The Medici family is one of the most powerful and influential dynasties in European history. They introduced new banking systems and laid the groundwork to make Florence a cultural hotspot of Renaissance Italy. Through their political strategy and patronage of major artists, such as Michelangelo, they shaped the High Renaissance and the Italian political landscape. Read on to discover how the Medici family established their power and maintained their influence over hundreds of years.
The Medici Family’s Rise to Power
Italy was not a unified (and independent) nation when the Medici family’s power began. The Italian peninsula was organized into city-states, unlike surrounding nation-states, such as France. Some of these states included Siena, Venice, Naples, and Florence; the last of which is where the Medicis established their political power base.
The peak of their power lasted from 1434 to 1737, producing figures who would extend their hold beyond Florence. These include four popes: Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV, and Leo XI. Among the Medici family members were also two queens of France: Catherine de’ Medici and Marie de’ Medici.
The basis of the Medicis’ wealth and prestige was their bank. Active from 1397 to 1494, it was the largest credit institution in 15th-century Europe.
After Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici founded the bank in Florence in 1397, his son, Cosimo the Elder (1389-1464), expanded the family business.. He opened branches in other key city-states, including Geneva, Venice, and Rome, where the Papal States would task him with the management of the papal treasury.
In his lifetime, Cosimo would eventually go on to establish branches in foreign cities, including London, Bruges, and Lübeck. These offices made it easy for the papacy to order goods across Europe and for bishoprics to pay fees from afar.
Location is just one part of what made the Medici Bank prestigious. The Medicis also developed some of the financial tools we still use today. They introduced Double-Entry Bookkeeping, a practice that involves recording a payer’s debits and credits in a single log. This made it easier and more accurate to calculate one’s net worth.
Additionally, the Medici Bank introduced the Letters of Credit. At the time, it was dangerous to send large sums of money across the continent to pay for foreign goods. The Letters of Credit fixed this problem. In practice, this could look like an Englishman paying a London branch of the bank in pounds for an art piece from Florence. The Florentine office would then produce a Letter of Credit to the artist as proof of future payment. Then, the artist could deliver the work and take his payout from the bank in his own currency.
These achievements eventually helped the Medicis become one of the wealthiest families in Europe.
How Did the Medicis Become the “Godfathers of the Renaissance”?
What do the Sistine Chapel, the Duomo of Florence, and St. Peter’s Basilica all have in common? The Medici family helped develop all of them. Through a combination of peace-building policies, patronage, and occasionally personal relationships, they fostered an environment that allowed artists like Michelangelo and Raphael to create masterpieces.
Between Florence, Milan, Naples, and Rome, Florence was not the most militarily powerful city. This made it vulnerable to conquest during a period when Italian city-states fought for power with one another. However, the Medicis were also astounding diplomats.
Cosimo the Elder believed war was bad for trade and negotiated the end to a series of wars in present-day Lombardy, securing an alliance with the powerful Sforza family of Milan. This helped establish a mutual territory agreement between Venice and Milan known as the Treaty of Lodi (1454), inaugurating 40 years of peace in Italy.
His successor, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492), ardently continued to uphold the Treaty of Lodi. Lorenzo also earned the love of Florentine citizens by doing acts such as freeing and clothing galley slaves.
In fact, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) is said to have created the piece Pallas and the Centaur for him. Pallas Athena is the Goddess of Knowledge and wisdom, while the centaur represents humanity’s ferality. Lorenzo the Magnificent knew how to negotiate with Naples, even if Naples had a large army that could beat the Florentines. Yet, Lorenzo kept Florence independent and safe, making Lorenzo Athena, and Naples the centaur.
In addition to being a powerful political figure, Lorenzo was one of the greatest patrons of the arts among the Medici. He funded several major artists, including Botticelli and Michelangelo.
Patrons of the Arts: Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Da Vinci
Lorenzo met Michelangelo when the artist was a young teenager studying at the Academy of San Marco. According to Ascanio Condivi’s 1533 biography of Michelangelo, Lorenzo found him carving an ancient fawn stone head. He praised the young artist’s skill but also teased him by pointing out an error: that an old fawn would not have a full set of healthy teeth. So Michelangelo knocked off a few teeth and showed Lorenzo the piece again.
This mixture of quick skill and talent charmed Lorenzo, so he invited the young artist to live in his palace from 1490 to 1492. There, Michelangelo studied under the great Renaissance artist Donatello. He lived alongside Lorenzo’s sons and nephew, including the future Pope Leo X and Pope Clement VII, who would commission his work for the Papal States. So, when Lorenzo the Magnificent died in 1492, Michelangelo’s relationship with the family endured.
In 1508, Pope Julius II, a non-Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to paint the upper walls of the Sistine Chapel. There was a 25-year break before Michelangelo would touch it again. When Pope Clement VII came into power, he brought Michelangelo back to the altar by asking him to paint The Last Judgment.
Cosimo the Elder commissioned Donatello’s most famous piece, the bronze David. He intended to place it in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. This was a major piece because it was the first freestanding bronze cast statue of the Renaissance. It was also the first nude male statue in the area since those dating back to ancient Greece.
Donatello also created Judith and Holofernes for the garden fountain of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. It stood alongside the bronze David in front of Cosimo the Elder’s family palace in 1457.
Both David’s and Judith’s stories in the Bible symbolize underdogs overthrowing tyranny. Likewise, Florence viewed itself as a tyrant slayer, standing powerful against its neighboring city-states. Donatello effectively captured the core values of Florence and the Medici family through his work.
While Leonardo da Vinci did not have as strong a patronage by the Medici family as other artists, he did begin his education through their network.
As a teenager, he became an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio. Verrocchio was a sculptor and painter who created tombs for Cosimo, Giovanni, and Piero de’ Medici between the 1460s and 1470s. Under him, da Vinci learned about painting, sculpture, engineering, and metalwork. He worked with Verrocchio for a decade.
Despite this, Lorenzo de’ Medici did not include him on a list of great painters for the Pope to hire in 1481.
In a diary entry from 1515, da Vinci wrote,
“Li medici mi crearono e distrussono.”
This translates to “the Medici [or physicians] created me and then destroyed me.”
Scholars are unsure if he meant to reference the Medici family or doctors [the literal translation of medici]. Da Vinci was known to be critical of physician careers, but the entry’s real meaning remains mysterious.
Raphael’s career also flourished thanks to the Medicis. In particular, Pope Leo X was Raphael’s greatest commissioner. He hired him to do a set of ten tapestries intended for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. They illustrated the Acts of the Apostles, and can now be seen in the Pinacoteca Vaticana in Rome.
Before Leo X, Pope Julius II assigned him to paint some of his most famous frescoes, including the School of Athens and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. After Julius II’s death, Leo X continued to fund his work for the papal rooms. Leonardo had painted a piece called The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila, based on Pope Leo I’s meeting with Attila the Hun in 452 CE. He later changed Pope Leo I’s face to resemble that of Leo X instead.
Patronage In Architecture: Building The Uffizi, Il Duomo, And More
The Medici family played a significant role in the development of the Florence Cathedral, the Uffizi Gallery, and St. Peter’s Basilica.
Cosimo I de’ Medici, First Duke of Tuscany (1519-1574), originally formed the Uffizi to be an administrative building. The word Uffizi, in fact, means offices. The Uffizi opened to the public as an art gallery in 1765, shortly after the last member of the Medici family died. Today, it houses The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli and Laocoön and his Sons by Baccio Bandinelli, among other masterpieces.
Pope Leo X also commissioned the completion of St. Peter’s Basilica. Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, attacked the sale of indulgences to fund the Basilica as an example of the papacy’s greed. In his Ninety-Five Theses, the document which began the Reformation, he wrote: ”Why doesn’t the Pope build the basilica of St Peter’s out of his own money?”
Cosimo the Elder commissioned the dome in the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Florence Cathedral). There were many pauses since the cathedral began construction in 1296, and no dome yet. Architects wanted to build it without Gothic buttresses, but this was a technical challenge. There was a competition to see who could plan it, and Filippo Brunelleschi won.
Brunelleschi believed he could build the dome without scaffolding, but many still doubted his abilities. The Medici family, however, believed in him enough to fund this work. Today, Brunelleschi’s dome stands at 375.7 feet tall, making it one of the tallest domes in the world.
The Medici Family Between Art & Conspiracies
On April 26, 1478, the Cathedral of Florence held its Easter mass with an audience of 10,000 people. Among the crowd were Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano de’ Medici. A group of men interrupted the mass, attacking the duo with knives. Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed to death, but Lorenzo de’ Medici managed to reach the church sacristy with only wounds. The attack is known as the Pazzi Conspiracy, a plot by the Pazzi family, Pope Sixtus IV, and the King of Naples to overthrow Medici power.
Seeing their beloved Lorenzo the Magnificent attacked, the Florentine citizens took matters into their own hands. They captured conspirator Francesco de’ Pazzi and hanged him from a window of Palazzo Vecchio. His father, Jacopo, was captured a few days later, hanged, and then dragged to the Arno River. Francesco Salviati, a co-conspirator who was also the archbishop of Pisa, was also hanged outside the Palazzo Vecchio.
The Medici family then threw the remaining Pazzi members out of Florence. The event only strengthened control of their city and was commemorated in art by Stefano Ussi and Tancredi Scarpelli.
The Pazzi Conspiracy was not the time the Medicis’ power was challenged. In 1494, due to Piero de’ Medici’s lack of political acumen, the Medici family was exiled from Florence. The government that replaced them was firmly anti-Medici. Meanwhile, in 1501, the Opera del Duomo commissioned Michelangelo to finish a long-unfinished project: creating a sculpture of David for the Cathedral. The biblical figure of David, who defeated a giant with only a rock, was the perfect symbol for an unstable Florence. Not only was the city surrounded by city-states that threatened its power, but now, also by the Medicis, who some saw as tyrants.
In 1504, the government decided to place David in the city’s town hall instead. They oriented David’s eyes to point to Rome, where some of the Medicis were in exile. However, as it was originally intended for a Cathedral, it’s unlikely that Michelangelo intended for the statue to be political,especially considering the Medici’s help in his own artistic development.
Even when a High Renaissance piece was spurred against the Medici family, it was still ultimately about them. David’s perfect Renaissance contrapposto and affiliation make him one of the greatest Renaissance highlights today.
After the Medici’s exile (1494- 1513), Niccolò Machiavelli, a prominent political philosopher and diplomat, formed a network with anti-Medici government figures.
The Medici family returned to power in 1513 and compiled a list of potential conspirators who were likely to plot against them. Machiavelli’s name was on the list, so they imprisoned, tortured, and exiled him. However, there was not enough evidence of his direct involvement for them to execute him, so Pope Leo X allowed him to remain in exile.
Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to the next Medici ruler of Florence as a guide on how to establish and keep control of a state. He did this to get a position within the Medici court, but it failed. Only in 1520 did he re-enter public life, when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (the future Pope Clement VII) commissioned him to write a history of Florence.
The Medicis Stimulated Science, Music, And Fashion
Galileo Galilei was the tutor to Cosimo I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. In 1610, he published The Starry Messenger, in which he described recent discoveries he had made using a telescope. In it, he noted that Jupiter had moons, naming them the “Medicean stars.”
In music, Bartolomeo Cristofori was the first to invent the piano while working in Fernando de’ Medici’s court. The Renaissance also saw the birth of opera in the late 1500s. The Medicis provided financial support for major opera houses like the Pergola theater.
The Medicis also influenced 15th-century fashion. Catherine de’ Medici married King Henry II of France. She was a short woman and wanted to appear taller before meeting the French court. She commissioned a pair of high-heeled shoes, turning them into symbols of wealth and status. This was remarkable in a time when high heels were reserved for butchers who did not want to get blood on their feet. She also helped to improve and popularize the horse side saddle, allowing women to ride without exposing themselves.
The End of the Medici Family
The last Grand Duke of Tuscany, Gian Gastone de’ Medici, died in 1737 with no sons. Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici was the only member of the family left and did not have any children. With no one to continue the Medici lineage, she knew that the power of Tuscany would go to Francis of Lorraine.
Anna Maria accepted that all the art, books, maps, and houses her family owned would be transferred to the new grand duke. However, she created a so-called Family Pact, declaring that these treasures should not leave Florence. She detailed:
“That these things being for the ornament of the state, for the benefit of the people and for an inducement to the curiosity of foreigners, nothing shall be alienated or taken away from the capital or from the territories of the Grand Duchy.”
The next leaders followed her wishes. Anna Maria essentially succeeded at keeping Florence the capital of everything the Medicis created. Florence continues to attract about 16 million tourists a year, who come to admire what this fascinating family built.
