How Did Florence Make Money During The Renaissance

In a time when the actions of bankers and hedge fund managers fuel instability non only in fiscal markets but as well in the market for advanced art, many in the art world complain bitterly of the invasion of their sacred domain past these crass and unworthy coin-lenders. These fragile souls should all be required immediately to travel to Florence, to encounter an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi titled "Money and Beauty." In that location they would acquire that non only is the connection between fine art and money non a recent development, but that the growth of the modern banking system was closely linked with bones innovations in our creative heritage in Renaissance Florence.

In the catalogue for "Money and Beauty," the chairman of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, observes that "the events of recent years, including the nearly collapse of the banking system in 2008 -- due in part to innovative and mayhap overly risky financial assets -- brand an exhibition on the birth of banking and financial speculation specially timely." A monetary economist who is a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, Bini Smaghi is in a position to understand how true this is. Among the exhibition's many specific lessons for us is that the word risk is derived from a Tuscan term, rischio, which allowed bankers to receive a render on their loans that would non be considered interest, and consequently would not violate the Christian ban on usury. Thus centuries before Occupy Wall Street, a central term in the economic assay of markets emerged from an early disharmonism between the realities of market place transactions and a powerful prevailing system of morality.

More broadly, what "Coin and Beauty" demonstrates is the diversity and complexity of the interrelationships between art and money in the Renaissance. The prosperity of Florence rested in significant function of the urban center's creation of the gilt florin in 1252. This new coin replaced the much less valuable silvery coins that dated from the time of Charlemagne, and the florin's timeliness was witnessed by its rapid spread throughout Europe. And equally information technology spread, it carried with it the message that Florence was an innovator in coin and banking. Florentines were soon hired to oversee mints and mines in many fiscal centers, and Florentine banks established operations in many of these. At home in Florence, merchant bankers dominated the local economy, and culture. They busy churches with beautiful paintings and sculptures, and when they had filled the churches, they decorated their own homes; when these were filled, they built magnificent palazzos that covered whole city blocks, and filled them with art.

Fra Angelico, St. Nicholas with the Emperor's Envoy and the Miraculous Rescue of a Sailing Vessel, between 1437 and 1449, tempera and gold on panel, 34 10 63.five cm, State of the vatican city, Musei Vaticani, inv. 40252

Artists made images that served their patrons in many means. They painted the Madonna and Child for their patrons' chapels, and portraits of their patrons in luxurious gowns. They also painted allegorical scenes in which bankers and money-lenders practiced their trades, and episodes in which merchants benefited from divine intervention. Florentine merchant-bankers publicly demonstrated their vast wealth and swell piety through the big and elaborate canvases they commissioned, and oft through the ornate gilded frames they had made for them, and they demonstrated their refinement and exquisite taste past employing master artists who were known throughout Italia for their genius.

Visitors to Florence could only marvel at the results. In 1459, the son of the Duke of Milan was amazed by what he saw at the Palazzo Medici -- "the decorative tapestries, the chests of inestimable adroitness and value, the masterful sculptures, the infinitely varied patterns and silverwork" -- and he neglected to mention the greatest treasures of all, paintings by such masters equally Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. The young Galeazzo Sforza was no more perceptive in his analysis of the source of these works, every bit he concluded that "money lonely" could non compete with these achievements. Withal in fact Tim Parks, the co-curator of "Coin and Beauty," writes that everything Sforza saw "had all been bought with money, everything depended on the fiscal clout of a major bank." In general, adds co-curator Ludovica Sebregondi, "Patronage is the link that brings fine art and the economic system together."

The specific furnishings of patronage are spectacularly illustrated in this exhibition, which offers beauty as well equally enlightenment. Amongst the visual highlights is an altarpiece by Fra Angelico that depicts St. Nicholas rescuing a sailing vessel. The painting's abstruse forms and subtle colors suggest a clear link between the mid-15th century and early on Surrealism. The exhibition features a number of paintings past Botticelli, including a superb Venus that isolates the central figure from the famous Uffizi Birth of Venus, highlighted dramatically against a dark background.

Sandro Botticelli workshop, Venus, after 1482, oil on canvas, 174 10 77 cm, Turin, Galleria Sabauda, inv. 656

Clement Greenberg famously wrote that avant-garde art has always been attached to society's ruling class by a golden umbilical cord, and "Money and Beauty" emphatically demonstrates that this was true during a key period in which both art and finance were being created in their modern forms. It thus decisively dispels romantic merely mistaken myths that money somehow damages the purity of fine art. I leave the terminal words on this to Ludovica Sebregondi:

"Not by usura was La Calumnia painted," declared Ezra Pound in a verse form as powerful every bit it is historically inaccurate. In fact, information technology had been the banking system and the whole mercantile world (including the exercise of coin-lending) that made possible the not bad commissions for works of art . . . In this fascinating earth, Coin and Beauty were at the service of one another, allowing the cosmos of immortal masterpieces that have indelibly marked i of the near important epochs in the history of mankind.