Cosimo de' Medici: Art Patron of the Florentine Renaissance

Introduction: Rethinking Cosimo de' Medici

We know a great deal about the de' Medici family — one of the most important dynastic families in Europe and, in particular, a defining force in the cultural and artistic life of Italy and of the continent as a whole. And yet, as Dale Kent makes clear in her authoritative and fascinating account of the family, and especially of the life of Cosimo de' Medici, we actually know less about this family than we think. Kent argues that common ideas — and common misconceptions — about the de' Medicis reflect not only flawed knowledge about this particular family but also more general flawed assumptions about their era and about prevailing attitudes of the time toward artistic patronage and, indeed, toward art itself.

Kent's book is as much an ethnographic exploration of the culture and society of fifteenth-century Florence as it is a biography of Cosimo de' Medici himself — although in her telling, the man and his historical context are in many ways inseparable. He would not have been the kind of art patron he was in another age, and likewise his era was transformed because of the particular kind of man that he was: Florence created Cosimo even as Cosimo created Florence.

Kent argues that rather than being a rapacious politician and banker with little true appreciation for the arts, Cosimo de' Medici was an educated and cultured man whose ability to sponsor important artistic projects was grounded in both his political and economic power and his genuine appreciation for the humanistic and neoclassical currents of Florentine Renaissance art and architecture. As one review of the book notes:

How was Cosimo, a businessman and politician, able to appreciate and commission Christian and classical works of such sophistication, skill, and variety? While most scholars have focused on the 1450s and early 1460s, Kent looks at the early 1400s, when regular contact with scholars and artists supplied Cosimo's education. He studied under and was intimate with the humanists Niccoli, Bruni, Poggio, and Traversari, and the classicizing artists Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Donatello. Kent relies mostly on humanist correspondence referring to Cosimo, manuscripts copied for or presented to him, and biographies. She also found a surprising number of documents bearing on the more difficult question of Cosimo's relations with artists. Relying on Albinia De La Mare's study of Cosimo's library, Kent discusses the Christian, classical, and humanist manuscripts that he owned; the dedications to him on manuscripts; and manuscripts of moral philosophy and history that he personally annotated (D'Elia 114).

Kent's book is a departure from many other studies of Cosimo de' Medici — as well as of the entire clan — because other scholars have tended to focus on his political power and his interests as a merchant. While these elements of his life, his political and financial resources, are certainly part of the picture Kent presents, they remain only a part of it. Where others have tended to see Cosimo de' Medici's artistic patronage as a form of flamboyance — a way of flaunting accumulated wealth and elevating his social position — Kent suggests there was an altogether different motivation at work.

It is easy to cast aspersions at the church for being too worldly and too subject to the influence of money, but Kent suggests that there was, at least for Cosimo de' Medici, an altogether healthy mingling of the sacred and the mundane. As Boland (2000) points out in her review of the book, Cosimo helped bridge the gap between the lay and religious worlds by using his worldly fortune to fund churches, and also by commissioning works such as the fresco of the Journey of the Magi for the Medici chapel:

The chapel frescoes, by Benozzo Gozzoli and completed around 1459, were the culmination of Cosimo's long association with the cult of the Magi. They may be seen as imaging his own spiritual journey as a wealthy and powerful man who enjoyed great authority in the city, but who in his gifts to the Church made offerings as the Magi did to the Christ child.

On the east fresco, the actual, clearly individuated portraits of the family and their relatives and retainers appear in the cortege following in the train of the young Caspar: Cosimo is in the front rank, mounted on a mule, which could be seen as a symbol of humility, often adopted by abbots and popes, but which family letters record was also an animal members of the de' Medici family rode on their journeys between Florence and their villas. Cosimo is flanked by his sons Piero, Giovanni, and the illegitimate Carlo. The son of Cosimo's Circassian slave, Carlo is clearly distinguished by his dark skin and by his exotic features and headdress. Above is the Adoration of the Magi, painted around 1440 by Domenico Veneziano and now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. As in the Medici chapel, this representation of the Magi offered an ideal opportunity for the inclusion of portraits of the patron and his friends. In this case, the man in black and white at the centre of the group of Magi, standing slightly behind them as if presenting them to the Holy Family and to the viewer, portrays Piero de' Medici, the putative patron of the picture. He holds a falcon, his personal emblem and a symbol of the faithful who always return to their heavenly master. In this work the human aspects of the Magi story are emphasized as much as the divine.

This blending of the human and the divine marked Cosimo's work as an art patron, as well as much of the culture of Florence at the time and, more broadly, much of the early Renaissance church.

While Florence in the early Renaissance was certainly a place of commerce and political intrigue — where attention to social alliances and the ability to spot a good bargain were essential skills for anyone seeking success — it was also a place in which the traditional power of the Catholic Church was being invigorated, as much as it was being challenged, by the rising tide of humanistic art and inquiry.

Cosimo de' Medici, like other Florentines of his generation, was both educated and a populist — a man of the world guided through that world by devout Christian faith, as Edmonds (2000) summarizes in praising Kent's book:

Cosimo de Medici (1389–1464), a man to whom patronage was a way of life, was in every respect a devout man. In his library, in addition to the Christian classics, there were Bibles, books of hours, and Latin editions of the classical texts — including the naughty tales of Ovid without which no educated European male could get along. There were also maps of the world — or at least, as much of it as was known.

Cosimo was certainly no pedant. The list of vernacular books in his possession shows that he read what the majority of literate Florentines read. But when it came to classical writing, Cosimo was an enthusiast, annotating lavishly his copies of the writings of the orator Cicero.

Cosimo de' Medici — Kent argues — was a part of both elements of Florentine culture. He was a man of the world, active in both politics and commerce. But he was also a man of faith, and his patronage of artists and of art was as much motivated by his faith and spiritual beliefs as by his desire to solidify the financial, political, and social position of himself and his family. Kent argues throughout the book that Cosimo de' Medici devoted substantial resources to the arts as an expression of his devotion to his religion — as well as his devotion to his city, to beauty itself, and to his family. He was able to do this because in Renaissance Florence it was possible to combine all of these aspects of life: commerce and the church could work together, beauty and friendship were easily joined, and politics ran through everything.

The overall portrait that emerges is of a man who was far less cynical than the stereotype of his whole family would lead us to believe, and the complex pleasures he derived from patronizing the arts, as well as the variety of rewards he drew from doing so, tell us a great deal about both this man and his moment in history.

He is also, in Kent's portrait, less autocratic in his artistic choices than might be popularly believed. While his own tastes were certainly an important factor in the artists and works he chose to support, he was also influenced by broad popular tastes:

In addition to patron and artist, Kent stresses the role of audience in determining artistic commissions. Good schools and high literacy made the population of Florence a critical factor in the success of artists, writers, and musicians. From communal projects, such as Brunelleschi's cupola, to religious confraternities, processions, and plays, the Florentine people had a role in establishing taste and culture. Popular poets and musicians competed in the streets and participated in festivals; the best had their songs and poems transcribed and distributed. Performers talked about poverty, social mobility, responsibility, good government, and the libertas and patria of Florence (D'Elia 115).

It must also be remembered that while Cosimo de' Medici was not a democratic leader in the modern sense, the distinction between public and private was considerably narrower in Cosimo's Florence than it is today. Cosimo's private garden, for example, was transformed into a kind of public academy for painters, as were the gardens of other de' Medici family members (Jacobs, 2002). The homes and gardens of Cosimo de' Medici existed in an almost seamless whole with the public commissions that he made:

Together, the collected works "were like a school and academy for young painters and sculptors, as well as for all others who attended the arts of design." Michelangelo was among this privileged group. The life of Mariotto Albertinelli (1471–1515) mentions another garden, "full of feminine and masculine torsi that were not only lo studio of Mariotto but of all the sculptors and painters of his time," situated "on the side toward San Lorenzo," that is, behind Cosimo's palace. The instructional as well as aesthetic function of these gardens — or rather, this composite garden — best explains the prominent position afforded the portal pictured between the scene of Lorenzo welcoming Michelangelo (presumably to his garden) and the image of the David on the catafalque erected for the great master's obsequies.

Cosimo de' Medici: A Biographical Overview

Before exploring further the points made in Kent's book, it is worth pausing briefly to provide an overview of the life of Cosimo de' Medici, the progenitor of one of the main lines of the Medici family, which would rule over the independent city-state of Florence from 1434 to 1637.

Cosimo, who came from a relatively prosperous Florentine family, rose to personal power first by directing the Medici bank to the Council of Constance and then as manager of finances for the Papacy — working both to increase revenues to the church and to himself, having obtained a monopoly over a group of alum mines from Pope Pius II. Alum was an essential element in the city's financial success, as it was used in most of the key dyeing processes in a city that depended upon the textile trade.

He would become the wealthiest man in Florence through this concession, as well as through the money made by the family bank, which had branches in all of the key financial and commercial centers of Europe. His influence — both in terms of his personal wealth and the control his bank exercised over Florence's entire trading system — was substantial. His populist attitudes made that power threatening to other established families in the city, and one of these families — the Albizzi — accused him of the capital crime of setting himself above other free citizens. He was imprisoned, though he certainly could have fled, and the death sentence was set aside by an official who, one can only assume, had received at least some portion of de' Medici gold. That official banished Cosimo to Padua and Venice, where his wealth and his contacts assured him an enthusiastic welcome.

Back in Florence, other members of his family worked to manage the next set of elections so that the Signoria — the city's council — would come into the hands of de' Medici supporters. Cosimo then returned to the city, and his enemies fled. The de' Medici dynastic principate had begun, as had Cosimo de' Medici's career as a patron of the arts, as Kent (pp. 15–16) argues.

Taking Advantage of the Moment

After his return from exile, Cosimo de' Medici made a number of changes to Florence's governing system that both helped him consolidate his power and ensured that power could not be effectively challenged by others. These changes made the city somewhat less democratic — though it had not been a substantively democratic place to begin with — and allowed him to spend less time on continual political consolidation, freeing him to concentrate his energy on grand cultural and artistic enterprises.

His belief in the importance of artistic expression, rather than alienating him from the people of Florence as an elitist enterprise, in fact drew him closer to the citizens of the city, with whom he shared cultural and artistic touchstones. Cosimo de' Medici's patronage was far more democratic in tone and in effect than it might intuitively seem:

Kent examines popular works read by Florentines of all social levels, including vernacular scrapbooks and miscellanies, poetry, devotional manuals and moral exempla, civic traditions, histories, and ethnographies. These often-illustrated works formed the intellectual background and tastes of Cosimo and his audience. These common readings reveal that a large proportion of Florence's population would have been able to understand the Christian, classical, and literary themes in art. Following Baxandall and recent studies on ekphrasis, Kent demonstrates how devotional works trained people to identify with Christ and to use their minds rather than their eyes when viewing religious art, and how rhetorical theories emphasized the relation of word and image. Again in opposition to Charles Hope, Kent argues that art was full of complex meanings and that ordinary people could understand and appreciate these meanings. Patrons, she asserts, responded as much to their audience and popular culture as to their own self-expression (D'Elia 116).

As soon as he had established his base of political power, Cosimo de' Medici began to push forward with his grand plans for architectural and artistic works. Kent stresses that while we might now think of him primarily as a patron of the arts, his influence during his own lifetime was felt above all through architecture:

Cosimo required undivided power in order to carry out his plans as well as to satisfy his passions, above all his passion for building both secular and religious structures.

Because Kent examines every single artistic and architectural commission Cosimo made during his life, she allows the reader to appreciate the relative weight of his architectural commissions compared to his artistic ones. His genuine interest in contributing to the overall quality of life in Florence, combined with his interest in consolidating his own position, inclined him to favor architectural commissions, which had a far greater public impact than paintings and sculptures — though he commissioned those as well, and it must be remembered that architectural commissions, especially of churches, also contained sub-commissions for paintings and other artworks. His sincere dedication to civic improvement was a cornerstone of his patronage, as Boland (2000) notes:

Dale Kent's Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron's Oeuvre (Yale University Press) is exhaustive, full of insight, and liberally illustrated, and is the first comprehensive examination of the whole body of works of art and architecture commissioned by Cosimo and his sons. From the wealth of available documentation illuminating Cosimo de' Medici's life, Ms. Kent identifies civic patriotism and devotion as the main themes of his oeuvre, and argues that religious imperatives may well have been more important than political ones in shaping the art for which he was responsible, and for its reception.

Kent presents us with a picture of Cosimo de' Medici as, in many ways, a man in the right place at the right time. His own personal ideas were very much reflected in the general culture of the times — and because of this, and through his commissions, he was in turn able to influence his city and, from Florence, the rest of Europe. To understand exactly how and why this is so, we must look briefly at the broader structure of the Italian Renaissance itself.

The Renaissance began — as is probably true of so many large-scale social changes — both as the result of the accumulation of many small changes made by people acting independently across a range of different arenas of society, among them merchants and artists, princes and sculptors, and ordinary tradespeople. But it was also given crucial impetus by the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Although it is an oversimplification to argue that the fall of Rome brought about the Dark Ages and the fall of Constantinople brought about the Renaissance, it is not entirely inaccurate to use the destruction of these two great cities as markers for the beginnings of two eras. When Rome was overrun, many of its scholars and artists decamped to the Rome of the East — the Byzantine Empire. And when Byzantium fell in turn, a millennium later, its scholars gathered their most valuable possessions — including a number of Greek texts — along with their learning, and came back to Italy.

What they found there was a country beginning to revel in the philosophy of humanism. After centuries of belief in the inherent wickedness of human beings, Italian and especially Florentine writers, artists, and social leaders were beginning to argue for the essential goodness of their fellow humans — at least if those humans were properly educated. Humanist scholars, writers, and artists such as Petrarch, Giotto, and Dante were arguing that each individual could improve himself through a careful study of the writers of Rome and Greece.

We tend to associate this rise in the value of classical literature and learning with artists and writers, seeing them as the true inheritors of such sensibilities. And certainly a number of writers and artists were in the forefront of Renaissance developments — though it is also true that while the Renaissance is in many ways the era of rediscovery of the art, learning, and literature of the classical world, at least Roman art and Latin texts had never entirely ceased to be appreciated in Italy. They were already receiving renewed interest when the scholars from Byzantium arrived bearing Greek texts, helping to fill in the other half of the realm of classical knowledge and further encouraging people to dedicate themselves to learning from the ancients.

But what we tend to forget is that behind these writers and artists there were, in most cases, patrons like Cosimo de' Medici — and at least in this case, not simply patrons with gold and no taste. Cosimo was himself responsible for having Greek reinstated — for the first time in hundreds of years — at the University of Florence. He may not have been a Dante in terms of his own abilities as a writer, but he was certainly a dedicated humanist in his own right.

Conclusion: A Man of His Time

Overall, the book is a fascinating and convincing picture of what can be accomplished in the arts and in architecture given nearly infinite wealth, education, and a population that values the arts. This should not, in fact, surprise us. But the result cannot help but be impressive. Kent's study succeeds in replacing a simplified, politically reductive portrait of Cosimo de' Medici with a richer and more persuasive one — that of a man whose patronage was simultaneously an expression of faith, civic pride, humanist learning, and genuine aesthetic passion, all of which were possible to hold together in fifteenth-century Florence in a way that would be difficult to replicate in any other time or place.