The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (review)

At the heart of an interpretation, advises St. Jerome, lies "not what you find, but what you seek." Jacks and Caferro have found a great deal indeed. In an inspired collaboration, they have worked through centuries of documents in the unusually intact Spinelli Archive, housed since 1988 at Yale's Beinecke Library. As a result, The Spinelli of Florence is a splendidly detailed account of one merchant-banking family's vicissitudes from the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth century. Genealogical charts, lists of customers, tables of prices, comparative plates of architectural features, succinct descriptions of, for example, expensive silk cloth, the iconography of Doubting Thomas, monastic infirmary architecture, the activities of a rural building team, and even a proud cardinal's failed attempt to beg patronage for the Augustinian Hermits—such riches abound. The quantity and quality of detail is sure to delight specialists.

Jacks and Caferro assemble their findings in eight roughly chronological chapters. The first sorts fact from fiction in the early Spinelli decades, recording business and marriage links to the Alberti, as well as a notable presence in the powerful cloth guilds and the Priorate. The remaining seven chapters are devoted to the getting and spending of Tommaso Spinelli (1398/1400-1472), the family's most eminent figure. Family history from the perspective of one member is not such a paradox as it may appear; Tommaso lacked the personality to emerge from the archives as a Renaissance "individual." His "faceless character" (268, referring to absence of portraiture) requires the authors to seek their subject in the best interdisciplinary fashion, reconstituting his curial, urban, and rural contexts, tracing the currents of influence and cash in his networks of patrons and clients, customers and factors, artists, architects, and laborers.

Tommaso early identified his theater of operations in Rome, which allowed him to dispense with public office at Florence, although he kept a cautious eye on the Medici. He began by working for the rival Alberti and Borromei banking firms at the Curia, rising to serve as Eugene IV's depositary general (Chapter 2). Under Nicholas V and Callixtus III, Tommaso established his own bank (Chapter 3) until, wearying of such risky work, he developed a safer specialization in expensive wools and silks for curial clients (Chapter 4). As he grew more secure in his wealth, Tommaso invested pragmatically but largely in ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, both in Rome and in Florence (Chapters 5-6). On the model of the Medici and Alberti family retreats, he also rebuilt a villa outside Florence (Chapter 7). But although his daughters were well dowered and strategically married, Tommaso left no male heirs. His testament (docs. 46 and 48) could secure the humiliation of his estranged second wife, maintenance of the chapel of S. Tommaso at San Celso in Rome, provisions for the palazzo Spinelli, and his burial in the family chapel at Sta. Croce in Florence, but not the one thing needful—a competent Spinelli to manage the troubled business. Not twenty years after Tommaso's death, his nephew declared bankruptcy (Chapter 8).

In filling out this plot, the exposition stumbles at times, as paragraphs lose their topics (for example, 43, 157), Latin slips (for example, 190), or the sense of purpose goes adrift. Jerome's advice is helpful in taking the just measure of these problems. Granted that the authors have found a great deal for specialists to absorb and debate, their striking achievement lies in what they have sought—a new level of collaborative attention for one of the most sophisticated of historiographical fields. The current advanced state of Florentine social history requires attention to a mass of dauntingly entwined issues, including family structure, strategy, and affectivity; the creation and investment of wealth; political patronage and clientage; the "bottega" and "great man" models of patronage, whether artistic or...