achieve their
highest goals.
In comparison to athletes, whether physical or spiritual,
most men are comparatively free. Ordinary
people do not achieve the highs and the lows of human excellence and degradation
which only asceticism can produce.
Gerald Heard has
correctly pointed out the proper balance which must exist in a society to be
well-ordered and harmonious: "This point, that each class has a specific
morality and that morality not only is peculiarly right for it but also
contributes, as separate notes in a chord, to a social, harmonious morality
covering the whole community, is so important and has up to now been so little
recognized that it needs stressing. Indeed,
we are here faced with an evolutionary development of the doctrine of the higher
and lower lives as taught in Catholicism; that there is a class which aims at
perfection and so has in exchange for certain drastic denials, certain specific
ways of living permitted to it. Beside
that class there is the main mass who are both more free and less privileged.
Certain it is that every state, sooner or later, has, in some way,
however crude, to recognize that it contains groups or strata of different
social obligation and contribution." (Gerald Heard, Man the Master,
Faber and Faber, London, 1942, p. 185)
The music for this series of
paintings is Josquin Desprez’s (c.1440-1521) Ce Pauvre/Pauper sum ego,
performed by The King’s Singers.
The video is only a minute and a half; the lyrics are:
This poor beggar of God
has neither benefice nor employment
that is valuable or helpful to him
except what he carries with him.
I am poor.
Because of the lyrics, I will start with the
Christian tradition but we shall see that this tradition had a major influence
on the secular intellectuals through the joint combination of Christianity,
Greek, and Roman exemplars.
In this video we essentially
establish the Triumph of Poverty. We
start with the first monastic, St. Antony of the desert who is seen in the first
slide as giving away his worldly wealth. He
was born of a wealthy family, but when he read the passage in the Gospels that
told the rich young ruler to give away to the poor all he had, he responded
personally to this appeal.
The second slide shows St. Antony
being tempted by material wealth. You
can barely see the pot of gold to his left.
Usually the artists show the more lurid forms of sexual temptation or
wallow in the devil imagery—consider one of my favorite artists, Hieronymous
Bosch’s version of the Temptation of Saint Antony.
St. Antony and the Gospels inspired the later
development of the Friars, both Franciscan and Dominican.
Visually one can see this in the famous frescoes of Giotto which show St.
Francis giving his cloak to the poor and renouncing all his earthly goods.
Here the hostility toward bourgeois family is patent.
St. Francis can only respond to the hand of God and not to
his earthly father. His earthly
father was a successful merchant of Assisi and as you can see from the frescoe
was very disappointed at his son’s decision to be a fool for Christ rather
than a seller of cloth.
The next slide from Giotto in the Church of
Assisi, shows the famous portrayal of St. Francis marrying Lady Poverty.
Here we see Christ marrying St. Francis and Lady Poverty looking much
like the secular conflicts engendered by Hercules at the Crossroads, poised
between Virtue and Vice.
Virtue is usually portrayed as a Poverty figure and Vice is
usually portrayed as the easy woman of luxury.
St. Francis despised money and refused to let the
brothers come into physical contact with it: "If they were paid with food
and lodging, they were to be grateful, but never were they to take money." (Philip
F. Mulhern, Dedicated Poverty (Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1973, p.
102)
It is not hard to
see how St. Francis could become the hero of the flower children of the Sixties
when one notes that St. Francis apparently was opposed to the care of the body.
He was described by a contemporary: "his habit was sordid, his
person contemptible, and his face unkempt." (Mulhern, p. 102, cf. Leff, I.
p. 62)
But, if truth be
told, there developed a great competition between the Franciscans and the
Dominicans. Part of the problem was
the Fraticelli, Spiritual Franciscans, who grew out of the apocalyptic
predictions of Joachim of Flora. He
essentially tried to secularize the religious vocation of monks to an
apocalyptic prediction of the movement of world history.
The whole world would become a giant monastery—the world of the pure
spirit unadulterated by coercion and violence.
The age of the Father (Law) was followed by the age of the Son (Grace),
and would be followed by the age of the Holy Spirit in which we would all become
like monks: no wealth, no sex, and no obedience.
The severity of
the Franciscans was moderated—not without great battles, schisms, and
heresies—by Pope Gregory IX who “set aside the Testament and the the
extent of the practical difficulties in carrying on business with the lack of
all possessions shows in the roundabout way an agent had to be appointed to
accept necessities for the Friars’ daily life." (Mulhern, p. 104; also
see Leff, Heresy in the Later
Middle
Ages Vol. I, p. 66 for a
discussion of the latter) The economists will have their day.
Also within each
order there was violent competition between what came to be called, the
Observants (the strict poverty tradition) and the Conventuals (those who
believed that poverty applied only to the individual (no private property
rights) and not to the monastic order as a whole (bequeathed wealth and
donations could lead to a very comfortable life-style).
Ironically, both our sensible Saints, Berardino and Antonino, were
Observants and not Conventuals.
There is an irony in that the two strict ascetics,
St. Bernardino and St. Antonino understood quite clearly that poverty had to be
voluntary and, even then, could be a source of pride.
They were both Observants (the former Franciscan and the
latter Dominican) which meant a stricter life than the average monk wished to
live. But at the same time they
were opposed to the Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, who demanded absolute
poverty and had an apocalyptic criticism of all worldly activity since the
millennium was soon to be on its way.
The Christian glorification of poverty was further
stimulated by the Greek and Roman humanist tradition.
We can see the Greek tradition in the slide of the Majolica
plate of the meeting between Diogenes and Alexander the Great.
There is a famous saying that “Diogenes was richer in his poverty than
Alexander in his greatness.” What this meant was that Alexander the Great
perceiving Diogenes, the Cynic, in his poverty asked what he could do for poor
Diogenes. Diogenes in his perfect
simplicity responded, “Get out of my sun.”
It was also noted that Diogenes drank from no cup but the hollow of his
hand.
Another Cynic, Crates, can be seen in the marvelous
pavement in the Siena Cathedral: Fortune
and the Allegory of the Hill of Knowledge.
The same lesson as Hercules at the Crossroads is conveyed by the fact
that Fortune has delivered the seekers after truth on the island.
They must work up the hill of knowledge through brambles and thorns.
Once they get to the top, they meet Socrates and Crates.
The latter is seen throwing out his worldly possessions.
In the next slide we see the Wheel of Fortune with
Four Philosophers. The wheel of
fortune is the way of representing the vicissitudes of worldly wealth and
fortune. Sometimes we are up and
sometimes we are down. As humans,
we don’t really have control over where we are.
But we need to make the best, spiritually, of what chance has presented
us.
My final slides on the pro-poverty
side are of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
First of all we see Dante and Petrarch in Andrea del Castagno’s frescoe,
Nine Famous Men and Women, in the Villa Carduci just outside of Florence.
These humanist links with poverty are extensive, if usually
ambiguous. For example, Dante could be baptized as either a quasi-Franciscan or
a “civic humanist” by Matteo Palmieri, Lionardo Bruni, and Manetti for his
role as a Florentine patriot in holding office and fighting in the battle of
Campaldini, the crucial battle between Florence and the city of Arezzo.
The Franciscan interpretation of
Dante can be seen in his treatment of avarice and usury.
Boccaccio dumped on Dante for marrying; according to Hans Baron,
Boccaccio considered “marriage as the greatest danger to a man of learning.”
Boccaccio claimed, "the
Florence of his own day had preserved nothing of the ëhonorable poverty’
which he admired in early Roman times." (Baron, “Franciscan
PovertyÖ”, p. 17) Although Aristotle had claimed that, "nobility is inherited wealth and
virtue," Dante found it convenient to leave out “wealth” and emphasize
“virtue.” Humanist
intellectuals of a Stoic persuasion were inclined to a Franciscan view of the
dangers and temptations of riches and avarice.
Paupertas was not restricted to religious men.
Frederick B. Pike has described a
similar movement in Latin American intellectuals.
“As the twentieth century began, Latin American
intellectuals fell under the sway of European thinkers who proclaimed the
mission of writers, painters, architects, and composers to lead humanity toward
higher stages of consciousness and to liberate the masses from the life-limiting
restraints of materialism. Jeremy
Bentham, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer passed out of vogue in Latin
America, and the new cultural heroes came to include Ernest Renan, Henri Bergson,
and a good sprinkling of gurus of esoteric cults.” (Pike, p. 435)
The combination of lapsed Catholics with humanism and spiritualism can
only remind one of the Neo-Platonic developments in Florence during the latter
half of the 15th century.
Pike described the aristocratic
ethic as “las letras dan nobleza.” Letters
or culture confers noble status; the elites, formerly clerics, are now the
secular intellectuals who will save the lower classes from the grinding
materialism of bourgeois society. Sometimes
the secular and the religious are combined in a military-clerical complex that
despised bourgeois liberalism in the name of various corporative ideals.
To “las letras” was added, “y los armas.”
The Civic Humanist understanding of Dante can be seen in
Bruni’s biography of Dante. He
compared him unfavorably with Petrarch. “Among
the stay-at-homes, who are withdrawn from human society, I have never seen one
who could count to three. A lofty
and distinguished mind does not need such fettersÖ. Standing apart from the
interchange of ideas with others is characteristic of those whose inferior minds
are incapable of understanding anything.”
(Hans Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism:
Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, Volume 1,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988,
p. 18)
In the early
stages the ideas of a not-so-voluntary poverty were held as a badge of natural
honor and virtue by the humanist intellectuals; they were shared, as Hans Baron
has argued, by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
They joined the ideals of Franciscan poverty and Stoic poverty in a
manner which denied the golden mean of the Aristotelian tradition.
The spirit of the poverty tradition left the monastery, opened all doors
before it, and attempted to take over the whole world, culminating in the
theocracy of Savonarola, as we shall see later.
How do we come to
understand these brilliant intellectual humanists?
Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary defines a "patron" as
"commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with
flattery." Those humanist intellectuals who were either excluded or
excluded themselves from being true monks or friars were dependent on such
patronage for their uncertain incomes. I
am reminded of Mike Uhlmann’s second law: "The public is quite prepared
to bite the Invisible Hand even as it is being fed by it."
Dante and
Petrarch, for example, went further than asserting that money does not buy
happiness, or that wealth can be a trap or snare that corrupts man.
It stands in the way of true happiness and virtue.
Dante redefined virtue to not include riches.
Although most
humanist intellectuals of the time had neither wealth nor a fortiori inherited
wealth, they were endowed with the sin of pride and perhaps envy, to desire the
esteem of nobility. Therefore the
only angle they had was to claim virtue. Furthermore,
they had nothing but contempt for the slovenly, boorish, and bellicose virtues
of the feudal, quasi-military regimes; nor could they admire the aggressive,
entrepreneurial skills of the urban bourgeois classes.
Ironically, many of the latter only aped the land-owning aristocracies
once they had risen to wealth; their desire was to acquire land or public
office, more permanent fixtures of honor than mere wealth.
Petrarch (1304-1374) was opposed
to riches, marriage, and family. Living
in seclusion, he would usually come out to help out tyrants and revolutionaries,
but not those of free republics like his native Florence.
He refused to assume the Rectorship of the Florentine studio or
university when it was offered to him.
Petrarch has been
described in a way that almost seems to make him a carbon copy of the modern
intellectual. Von Martin argues
that the humanist bourgeois was replaced by the humanist litterateur whose
political attitude "was given to illusions and opportunism.
Even this was already foreshadowed by Petrarca, whose republicanism and
democratic opinions were but the outcome of his admiration for Rome, whose
enthusiasm could be fired by a fantastic figure like Rienzi or the long-dead
ideal of a universal monarchy (this at the time when Charles IV’s Italian
expedition brought this idea within the scope of his experience). His remoteness
from reality made him incapable of penetrating to the sober nucleus of things.
Such an achievement was impossible to him on account of his self-willed
isolation, and this same isolation made him regard everything which was too
firmly rooted in the soil of reality, everything which was alien to his purely
intellectual, i.e. self-created ideals, as banal and too ëbourgeois’.
The man of genius or the man who believed himself to be a genius wanted
to emphasize the distance that separated him from the ordinary man.
He stressed the freedom of his personality by standing aside from all
bourgeois ties and by maintaining his freedom in face of professional life, the
state or the family. He never
committed himself, never made final decisions but kept an eye on all
possibilities, a-socially and even anti-socially preserving his aestheticism.
From the excessive glare of a rational civilization the
romantic humanist retired into the twilight of a purely literary and imaginary
world; he sought a distant dream world in the remote past in which he could give
free rein to his wish-dreams. Because
he was dissatisfied with his own times, as Petrarca explicitly admitted, he
sought refuge in an idealized past, access to which was denied to the mass of
the people. That was his way of
cutting himself off from his day; unlike the revolutionary intellectual who
seeks refuge in a Utopia of the future, he was the reactionary type, a laudator
temporis acti cut off from reality and from life."
Von Martin describes it as a "humanist anachoretism" (anachoretism
means the flight to the desert) to distinguish it from the medieval hermitism
which had a definite function in the corpus mysticum. He points out that
Petrarca thinks of the rustic life as a "change and recreation" but
actually regarded the "peasants as the ëdregs of humanity’."
Characteristic of his distrust of
wealth was in his Letter to Posterity written near the end of his life in
1372:
My parents were honourable folk, Florentine in their
origin, of medium fortune, or, I may as well admit it, in a condition verging
upon poverty. They had been expelled from their native city, and consequently I
was born in exile. I have always possessed an extreme contempt for wealth; not
that riches are not desirable in themselves, but because I hate the anxiety and
care which are invariably associated with them. I certainly do not long to be
able to give gorgeous banquets. So-called convivials which are but vulgar bouts,
sinning against sobriety and good manners, have always been repugnant to me. I
have ever felt that it was irksome and profitless to invite others to such
affairs, and not less so to be bidden to them myself. On the other hand, the
pleasure of dining with one’s friends is so great that nothing has ever given me
more delight than their unexpected arrival, nor have I ever willingly sat down
to table without a companion. Nothing displeases me more than display, for not
only is it bad in itself, and opposed to humility, but it is troublesome and
distracting.
Girolamo Savonarola (1452-May
28, 1498)
The music, F. Cioni’s Viva
Christo e chi, only a minute in length, captures the spirit of the
revolutionary Savonarola drawing on the support of his army of children, the
fancuilli, who would sing this kind of song in their processions through the
streets and houses of Florence as they gathered the materials for their
“bonfire of the vanities.” The
lyrics in English are:
Long live Christ and he who believes.
Arise, Florence, to the task,
because Jesus wants to crown
those who will die for this faith.
I feel myself melt,
When I look at my Lord
who was born and dies for us,
only to make us heir to heaven.
O Jesus, what do you desire
from Florence, so full of love?
Come by grace a little into her heart,
make known to her your promises.
Savonarola fomented and guided the
revolution in 1494 which kicked out the Medicis with the help of Charles VIII,
the French army, and the anti-Medici Florentine patricians.
He welcomed Charles as the New Cyrus and compared his coming to the Great
Flood. Savonarola was a man of
great paradoxes: absolute poverty on the one hand, but absolute riches and
prosperity—once the revolution and purification had occurred. Like
all communists and millenarians he never revealed the details of his new order.
But he was assured that “good government involves angelic inspiration
and leads to a heavenly city with the probability of a worldwide empire guided
by Christ.”
(RenÈe Neu Watkins, Humanism and Liberty: Writings on
Freedom Fifteenth-Century Florence, Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1978).
Another irony of Savonarola is that his vision
included references to the idea that “Florence will be more rich, more
powerful, and glorious than everÖif by flagellation your king reveals it to
you now, know that in a short time you will be liberated.”
(Macey, p. 68)
Compare for example the lyrics of song number 6 on the Macey
CD with song number 8 which we can describe as going “crazy for Jesus.”
The theme in the latter is anti-wealth, the topsy-turvy world of the
Christian against the secular world of his and most times.
He came as a prophet to Florence in the tradition
of Amos and Jeremiah, and suffered the usual wages of a prophet: summarily
hanged on May 28 along with two of his fellow Dominicans.
Ironically for Savonarola with his bonfires of the vanities,
they were then burned at the stake and their ashes thrown into the Arno River.
The similarities to the Ayatolla’s of the world are worth noting.
Another major theme song was Ecce
quam bonum (2:27, number 15 on the CD by L. Bettini (1489-1527), one of the
fanciulli who never got over the experience like the Woodstock generation in
America). Here again the emphasis
is on unity and community: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for
brethren to dwell together in unity.” Ironically,
stanza 21 reads in English:
I want nothing other than fire,
which today we ask for,
so that it burns us in this place,
so that not one of us doesn’t feel it,
while we sing this dance: Behold how goodÖ
The hostility generated by Savonarola was not just
from the “secular” side but also the religious side.
The Franciscans and the Dominicans were to duke it out at a
trial by fire in 1498 but the rains prevailed and it never took place.
Another irony of history is that
after Savonarola’s death one could hear this song sung two different places in
Florence: first of all as an underground effort by the friars of San Marco who
“performed it several times each as they marched in processions around the
cloister” (Patrick Macey, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) The second sung by persons in the reopened and
thriving brothels, celebrated another kind of unity.
Savonarola continued to live in the eyes of his
followers with something of an underground support in both music and art after
his martyrdom. Even to this day
there are those who wish to move him from the “blessed” category to the
Saint category.
Humanist
Background to the Medici
For our final video on wealth and civic humanism,
we shall go back in time to trace the kinds of “civic humanism” which
nurtured the wealth and created beauty that so angered the fiery Dominican,
Savonarola.
The artwork is based on the Adoration of the Magi
and focuses primarily on the Chapel in the Medici-Riccardi Palace in Florence.
The music is by your twentieth century Argentinean composer, Ariel
Ramirez. In his Navidad Nuestra (1964),
he included a movement, “Los Reyes Magos” (The Wise Kings). This version is
sung by JosÈ Carreras.
There is a humanist tradition
which extends from Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), Lionardo Bruni (1369-1444),
Matteo Palmieri, through Cosimo Medici (
) and reaches an extravagant height in Poggio di Bracciolini (
).
The “civic humanism” of
Florence reaches backwards to the period before Cosimo Medici.
There are many, if not most, who assert that Cosimo Medici
was the downfall rather than the apogee of classical republicanism.
He was the founder of a crypto-tyranny or despotic government while
maintaining outwardly republican forms.
Let us take a look first at
Salutati who can be seen in Masaccio’s painting of the Raising of the Son
of Theophilus in Florence. He
was Chancellor of Florence for thirty-one years after he had studied law at the
University of Bologna. He was the
first intellectual favorable to the active life, wealth, republicanism, and
marriage. He wrote De Fato et
Fortuna (1396-1397) in which he was attempted to reconcile God’s overall
Providence with the free will and responsibility of individual human beings.
Florence’s archenemy, Duke Giangaleazzo Visconti reportedly remarked
that one letter by Salutati “was worth a troop of horsemen.” (Good treatment
by Ronald G. Witt in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government
and Society, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)
The Stoic and
Franciscan contempt for riches was questioned most trenchantly by Leonardo Bruni
who translated and commented on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics for
none other than Cosimo Medici. Wealth
is the lifeblood of the city. The reason that wealth was so important was that
it made possible the life of charity. The
possession of external goods makes possible acts of charity, the greatest of
Christian virtues and the mother of all the other virtues.
Bruni’s
opinions were shared by the humanist Matteo Palmieri. Palmieri stressed the
importance of the sharing of one’s money rather than the idle hoarding of cash
balances; the virtuous man is characterized by the virtue of liberality and the
miser is the one who suffers from avarice.
The World of
the Medicis
Let us
now move to the world of the Medicis. I
am going to recount the story of the rise and fall of the Medici as a morality
play. Let us begin right in
the middle of the glorious age of Florence, the Ciompi uprising of 1378.
The Ciompi were the wool carders, one of the lower ranks of the wool
trade, not fit to be part of the Lana—the wool guild.
It was the first working-class uprising and did not go very far.
After that the Florentines defined
themselves as the party of libertas.
This was defined in terms of the resistance to the tyranny of the
Visconti, the despots of Milan. The
parallels to the American Revolution are very strong.
It was not until we declared George III a “tyrant”—no
longer a legitimate monarch, in the Declaration of Independence, that we became
a nation “dedicated to liberty.”
There have always been Italian
nationalists in the nineteenth century and Fascists in the 20th
century who were defenders of Milan and the Visconti.
On the legitimate side they admired the Florentines for
resisting the French—and one can never be opposed to that—but on the
illegitimate side, they were admired for building a strong national state.
It is, perhaps, not inappropriate that Mussolini was hung upside down in
a filling station outside of Milan.
Cosimo [slide]
represents the fullest growth of the bourgeois spirit where the Medici bank and
the city of Florence prosper. The
later Medici, including Lorenzo the Magnificent, [slide] represent the slide
into luxury and tyranny.
But from where
did the Medici rise and how did they fall?
The Medici in the 14th century were not as prominent as they became in
the 15th century. In many ways to
describe them as rent-seekers in the 14th century is to disguise open fraud,
coercion, and murder with too bland a word.
The word ërent-seeking’ should be restricted to forms of exploitation
which Adam Smith called the more orderly process of law.
Gene Brucker has described the political and coercive methods of the
earlier Medici which appeared to get them nowhere in the Florentine Republic.
The founder of the family in most histories is Giovanni de Bicci; it was
precisely he who dropped the openly political methods of gaining wealth.
According to Gene Brucker, "He withdrew as much as possible from the
turmoil of partisan strife and concentrated upon his business affairs. With his
calculated policy of modesty and restraint, he did not attract undue suspicion
or hostility from the ruling group. Moreover,
his moderation gained for him the support of a large number of citizens, who
formed the nucleus of a personal party, as distinguished from the family blocs
of the past. The fruits of
Giovanni’s prudent policy, which was a complete contrast to the turbulence and
aggressiveness of the Medici in the previous century, were reaped in full
measure by his son, Cosimo, Pater Patriae." (Gene Brucker, "The Medici
in the Fourteenth Century" Speculum, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, January,
l957, p. 26). Giovanni did manage
to secure the contract for the municipal tax business near the end of the
fourteenth century.
Let us examine
the statue of Judith and Holofernes by Donatello now in the Piazza della
Signoria, originally in the Palazzo Medici [illustration from either Donatello
or Gombrich]. This large bronze was commissioned by Cosimo and was displayed
with a Latin couplet attributed to Piero, Cosimo’s son, which warned against
the sins of Kingdoms fall through license; cities rise through virtue.
See the proud neck struck by a humble hand.
(quoted
in E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance,
London: Phaidon Press, 1966, p. 41) As we shall see later this warning to the
Republic of Florence was not heeded; the children of Cosimo did not maintain his
virtues of sobriety and restraint.
But even the
restrained Cosimo was an object of suspicion and required defense.
There are several interrelated issues which must be dealt with: his
ambition, his occupation of banker, and his conscience.
The Christian tradition of the Scholastic thinkers had been evolving on
the question of ambition, but there were still many Christians who were
skeptical of ambition.
Here we must
confront the problem of the relationship between ambition and the desire for
fame. Are these legitimate human
strivings or are they always infected with human pride and sin?
Is the "desire to better our condition" as Adam Smith would
have neutrally put it in the Wealth of Nations good or evil?
Some commentators have seen a change of view on this subject during the
Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. De
Roover inclines to the position that there was a gradual accommodation in
Scholastic thought to the problem of ambition and social mobility. He argues
that: "Although theological prejudices against trade were on the wane in
the fifteenth century, San Antonino still dealt with economic matters under the
general heading, ëConcerning Avarice’ (De Avaritia).
According to Thomas Aquinas, covetousness had consisted in seeking to
accumulate wealth for the purpose of improving one’s station in life.
However, his commentator, Thomas de Vio (1469-1534), better known as
Cardinal Cajetan, declares this to be false (Nam falsum videtur hoc esse).
If it were true, the result would be to freeze everyone in his social
condition with the result that a peasant would always remain a peasant and an
artificer always an artificer without any prospect of bettering his lot, which,
Cajetan states, is manifestly absurd. He
then advances the opinion that, without committing the sin of greed, men with
unusual ability can rise in the social scale to a rank commensurate with their
ëvirtues,’ or achievements. Cardinal
Cajetan, of course, was Italian; there was already a great deal of social
mobility in Renaissance Italy where great bankers, such as the Medici, became
rulers and the son of a peasant, like Francesco Sforza, made himself duke of
Milan. In northern Europe, social
ranks were clearly limited and the barriers insurmountable; one cannot imagine a
meteoric rise like that of Sforza or even of the Medici." (De Roover,
"The Scholastic
Attitude…", pp. 340-341)
It is not so
clear that De Roover is right about the ability to rise among the Northern
Europeans. As Strieder has pointed
out, "What the Medici later achieved–the rise from the Florentine merchant
class to be Grand Dukes of Tuscany–need not have appeared impossible to the
strong will of a Jacob Fugger."(Strieder, p. 93, and illustration of Jacob
Fugger which evidences his strong will).
These themes of
ascendancy and proper striving is one stressed both for the economic world and
also for the political world. They
are in fact so curiously intertwined for the Medicis as we already have seen.
Chancellor Bruni begins to put an even more positive light on these matters:
"The hope of winning public honors and ascending is the
same for all, provided they possess industry and natural gifts, and lead a
serious-minded and respected way of life…it is marvellous to see how powerful
this access to public office, once it is offered to a free people, proves to be
in awakening the talents of the citizens. For
where men are given the hope of attaining honour in the state, they take courage
and raise themselves to a higher plane; where they are deprived of that hope,
they grow idle and lose their strength." (Alexander Murray, Reason and
Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. 20-21)
Perhaps we can
now understand why the question of where to locate the specific sources of the
support for capitalism is still at issue. Certain
Catholic writers have exonerated Protestantism, but have not wished to condemn
the Catholic tradition as being supportive of capitalism.
Instead they find it in the secular spirit of the city states and the
power-success orientation associated with an amoral Machiavellianism.
De Roover, for example, claims that "Even Amintore Fanfani, although
Catholic exonerates Protestantism of all responsibility for the early
development of capitalism and blames instead the individualism fostered by the
Italian communes and their merchants during the Renaissance and even
before."
Aggressive the
merchants and bankers may have been. Individualistic
they do not appear to have been. The
building of cities, the importance of confraternities and guilds, the
significance of family, are all things that one does not associate with a
rampant individualism.
Let us take as an example the nature of Cosimo’s ventures
into the support of the arts.
The economic
origins of Medicean wealth were also enshrined in the early mottoes attributed
to Cosimo. The republican spirit
may have been a facade by the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, but in the days
of Cosimo it was a real thing. Machiavelli,
perhaps disdainfully in the light of his other remarks about "disarmed
prophets", meaning Jesus
Christ, also referred to Cosimo an an "uomo disarmato": a mere banker
and city boss. Cosimo had none of
the trappings of aristocracy, neither distinguished ancestors, nor claims to
military prowess. Gombrich has
brilliantly pointed out that the panegyrics
about Cosimo had to
revolve around the Arts of Peace rather than the Pleasures of Battle. The Golden
Age symbolism which descended from the Virgilian panegyrics to the peace and
prosperity of the Augustan Golden Age showered over Cosimo.
The motto, "Pax et Libertas", surely looks backward to the
ancient Roman meanings of Libertas, and its associations with classical
liberality and largesse, as well as looks forward to the commercial
republicanism which finds its highest flower in the peace and liberty of the Pax
Britannica of the 19th century.
[1465 medal of Cosimo de Medici]
Cosimo in his
pursuit of peace was also a promoter of Christian unity.
This can be seen in the fact that he helped in the financing of the
famous ecumenical Council of Florence which tried to heal the split between the
Greek and Latin churches. At that council he was impressed by the arguments of
Gemisto Pletho who lectured on Plato and the
immortality of the soul. Cosimo was
moved to commission Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato’s dialogues into Latin.
The connections between the early Medici and
liberality can be seen in the context of their symbolic devices.
Originally they had a triangle with six balls, representing gold coins.
Although this was the symbol of the banker’s guild, it may have derived
from the three balls which are the traditional symbols of pawnbrokers, deriving
from the story of Saint Nicholas.
As I pointed out earlier in our discussion of San
Bernardino, the police powers of state and local governments included the
regulation of usury and prostitution. Saint
Antonino of Florence also shows the flexibility which had to be applied to
complex matters of public policy. According
to de Roover, "Sant’Antonino seems to have had a better understanding of
this problem; in one place he aptly compares licensed pawnshops to houses of
prostitution (prostibula), which also are tolerated as the lesser of two
evils." (Two, Kress, p. 32) In other words it is one thing to say that
prostitution is an evil, or that drunkeness is an evil; it is another thing to
say that the best law is to simply outlaw it. Prudence is the final arbiter in
the formation of the public good as carried out through the treacherous
institution of laws and orders.
The prostitutes
of course had their patron saint in Mary Magdalen who as we will see later is
usually linked to St. Matthew as an obvious and notorious sinner saved by
God’s grace. All professions are
redeemable, even the world’s oldest. E.R.A.
Seligman in his fascinating book, The Social Evil, points out that
Clement VIII compelled the "public women to give a part of their earnings
to the Convent of St. Mary of Pentitence." (p. 19).
Turpe lucrum,
ill-gotten gain, was defined by Sant’Antonino as "any gain accruing from
any illicit contract or from sinful and unlawful activities prohibited by either
divine or human law or by both, such as prostitution, monopoly, gambling,
tournaments, histrionics, simony, and the like.
Ill-gotten gain usually gave rise to the restitution either
in the form of donations to charities (erogatio pauperibus) or to the person
aggrieved if he could be identified….Gains derived from prostitution, unlike
usury, were to be given to the poor" (de Roover, Two, p. 32).
The problem of
usury is very complex. But it is a
mistake to assume that the ban on usury is simply a denigration of economic
activity. In the same way as the
famous paintings of Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple cannot
be taken as a condemnation of money-changers, the ban on usury is not a
condemnation of profit or entrepreneurial activity.
In fact both of these cases can be interpreted in ways sympathetic to
entrepreneurial activity.
Reflect on the parable of the Talents.
The person given one talent buries it in the ground and it does not
multiply. All he can do when the
master asks him to give account of what he did is to argue risk aversion and
fear of what the landowner might do if he lost the money. Money is not fertile;
it is a barren metal. As the
popular saying goes, "Money doesn’t grow on trees."
Although this has been a standard part of the usury controversy for many
centuries, the parable of the talents has not been brought to bear upon the
proper interpretation of this controversy over interest.
Seeds buried in
the ground, on the other hand, reflect exactly the willingness to assume risk,
to be experimental, to have faith in the order and regularity of nature which is
necessary as a background for any rational action or scientific theory.
In the words of the Mayers’: "No scientist performs a greater act
of faith in the predictability of the operation of natural laws than the farmer
who plows a part of this year’s harvest back into the earth." (Mayer and
Mayer, 1974)
It is not until
we can seriously discuss such issues as "seed money" that the
categories of interest, capital, and usury could take the more modern forms.
The argument that money is sterile, non-productive, and in the worst
instance, associated with excrement, gave way to the idea that it could be
dynamically productive if used and circulated.
Money sitting still had a stigma to overcome.
We can see in Donatello’s telling of one of the miracles of St.
Anthony, the Miracle of the Miser’s Heart [Plate 102] that when the miser
dies, a stone is found where his heart should have been and his heart is to be
found in the dead man’s treasure chest. [also
can be seen in Bosch’s miser painting] The point is not only the obvious one
that a man’s character is found in what he loves, but also that money is found
sitting.
Hoarded money is certain money locked away and unproductive
of any good ends.
The
parable of the talents had it right: it was the attempt to achieve perfect
certainty and control which is the evil. John
Noonan’s summarization of the effects of usury teaching is signficant in this
regard: "…it encouraged risk-sharing investment and charity to the poor;
its practical success may be measured by a comparison between the conditions of
credit in medieval Europe and those in classical Greece or China or India."
(Noonan, p. 407)
Saint Nicholas by
a generous use of money saved three young respectable ladies from entering the
life of prostitution. Let us
examine the paintings which recently traveled throughout the United States as
part of the Vatican exhibition. Let us first examine the panel done by Gentile
Da Fabriano in the early 15th century.
[Plate 72a, Vatican collection] Here we see St. Nicholas on the left hand side
throwing three golden balls on to the bed.
The background is this. The
man was a respected man of the town who had fallen on hard times.
As a result he did not have enough money to supply his daughters with a
dowry which was necessary in order for them to get married.
The only prospect for them was a life of prostitution; another
interesting linkage between money-lending, usury, and prostitution.
Another treatment close to our time of 15th century Italy is the version
of St. Nicholas done by Fra Angelico for the chapel of Saint Nicholas in Perugia,
1437. [Plate 75a, Vatican Collection]
It is not by
accident that St. Nicholas becomes transmuted into Santa Claus, that one still
legitimate symbol of largesse in Western culture.
St. Nicholas represents that spirit of overflowing giving
which has no utilitarian motive, no ulterior motive, but simply an outpouring of
grace.
Is it possible to
believe that Cosimo Medici was moved by a feeling of grace and gratitude for the
good things which had come his way? Undoubtedly,
Cosimo, like all men in all times, felt guilt over the evil things that he had
done, and wished to do as much as he could to restore the balance; but when he
expressed the sentiment that the Lord should have patience with him and he would
return it all, could it not be an expression of the stewardship which flows from
gratitude rather than guilt?
One of the most
interesting of the Florentine symbols is the figure of Florentia that we can see
in a closeup of part of the portrait of Cosimo.
There is much etymological discussion over the meaning.
One of the more plausible connections is the Roman tradition of augural
names and that "Florentia" was chosen in the hopes that this
"new place would prosper and flourish, that it would flower and bear
fruit." (David G. Wilkins, "Donatello’s Lost Dovizia for the Mercato
Vecchio: Wealth and Charity as Florentine Civic Virtues" The Art
Bulletin September 1983, Vol. LXV, No. 3, p.
415) One is reminded of the motto of Glasgow, "Let Glasgow
Flourish".
The cornucopia
derives from the ancient myth of Hercules in battle with Achelous, the
river-god, over who should be able to marry Hercules’ sister, Deianira.
Achelous had a bull-like horn and could change himself into many shapes.
The battle was dramatic, loud and confusing.
In the midst of the battle Hercules broke off one of the horns of
Achelous. After the battle was over
he gave it back to Achelous, and received in return the miraculous horn of
Amalthea, the goddess of Plenty. This
latter horn, the horn of plenty, would give the one who possessed it as much
food and drink as he could consume. Such
symbolism was used for the ancient household gods known as the Lars.
The use of
cornucopias as figures of wealth and charity are also important aspects of the
famous lost statue by Donatello, the Dovizia, which stood for a long time in the
market place in Florence. The term
"dovizia" is a form of the Latin "divitiae" which meant
prosperity or wealth. A new
positive attitude toward wealth and prosperity was beginning
to be felt in Florence at that time.
Although Poggio
Bracciolini allows nobility to the citizen, he still maintains the
philosopher’s virtue, "which is sufficient unto itself as
ënobilissima’ above the ënobilis virtus’ of the citizen, the times in
which stoic poverty and self-sufficiency alone made up the philosophy of
humanism are over." (Baron, "Franciscan", p. 33)
The contrast
between St. Francis’s attitude and rejection of his family and the Medici
loyalty and allegiance to family is striking.
When Giovanni di Bicci (1360-1429) was on his deathbed he summoned his
two sons and implored them to take care of their mother.
"I commend Nannina to your care: she has been a good wife to me and
mother to you, and you must see to it that my dying does not deprive her of her
rightful place in our family, nor of the honour and respect she has always
deserved."
His first project
was a collective enterprise or as Gombrich described it, a "grand communal
scheme, the erection of statues to the patron saints of the Florentine
guilds" in 1419. The wealthy
guild of the bankers commissioned Ghiberti to do a statue of their patron saint,
St. Matthew. [Plate 54 in Gombrich] We shall deal with St. Matthew in much more
detail in the next lecture. But the
point here is that the Medici fit right into the very traditional patronage of
the communal religious life at least in their early phases.
Before exploring
his patronage in more detail let us now look at his specific profession.
Cosimo was a banker and a member of the money-changer’s guild.
Both of these were suspected because of their connections with usury
doctrines (the taking of any interest) and the canon law’s strictures against
businessmen based on the interpretation of Christ in the Gospels throwing the
money-changers out of the temple.
It is interesting
to note that the term "savings" had to be saved from the vice of
avarice. The purely passive
connotation of "hoarding" or money sitting was the negative one
condemned by the church and in art. Money
in the lock box was money not being used productively.
The resulting blurs between savings and investment which have been so
confusing in modern macro-economics stems back to this earlier condemnation of
saving when it was interpreted in purely passive terms.
The great liberation, or so it was intended, of Keynesian economics is
the return to this condemnation of saving as a purely passive act, i.e. that
income which is not spent on consumption. Keynes
in essence had to react against the changes initially introduced by Alberti
[slide] when he redefined masserizia (savings) to mean active investment in
possessions rather than passive hoarding. (cf. Daniele Bonamore, Prologomeni
all’economia politica nella lingua Italiana del Quattrocento (Bologna,
1974), linguistic analysis of Alberti)
It is also
important to note that "household" income has always been more
important than "individual" income.
Logically methodological individualism would dictate that one not talk
about collective entities like households until they have been constructed out
of the utility function of individuals. It
is signficant that the treatises which showed a more favorable attitude toward
wealth were precisely Alberti’s which was on the Family, and Francesco
Barbaro’s "Concerning Marriage" written for the wedding of
Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo in 1415. The
della Robia adaptation of Donatello’s Dovizia contains the inscription,
"Gloria et Divitie in Domo Tua", "May Honor and Wealth Be In Your
Home" (fig. 11 in Wilkins)
Poggio
Bracciolini wrote the very famous "Dialogue on Avarice."
He was very forthright in defending the accumulation of wealth.
His dialogue On Avarice was not only a defence of the natural
human desire for gain, but a virulent attack upon ëthose rough and
hypocritical parasites’ (the friars) ëwho, on the pretext of religion, and
without working or toiling, go about preaching poverty and the contempt of
riches.’ ëWe shall not build our cities,’ he said, ëwith such ghosts of
men,’ and he went on to declare that if each man were to content himself with
only producing what was necessary for his own needs, ëevery splendour, beauty
and ornament would disappear from our city; no more temples, no more monuments,
no more arts….Money is a necessary goad for the State, and men who love money
must be considered its basis and foundation.'”
William Stokes,
in a little known essay on Foreign Aid written in 1958 called the influence of
the rough and hypocritical parasites, the “Drag of the Pensadores.”
The Pensadores are the intellectual class whom he claimed neither wanted
to work nor sanctioned anyone else doing productive work, particularly manual
labor. He traced it to the cultural
complex of attitudes adopted from Spain.
It is significant to note that San
Bernardino began one of his sermons in Florence with the careful statement,
“Italy is the most intelligent country in Europe, Tuscany the most intelligent
region in Italy, and Florence the most intelligent town in TuscanyÖ.[but]
where noble gifts are allied to malice, you get the most evil men.” (Quoted in
Borsook, p. 103)
Charity and
liberality were virtues that could be compared between different city states.
Florence took pride in her charity, and it has been pointed out that in
the famous Biadaiolo manuscript (circa 1340), [slide] the poor of Siena are
"shown being driven from their hometown and subsequently welcomed and
succored by the more charitable
Florentines." (Wilkins, p. 419)
Charity is often
shown with a cornucopia spurting flames at both ends: the one end signifiying
the amor dei, the love of God, and the other end showing amor proximi,
the love of one’s neighbor.
The extreme of this syncretic
approach to non-Christian traditions is perhaps found in Pico della Mirandola.
His contacts with Elijah del Medigo in Florence led him to the study of
Hebrew and the purchase of the cabalistic Jewish mystical masterpiece, the Zohar.
He claimed that, “In the Cabala, I find what I find in Paul; in the
Cabala I hear the voice of Plato—that strong bulwark of the Christian faith.
There is in short no subject of controversy between Church and Synagogue
but finds its support for our Christian side in these booksÖ.there is no
science that can more firmly convince us of the divinity of Christ than magic
and the Cabal.” (Quoted in Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance, p.
117)
It is not always clear what he
means by “magic” but it has been suggested that it is a reference to the
wisdom of the magi than a bundle of tricks.
This would be consistent with the fact that the Procession of the Magi by
Benozzo Gozzoli perhaps contains a portrait of Elijah del Medigo in its
multi-cultural jamboree. Roth
argues that both Pico and Elijah are among the smaller figures riding in the
procession, the latter “wearing the broad-hooded headdress characteristic of
Italian Jews of the day.” (Roth, p. 115)
Unfortunately not
all the Medici were exemplary businessmen.
The sexual temptations including sodomy afflicted them as well as the
businessmen that Berardino had in mind in Siena.
De Roover points out that “Many cases are on record in the
Medici papers. The Medici
themselves (Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo) set the bad example followed by their
general managers (Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci and Francesco Sassetti) and many of
their factors (Francesco Nori and others).
A few, very few, turned away from worldly vanities and, to expiate their
faults, went into a monastery." ("Entrepreneurship", p. 343
Antal goes on to
argue that "The connection between works of art and atonement for usury is
not an uncommon one. Thus in 1315
in his will Rinuccino Pucci endowed a bone lamp to hang in front of Giotto’s
Crucifix in S. Maria Novella." (Antal, p. 213, fn 1) The same kind of
motivation has been argued for Cosimo.
We shall see
again the curious intertwining of money-changing, banking, trade, manufacturing,
and usury. The motives that have been attributed to Cosimo in particular have
been a combination of Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude.
Guilt over having made money in ways not sanctioned by the church, i.e.
usury. If this is true, then
Cosimo’s magnificence is best considered as a form of restitution of
ill-gotten gains, not much different from the prostitutes that we discussed
earlier. On this interpretation,
Cosimo’s graciousness, magnificence, and liberality is akin to that of the
modern captain of industry who gives money out of guilt.
Cosimo wrote in a letter to his son, Piero, :
"Only have patience with me, my Lord, and I shall return it all to
you." (Gombrich, p. 38) Gombrich goes on to add that "It must have
been a phrase he had heard all too often when his debtors came to ask for a
period of grace." Unfortunately, we do not have a record of Cosimo
commissioning any paintings of the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant which we
will take up in the next lecture. If
we did this might help confirm Gombrich’s gratuitous assumption that Cosimo
felt guilty both as a usurer and as a politically ambitious man.
He tells us to take with a grain of salt the account by Vespasiano of an
event which took place when the latter was only thirteen years old: "When
Cosimo had attended to the temporal affairs of his city, in which matters he was
bound to burden his conscience a good deal, as do most of those who govern
states and desire to advance beyond others, he realized that he had to turn his
thoughts to things devout if God was to forgive him and maintain him in the
possession of those temporal goods; for he knew full well that otherwise they
could not last. In this connection
it appeared to him that he had some money, I do not know from what source, which
he had not come by quite cleanly. Desirous
of lifting this weight from his shoulders, he conferred with his Holiness Pope
Eugenius IV who told him…to spend ten thousand florins
on building."
Adam Smith
observed in the Wealth of Nations that "No two characters seem more
inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign." (Book V.ii.a.7) Although
his major case in point was the East India Company, he also discusses the
debacle of Florence brought about by Lorenzo the Magnificent.
According to Smith, "Princes, however, have frequently engaged in
many other mercantile projects, and have been willing, like private persons, to
mend their fortunes by becoming adventurers in the common branches of trade.
They have scarce ever succeeded. The
profusion with which the affairs of princes are always managed, renders it
almost impossible that they should. The
agents of a prince regard the wealth of their master as inexhaustible; are
careless at what price they buy; are careless at what price they sell; are
careless at what expence they transport his goods from one place to another.
Those agents frequently live with the profusion of princes, and sometimes
too, in spite of that profusion, and by a proper method of making up their
accounts, acquire the fortunes of princes.
It was thus, as we are told by Machiavel, that the agents of Lorenzo of
Medicis, not a prince of mean abilities, carried on his trade.
The republick of Florence was several times obliged to pay the debt into
which their extravagance had involved him.
He found it convenient, accordingly, to give up the business of merchant,
the business to which his family had originally owed their fortune, and in the
latter part of his life to employ both what remained of that fortune, and the
revenue of the state to which he had the disposal, in projects and expences more
suitable to his station." (V.ii.a.6)
I wish in this
section to chronicle the movement from trader to sovereign and the corruption of
the bourgeois ethos which accompanies it.
Under Lorenzo the
Magnificent, who in effect was a classical tyrant, we find a movement toward the
privatization of art. Collections
of precious gems and cameos which were not for public display were his strong
suit. He acquired the collection of
Cardinal Bembo, afterwards Pope Paul II, which is now spread between the Museums
of Naples, Florence, and Paris. As the Medici became increasingly aristocratic
their art patronage became much more oriented toward private commissions for
luxury items. Lorenzo the
Magnificent had developed in the words of Martin Wackernagel a taste for
"pronounced luxuriousness and lavish splendor of detail".
In contrast to the civic-mindedness of Cosimo the elder who represented
an "early type of enterprising, large-scale builder, donor to pious
foundations, and cosupervisor of public projects", Lorenzo had a
"collector-connoisseur’s mentality". (Introduction to Wackernagel by
Alison Luchs, p. xvi)
Aby Warburg noted
the tendency of the Florentine merchants toward fashionable display which can be
seen to its best advantage in the painting, "The Adoration of the
Magi" by Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
As Warburg describes, "Not only the pictures the Florentine
merchants owned, but also their manner of life permits us to detect their
predilection for frenchified poses a la mode.
The sons of the old and cautious Cosimo who so disliked drawing attention
to himself, Piero and Giovanni, were already guards officers in the reserve,
though not to be sure of the martial type, but rather pleasure-loving swells,
till the time when Piero was overtaken by gout at an early age and Giovanni died
of over-eating." (E.H.
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg
Institute, 1970), p. 155) Gombrich
goes on to add, "The temptation which the fashionable display of cloth and
finery must have held for the Florentine burghers is a recurring theme in
Warburg’s notes. He even ascribed
the downfall of the Medici firm to the spell which this feudal display exerted
on their representatives in the North. Had
they not lent money so freely to Charles the Bold, they might have averted the
financial crisis caused by his downfall." (p. 157)
Cosimo is,
however, the end of the line. Symbolically
we can see the transition from liberty to luxury, from liberality to largesse,
in the newer heraldic devices adopted by the later Medici. [illustration of the
fleur-de-lis] The King of France gave Piero "the Gouty", son of Cosimo,
a fleur-de-lis on the lion of Florence. Perhaps
it is inevitable that the children who inherit adopt the ways of ease and
luxury. Lorenzo the Magnificent
lavished upon primarily himself the wealth that his grandfather had accumulated.
Where his grandfather spent it upon the city, Lorenzo spent it on antique
gems.
No matter how
hard the work ethic of the original entrepreneurs, it is extremely difficult to
transmit this spirit to the children. The
sons and daughters of the wealthy inevitably aspire to nobility and gentility,
which almost always means, no hard work. Aristocratic urges are to be satisfied
by lavish expenditure, patronage of the arts,
political aspirations, and acquisition of land.
The Court
mentality takes its toll. It also
usually results in the freezing of economic opportunity.
Economic entrepreneurialism becomes replaced by political entrepreneurial
activity or rent-seeking, as economists would put it today.
Nervous and flighty mobile property must become fixed in land.
As Strieder has observed, "We know
how strongly Machiavelli leaned to the view that only that merchant who acquired
land could ensure his permanent prosperity." (Strieder, p., 93) "It is
well known that the Florentine and other bankers of medieval Italy deliberately
tried to increase their credit and
their mercantile renown at home and abroad by the acquisition of estates as the
most concrete expression of their property and wealth and as producing the most
visible impression." (Strieder, p. 94)
The
self-destructive nature of capitalism has been noted by many different observers
from Max Weber, Schumpeter, Henri Pirenne, to such contemporary writers as
Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol.
Liberality as a
mean between avarice and prodigality is a balance extremely difficult to
maintain. Werner Sombart gets at
the heart of the matter: "As he grows richer, the bourgeois stagnates; he
becomes a rentier and lives a life of luxury."
(quoted in von Martin) Von Martin goes on: "Instead of
investing in capitalist enterprises he grows lazy and wishes for nothing more
than a comfortable life. This
change comes over Florence towards the end of the fifteenth century.
The capitalist spirit disintegrated, trailing off into complacent
rentierdom. This undermined the
spirit of enterprise and a pleasurable luxury replaced the old ëeconomic’
way of life. The zenith had been
reached and passed and the declining curve was soon to lead to the last phase.
This was the self-betrayal of the bourgeoisie in its new inclination to
courtly circles and its imitation of the seignorial
life.
One need only mention the outstanding case of the Medici,
whose business ability decreased from generation to generation.
Cosimo still showed personal strictness and the simplicity of a rising
generation, where Lorenzo lived in daily splendour.
Cosimo was an active and energetic banker, whereas Lorenzo let affairs
slide to the verge of bankrukptcy. And,
as the Medici were leaders in politics as well as business, we can follow the
same change on that side as well. Cosimo
still exercised the tactful discretion of the ëfirst citizen’, while
Lorenzo, the ëMagnificent’, liked himself in the part of a prince.
Cosimo was in all ways the servant of the state, but his successor turned
it to account for his private interests. Cosimos
regarded his respected integrity as an essential basis of his position, whilst
Lorenzo acted according to his own sweet will.
This social development was bound, on the political side, to have even
more pronounced effects upon those who did not occupy the leading
positions." (Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance, pp.
51-52)
The spirit of
calculation persisted but it became oriented toward different goals.
Avarice takes on the new political forms engendered by the desire to
preserve and protect what one has. Political
domination and the state become the tools for preservation and further
aggrandisement. Security, not
adventure, become the word of the day. As
Sombart has argued, "the spirit of enterprise decayed.
It is possible to trace its decline in Southern Italy from the end of the
15th century, elsewhere in the country from about the 16th.
The joy of acquisitiveness and the devotion to business made way for a
comfortable mode of life, partly that of the aristocrat, partly that of the man
of independent means….The same inclination towards a feudal state of society
became conspicuous in Florence. It
was spoken of as the ëSpanish way of life’; its chief characteristic was to
despise work and to seek after titles of nobility.
The change set in under the first Duke Cosimo; and he it was who made all
these young men who despised trade and industry members of the Order of Stephen.
But the Florentine wealthy classes generally strove to obtain
patents of knighthood, which were coveted so much because they alone enabled the
holders to participate in tournaments. And
just then tournaments were revived in good earnest in Florence.
With real middle-class frailty, the Florentines invented a less dangerous
kind of tournament, to which everybody was passionately devoted without being in
the least conscious of the caricature presented by the medley of middle-class
and aristocratic elements. The
first of the Medici patronized this craze with a zeal that can only be explained
by their desire to prove to the world that they, though commoners, had a court
life not one whit inferior to that of princes of the most ancient lineage."
(Sombart, pp. 133-134) The court
ideal was expressed in its fullest by Baldassare Castiglione in his book
appropriately called The Courtier which considered the knightly
attributes of courage, horsemanship, and skill at arms as requisites for the
true gentleman. It is perhaps
ironical but the nostalgia for the Middle Ages seems to begin
not in Britain in the 19th century (where it was rampant), but in the Italian
Renaissance. [portrait of
Castiglione from Horizon Renaissance, and Carpaccio’s painting of an
unknown knight, pp. 316-317]
"It was the
same in other Lombard towns; the period of the change was the beginning of the
16th century. Just as the most
cherished ideals of the middle classes who become opulent was to be dubbed
knights, so for those beneath them in the social scale, the goal most diligently
sought for was to live on their income, to live a life free from
work, if possible, in a country house of their own.
The vita temperata, the stato pacifico, were pointed to as Nirvana,
principally in the numerous books on husbandry with which extracts have already
made us familiar." (Sombart, Quintessence, pp. 133-34)
Borges in 1983 made a wise
observation that relates these phenomenon to what we often see in the culture of
Latin America. In a discussion of
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.
He perceptively pointed out that the problem of conspicuous consumption
was even worse in Argentina than in the U.S.: “Here the phenomenon of the
leisure class is even more grave. Except
for the penniless, every Argentine pretends to belong to that class.
As a boy, I knew families who, during the hot months, hid in their houses
so that people would think they were summering on some ranch or in the city of
Montevideo.” (Jorge Luis Borges, The
Total Library, p. 518)
A last ditch effort against the corruptions of
wealth and aristocracy can seen in the "charismatic fathers of republican
restoration", the followers of Savonarola who resurrected the Stoic and
Fransiscan emphasis on poverty. When
license takes effect, the
result
is usually the extreme reaction of a man like Savonarola. [medallion and slide]
One can see from his picture that he makes the moral majority look like a
pussycat. It may be argued that his attempts at restoration of the Republic on
theocratic lines (1527-1530) doomed the Republic and set the stage for an
absolutistic prince. It is
interesting that that prince took on the trappings of Augustus and the return to
the Golden Age, while trying to maintain as much of the republican forms as
possible.
Cosimo I Medici
(1519-1574), Duke of Florence and later in 1569 became the Grand Duke of Tuscany
and married in 1539, Eleanora of Toledo.
(for portrait of Eleanora and their son Giovanni de’
Medici, cf. Bronzino) He took over
the reins of power at age 18 after Duke Allesandro (1510-1537) was killed by
Lorenzino (1514-1547) as a tyrant. If Lorenzino thought himself of as a Cato
defending the old republic, then Cosimo I is best thought of an Augustus who
nostalgically remembers the old republican virtues but establishes an imperial
monarchy.
Unfortunately
Lorenzino was stabbed to death in Venice eleven years later.
Ferdinand Schevill described Cosimo I as a "tall, powerfully built
young man with a passionate love of sport of every kind, a better than average
intelligence, and a rude drive for political power…reorganized the
state…true founder of the Medicean monarchy…absolute regime…brought a
public order and security the republic had never been able to bring about…the
administrative improvement was purchased at the cost of reducing the once
high-spirited free citizens to groveling subjects receiving their laws from a
sovereign, who, indifferent to their consent, owed his authority solely to
military force." (Schevill, pp. 222-223) Cosimo I had a secretary, Gian
Francesco Lottini, who wrote him shrewd Machiavellian advice.
Although he was noted for his "somewhat unsavory character", (Kauder,
fn. 8, S&A) he managed to combine his life as a "shady politician
and gang leader of a Venetian murder ring" with being an Aristotelian
scholar.
His shrewd political advice based on Machiavelli’s Prince
was published as Avvidementi Civili.
There was another
more humane side to Cosimo I which the picture above does not capture. The
series of tapestries for the Palazzo Vecchio based on the Old Testament account
of Joseph has been traced back to the ancient philosopher Philo.
His book On Joseph which had the subtitle, "The Life of the
Statesman" stresses the theme of political leadership. (the following
account draws heavily on Graham Smith, "Cosimo I and the Joseph Tapestries
for the Palazzo Vecchio", Renaissance and Reformation, 1982, pp.
183-196) Philo stressed Joseph’s training as a shepherd as a background for
statesmanship. Joseph in his
supervision of the household of Potiphar also learned the art of controlling his
passions. In Philo’s words,
"a house is a city compressed into small dimensions, and household
management may be called a kind of state management, just as a city too is a
great house and statesmanship the household management of the general
public." (Philo, p. 161) In addition Joseph is the junior branch of his
family, like Cosimo I, and also he exemplifies the themes of forgiveness and
clemency, family affection and prudence. Bernardo Davanzatti (1529-1606) in his
1574 funeral oration compares Cosimo I to Alexander the Great for the reason
that both treated their enemies charitably.
Smith describes
Cosimo I in the following way: "Remarkably straitlaced, Cosimo I was famous
for his chastity and marital fidelity. Moreover,
as a reaction against the extreme licentiousness of Alessandro’s rule, Cosimo
framed new sumptuary laws and enforced rigorous moral standards in Florence.
It is against this contemporary background that Bronzino’s Joseph
Fleeing from the Wife of Potiphar must be understood.
Given these descriptions it is not hard to understand the accompanying
symbolism of the Augustan Age which Vasari used to describe the family
traditions.
Whether Cosimo I
paid more attention to his Machiavellian advisors or to the more traditional
themes of the Mirrors of Princes is not easy to say.
The road from
liberality to luxury is paved with magnificence.
Hercules at the Crossroads is seduced by the lady of easy
virtue and splendid appearance instead of choosing the hard, stony path.
David Herlihy in his Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia has point
out the connecton between Rhetoric and Magnificence.
The importance of being a "beautiful speaker" and a
"spender" are both themes which Aristotle stresses, but which he does
not sever from the love of wisdom or philosophy.
The evidence for the excesses to which splendid display and public
magnificence could lead is found in the sumptuary laws which many of the Italian
city-states adopted in this period. According
to Herlihy: "a magnificent presence might influence the decisions of
councils, upon which family welfare could depend.
And men who wished to represent cities and princes in high public office
had to cultivate a brilliant appearance."
The subtlety of
the path is described by Frederick Lane. The
cvic humanists, he claims, put politics first. "The re-evaluation of
politics created more sympathetic understanding of other aspects of classical
civilization. It contributed much
to a kind of self-consciousness which was less self-reliant than the
individualism of the feudal nobles or the pioneering merchants of earlier
centuries while it was more deliberate, more intellectual, and more devoted to
those skills in verbal expression and communication that enabled men to compete
and co-operate simultaneously in civic life.
The change of values
which occurred in the Italian city-states is sometimes said to have emphasized
the qualities esteemed by merchants and productive of success in trade.
It is at least equally true that they were the qualities commanding
admiration in political give-and-take, those which
Whitehead has called the qualities of persuasion." (Lane, "Roots",pp.
534-535)
The court and
courtier mentality has two sides: the rhetoric of power by those who have it,
and the rhetoric of flattery by those who do not.
Molho has claimed that the three hundred years from 1500-1800
saw the creation of courts, the fossilization of the social order and courtiers
seeking the favor of the new political masters.
In fact, the courtier was a "new type of man…intent
upon gaining the approval and sympathy of his lord, interested in refining his
manners and learning, conerned, above all, to impress his superiors and peers
(for his well-being now rested almost entirely in their hands), the courtier
dominated Italiansociety for the next three centuries." (Molho, p. 10).
One is reminded
of the acute analysis that Armando Sapori has made of the various scripts and
handwritings of the various classes in Italy.
He contrasts the legal contortions of the Notary who is trying to get
around the condemnation of usury and evade taxes to the merchant who has a
sober, clear, and incisive style. The
style of the Chancellors
expresses the dignity of the self-important man with an elegant and pompous
calligraphy.
The merchant’s
education was intelligently done because it was done by practitioners with a
no-nonsense approach to learning. Even
though it was specialized, it included a high cultural level as a part of its
desideratum. In fact, it could be
used as a model for graduate business schools even today.
Sapori describes the countinghouse or fondaco
as that "specialized, postgraduate school which he attended after he had
already completed his education in regular classrooms.
It is clear that there he learned to perform complex mathematical
calculations, even being able to compute the average maturity of several
sums due at different dates, and to discount accurately.
It is also evident that he moved effortlessly in that vast sea of
international money exchanges; that he employed a complex accounting system
which enabled him to know precisely what his costs were so that he could
determine on that basis his yields, and calculate the gains and losses each time
he closed his books. Master of the
technical instruments; sure of himself in the use of the literary language,
having served in his youth the apprenticeship in the shops of the various
large companies, the Florentine merchant of the Middle Ages rounded out his
personality by seeking contacts with the great men of the world." (Sapori,
pp. 75-76)[elaboration on the print of the German counting house]
It is too easy to
see the merchant and the rise of capitalism as simply a secularizing influence
by which men forget their spiritual life in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
It is also too easy to argue along the lines of Max Weber that this was
primarily due to the Protestant Reformation which dragged the asceticism of the
monasteries into
everyday life.
For all practical purposes the Florentine Republic
came to its effective end with the events surrounding the downfall of Savonarola.
Although the Medici were kept out until 1512 and there was a short
renewal of the Republic from 1527-1530, when the Medicis returned they returned
as Dukes. The feudal and centrally
organized nations of Spain, France, and yes, even the Papacy, overcame the
tenuousness of Republican governmental forms.
Some said that they suffered from the “Spanish disease.”
They asked for a King like all the nations and they
got one. Like Augustus, some were
better than others and some even had redeeming virtues, but that is the occasion
for another lecture. In economics
terms this meant an economic regime based on the plunder of the colonies so that
no self-respecting Spaniard would work for a living.
The machismo of the courtesans and noblemen were to be vented in
warfare, tournaments, and conquest rather than hard work, thrift, and all the
Republican virtues that had characterized the elite of Florence till that time.
Mercantilism or state
interventionism of the kind that plagues many Latin American countries starts to
rear its ugly heads. The healthy
economic and civic competition of city states is replaced by the finagling of
courts and corruption.
I wish to show
that the order and regularity of the monastic life were important parts of the
self-understanding of the businessman, but that the phenomenon occurred earlier
than the Reformation. The primacy
of the family and of business life were both understood in the light of the
secularization or de-sacralization of these phenomena.
But
the process of secularization should not be understood as either paganism,
anti-religious in spirit, or atheistic. It
simply means concerned with the things of this world and man’s temporal life
as contrasted to eternity. Nor is
this an unbridgeable gulf. Stewardship
which is theomimetic, or God imitating, is the proper model for man to follow.
Jacques Le Goff
has contrasted the medieval doctrine of "Time is a gift of God and
therefore cannot be sold" to the merchant’s preoccupation with time. He
argues that the "taboo of time with which the Middle Ages had confronted
the merchant was lifted at the dawn of the Renaissance. The time which used to
belong to God alone was thereafter
the property of man." He
quotes from Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia: Gianozzo:
There are three things which man may say properly belong to him: his
fortune, his body–Lionardo: And
what might the third be? Gianozzo: Ah! a very precious thing indeed! Even these
hands and these eyes are not so much my own. Lionardo: Incredible! What is it?
Gianozzo: Time, my dear Lionardo, time, my children.
But here we
arrive at a crucial point which is a correct understanding of property rights.
What belongs to man and what belongs to God; what is given to man to
order and regulate under the model of stewardship?
It is the differing answers to these questions which distinguish
libertarian affirmations of property rights from Christian, the sanctity of
voluntary contract and the types of constitutionalism constructed on it in the
public choice literature, from the models of covenant and compact.
These are the crux issues of the bicentennial celebration of the
Constitution. Forrest McDonald has
made the essential point: "…when the Framers of the Constitution said
that the protection of property was a (or the) fundamental purpose for
submitting to the authority of government, they understood that the word
property had more meanings than one. In
its older and more general sense it was related to the word proper, derived from
the Latin proprius, meaning particular to, or appropriate to, an individual
person."(p. 10, Novus Ordo Seclorum) He also argues that "by
the late eighteenth century property had come to be related to the idea of
dominion, derived from the Latin dominus, meaning lordship, and
ultimately from domus, meaning house."(p. 11)
McDonald then goes on to quote Blackstone’s definition: "that sole
and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external
things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in
the universe." McDonald then adds that the common lawyers were curiously unwilling
to recognize the fact of the Norman Conquest" (p. 11).
Perhaps the
answer is that the common law and the American traditions founded on that law
are unwilling to recognize the sovereignty of the human.
They reject the model of sovereignty which depends on arbitrary and
despotic will. God is not an arbitrary tyrant as the pro-Promethean forces would
have it. Man can therefore not be
construed as a mini-tyrant, an arbitrary affirmer of his rights without the
context of obligations and duties which accompany property rights.
Blackstone’s definition therefore must be taken in the context of the
rules of the police power to preserve civility and propriety as the proper
functions of government.
Bertrand de
Jouvenel has laid down a charge to modern society on much the same grounds:
"We can and we must spell out public policies for the control of all those
forms of pollution with which we are debasing our environment and for the
creation of harmonious cities, but we shall not achieve very impressive results
unless education at the
very earliest stage breathes into our conscience reverence for the earth’s
bounty, on which we depend, and regard for beauty as Man’s only lasting
achievement.
Surely the United
States as the richest country of our world, should take the lead.
When Italy held this position, in the late Middle Ages and during the
Renaissance, it gave the world what is still our richest patrimony.
Is it not time for her heirs to emulate her?" ("The Stewardship
of the Earth" in The Fitness of Man’s Environment (New York:
Harper Colophon Books, 1970, p. 117.)