Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography

Neri di Gino once said to Cosimo: "I wish you would say things clearly so that I could understand you." He replied: "Learn my language."

—Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli

A remarkable proportion of recent scholarship concerning Florence in the fifteenth century has been devoted to demonstrating that most commissions of this culture's famed works of art by members of the city's ruling elite were inspired by impulses more self-interested than a desire to celebrate the honor of God and the city. Historians now view these commissions as primarily, if not exclusively, ingenious representations of political power, especially if they were made by the Medici family, who in the early Renaissance came to exercise an unprecedented authority within the Florentine republic.

Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464) was Florence's most influential statesman and personal patron, and therefore anything he did was in a sense political. There are numerous examples of the favorable, and probably calculated, effects of Cosimo's personal and artistic patronage on his popular image, resulting in the enhancement of his influence and reputation in the city. Medici images are stamped with the impress of Medici identity—of their wealth, power, and pride in lineage. But if they are to be interpreted as political statements, expressions of secular power or aspirations, the concepts of politics and power need to be understood in much more complex terms than they have been to date.

A requisite step in this direction is to study the whole corpus of works commissioned in fifteenth-century Florence from the patrons' own perspectives, and I have myself recently completed such a study of Cosimo de' Medici's commissions. ¹ This work involved setting his commissions in the contexts, not only of his own life, education, and interests—and those of the artists he employed—but also of the civic, devotional, and popular culture that artists and patrons shared with their Florentine audience (by far the most literate in Europe at the time). Tracing the pattern of the themes that Cosimo's commissions expressed in visual form, I believe that I have been able to shed fresh light on familiar objects, restoring to them more of the meaning they bore in their own time—and able also to delineate a more accurate portrait of their patron. This approach alters or adds in essential ways to the picture that emerges from Cosimo's more commonly studied activities as banker and politician. The resulting image of Cosimo is, I hope, more intricate, more nuanced, more human.

In order to understand the role played by patronage in the creation of art, we need to reassemble each individual patron as the integrated subject of his or her own life, rather than as an object fragmented for the convenience of academics in the disciplines of politics, religion, social history, and art. We also need to abandon artificial and anachronistic oppositions between public and private, secular and spiritual, individual and corporate. Patrons should be allowed to define themselves in their own words, images, and actions: to present themselves and their worlds on their own terms. Otherwise, the historian's appropriate exercise of the critical faculty in relation to the self-representations of people in the past may harden into a general cynicism, and an impulse to moralize, too often based on present values and standards of progress, of right and just behavior. There seems to me no point in this sort of history, since much of the pleasure and profit of the discipline lies in discovering in the past unfamiliar ways of being human that help to expand our understanding of humanity.

It may be instructive that despite his modern reputation as the ultimate cynic, Machiavelli, one of the great historians of the Western tradition, regarded classical literature and history as a repository of experience waiting to be accurately understood, and he was eager to enter into the past world of antiquity on its...