Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder, ca. 1474. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
W.W. Norton
Medici Money
Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence: the house's origin story.
$18.00
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s noteUK edition: Profile Books
- Author
- Tim Parks
- Publisher
- W.W. Norton
- Published
- January 2006
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Banking Under Pain of Hell
The Medici bank operated from 1397 to 1494 in a Christendom whose Church condemned usury outright, and Tim Parks takes that contradiction as his subject. The bank's exchange dealings were structured to earn interest without naming it, and the family's spending on churches, altarpieces and learning was, among other things, restitution, wealth laundered toward heaven. Florence's golden age and its guilty conscience were funded from the same ledgers.
Parks, a novelist and translator long resident in Italy, wrote the book for Norton's Enterprise series in 2005, and he moves easily between double-entry bookkeeping and dynastic politics, from prudent Giovanni di Bicci to Cosimo's mastery to the collapse under Lorenzo. It is the origin story of the house, told through the money that made everything else possible.
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