delanceyplace.com 3/4/08 - the medici family

• 0 COMMENTS

In today's excerpt - the Medici family, bankers to the pope, de facto leaders of Florence, and patrons of such Renaissance luminaries as Brunelleschi, Galileo, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. The Medici dominated Europe as its wealthiest family, until the sheer size of nation-states such as France, the shift of trade to the Atlantic and away from the eastern Mediterranean, and finally the curtailment of intellectual freedom brought on by the Counter-Reformation led to the waning of Medici power and the incresing irrelevance of the Italian city-states:

"The height of the Renaissance spirit in Florence was reached during the reign of the Medici family, whose wealth came from the famous Medici bank. ... The Medici were able to obtain the banking business of the papacy ... [and] the pope was the bankers' largest single customer in Europe, since he needed an agency for the deposit and transfer of vast church funds. Money was lent in sometimes staggering sums to kings and merchants and nobles. ...

"At that time the Medici were ... enemies of powerful houses in the ruling oligarchy. For many years, the Medici family was forced to pay outrageously high taxes, and opposition to the Medici continued to grow -- but so did their power. The outstanding manager of the bank and the architect of the political takeover of the government of Florence was Cosimo de'Medici ('the Elder' 1389-1464). After a year in exile, Cosimo returned to Florence as the effective power behind the workings of the Florentine government. ... Families who had once used the taxing power of government to lash the Medici now found themselves taxed into ruin and denied the credit essential for their commercial enterprises.

"The rule of the Medici fostered Florentine humanism. Cosimo was the patron par excellence; cultural life reached new heights under his sponsorship. ... [In one important example] under [his] patronage, Marsilio Ficino founded the Florentine Academy, an informal school of writers and artists that was devoted to the full comprehension and assimilation of the works of the [recently re-embraced] Plato. ...

"The Italian Renaissance ... did not contribute to western civilization a new paradigm for ordering man's conception of the universe or his experience, as did the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Rather it contributed a new style of life and a new educational ideal. ... The most significant achievement of the Italian Renaissance was that it ... allowed the lord or businessman to believe that his pursuit of power, status, and wealth was justified ... but at the same time it placed these private interests and individual sensibilities within the context of a universal and political order and directed them to social needs. This was no mean achievement: Indeed this balance -- tense or even awkward as it may often be -- is fundamental to modern life, and is why the Italian Renaissance may rightly be regarded as the dawn of the modern world."