1/4 The Medici: Makers of Modern Art

£4,200,000 sold. Thank you so much. In the modern world, few commodities are worth more than art. If the artist's name is right, works can fetch sums that truly make the mind boggle. If you want to really understand the strange and scandalous affair between art and money, you have to look back 600 years. In Renaissance Florence, there was a far more shocking collision of market forces and masterpieces. The world's most beautiful art was created in the service of one rich and ruthless family. The Medici. With their money, the Medici turned Florence into one of the most beautiful cities in the world. They were the first great modern art collectors. But their relationship with art was anything but straightforward. All kinds of complicated emotions were involved. Guilt, the lust for power, sexual fantasy. And in the end, they didn't just collect paintings and sculptures. They changed the very nature of art itself and unleashed a monster even they couldn't control. In Florence, it's impossible to escape from the Medici. Everywhere you look, you can see their coat of arms made out of pallet or balls. It's as if they've trademarked the city for eternity. A lot of balls has been talked about, the famous Medici balls. There's a modern myth according to which they're medicine pills. Medici, medicine, not true. The Medici themselves like to pretend that they were descended from a valiant knight who performed heroic deeds and that these were the dents on his shield, not true. What they actually symbolised right from the start was peasants, coins. They're tangible symbols of the fact that these were men who dealt in money. The family's extraordinary journey began with Giovanni di Bici. Born into poverty, this hard-nosed merchant had a plan to make his family rich. Giovanni set up the first Medici bank in Florence in 1397, which traded on this exact spot. Now, there was nothing discreet or well-mannered about the world of Renaissance banking. These were money traders who carried out their work in public, in the market. Each one of them would call out his best offer of the day. I've got 50 florins to lend you to be paid back by St John's Day. I've got 30 florins to be paid back by Christmas. And each banker would work from his own table, set up in one of the aisles of the market. Banco is Italian for table, hence our word bank. It was a high-risk business. They were going bust all the time, and when they did go bust, they had to ceremonially break their table, hence the English word bankrupt. Banco rotto, broken table. The first Medici bank succeeded because it had rules, such as don't lend to royalty. They never pay you back. This was the birth of capitalism, and no family prospered more than the Medici. But the Medici were also men of their time, devout Christians, bound by church laws. The world of the afterlife, teeming with angels and demons, was every bit as real to the Medici imagination as the world in which they traded. And that gave them a problem, because according to the Bible, usury, money lending, was a mortal sin. God had decreed that man might save himself by labour, but there was no sweat on the Medici brow because they got their money through interest, by doing nothing at all. And as the riches piled up on the credit side of their ledger, they were terrified of what lay on the debit side, the threat of eternal damnation. The spectre of hell haunted all Florentines, including the celebrated poet Dante. In his Inferno, usurers were depicted in the depths of hell. Why was usury such an evil business to be in? The usurer, in the fullest sense of the term, goes to hell. He goes to hell because usury offends against the goodness of God. Dante says that the usurer sells nothing. He lends money and expects to be paid more back than what he loaned, but he hasn't given anything for this profit. He is selling nothing. And when Dante describes the punishment of the usurers in hell, he says that they sit in the seventh circle and their hands are continually moving. They can't keep their hands still. And that is because, in their lives, they did nothing with their hands. The church of Santa Maria Novella contains a fresco where the Medici's worst nightmares would have been realised. This is the Strozzi Chapel, painted in the 1350s by an artist called Nardo di Cione to give Florentines a glimpse of the afterlife. The reason the chapel was really famous, it was known as La Cappella dell'Inferno, is because it contains this monumental, extraordinary depiction of the terrors of hell. And, in fact, it's the first really epic depiction of hell as Dante had described it. There's one scene in particular that would have struck terror into the heart of a Medici. It's the seventh circle of hell, presided over by an evil-looking winged demon called Gerion, in which were placed blasphemers, sodomites and moneylenders. The fresco is much faded now, but peer closely and you can still make out the desperate hands of the usurers under a downpour of fire. But it wasn't all doom and gloom, because this chapel's also a vivid demonstration that there was a get-out clause for Renaissance moneylenders. According to church doctrine, you could buy your way out of hell. You could purchase salvation by sponsoring a great work of art and architecture such as this. And it was indeed paid for by a moneylender, a man called Tommaso Strozzi. There he is with his wife, and the artist's been careful to paint him being led by an angel towards the congregation of the blessed. Food for thought for a Medici. Pay for a spectacular work of art and maybe save your soul. Bankers were accused of splintering society because they created debt and greed and division. All the more reason to give to the church, the place where people were brought together. And in Florence, there was no more communal building than the baptistry, where every single citizen, rich or poor, was christened. In 1401, a great pair of bronze doors was commissioned to the glory of God. And Giovanni de' Bici, the head of the Medici family, was on the committee that chose the artist. Now, the Medici involvement with art in Florence begins right here on this spot. And the artist whom Giovanni de' Bici and his fellow committee members chose to create this great work was a man called Lorenzo Ghiberti. Ghiberti invented a totally new method of sculpting in bronze. Each panel was cast in a single piece, which gives these images a tremendously organic quality. Each one's a story distilled to its essentials, a miniature drama from the life of Christ. Here's the Last Supper, apostles hunched round the table. Here's Christ on his donkey, entering Jerusalem. And there's even an image of the traders, money bags and all, being driven from the temple, a small reminder of the ancient Christian distrust of riches. Now, it took Ghiberti and his workshop more than 20 years to complete these great doors. They were finished in 1424, just five years before Giovanni de' Bici died. And I think that when he looked up at what he and his fellow committee members had been responsible for commissioning, it was so much in excess of what anyone could have expected. This really is one of the great masterpieces of early Renaissance art. But I think it alerted him, and indeed the whole Medici family, to the potential of art. Giovanni's son, Cosimo il Vecchio, expanded the Medici bank across Europe. And with new wealth came new opportunities. Cosimo was a political genius who turned the Medici into the most powerful family in Florence. But he also knew that the city was a republic, in name at least, where everybody was supposed to be equal. So he dressed in the plainest clothes and even rode a donkey instead of a horse. He was determined to do everything he could to wipe the stain of usury from his family's reputation. This is the monastery of San Marco. In the 1430s, the Pope promised Cosimo redemption if he would pay for its construction. A heaven-sent opportunity to launder his piles of dirty money. It was fairly standard practice for extremely rich people to endow a chapel to commission a cycle of religious frescoes. But here, the Medici had paid for the construction of an entire monastery. This was a completely unprecedented act of private patronage. It seems that as far as Cosimo il Vecchio was concerned, when it came to the state of his eternal soul, money really was no object. San Marco was the home of the austere Dominican order. Each monk had a tiny cell containing a single fresco by Fra Angelico and his assistants of Christ's Passion, a focus for their spiritual contemplation. And Cosimo, the moneylender, had even made his way inside the temple. Now, this is the entrance to Cosimo's own cell. And right over the door, there's an inscription that makes official the nature of the exchange that's taking place here. It says that the Pope, Eugenius IV, promises that Cosimo de' Medici will be absolved for all his sins in exchange for having built this monastery. How typical, somehow, of this money man, this banker, to get his own pardon, to get his own salvation in writing. Now, at first sight, Cosimo's cell seems pretty much like all the others. He, too, gets an image of the crucifixion to contemplate. But while it's hardly luxurious, and I should stress that Cosimo came here, he fasted, he prayed, he did penitence for the sake of his eternal soul, his chamber is more luxurious than any other.