Christianity is duly acknowledged and revered, so that then we can concentrate elsewhere — on the women of Rome, the literature of Greece, on human qualities and values that have nothing to do with religion. This, more than any particular content, is the sense of humanism: to carve out a space that need not be understood in the urgent and inconvenient tensions of Christian metaphysics — heaven or hell — while still remaining within the Christian world. Dogmatism is abandoned, but not the faith. Is it really okay, Boccaccio had asked his mentor Petrarch some years before that preface, for a Christian to spend so much time with profane literature? So long, Petrarch assures him, as the literature is instructive, educates the young to serve the community, and turns the soul toward beauty and truth. This is the breakthrough: the idea of a secular space where one can have such moral values, but independently of Church teaching. What would-be honest banker dealing in dry exchanges would not yearn for such a thing, would not contribute to a culture that recognized other qualities than strict adherence to canon law? It is the space we live in today. Much of it was first staked out in fifteenth-century Florence.
Tomb of Pope (or anti-pope) Giovanni XXIII, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici from Donatello and Michelozzo, in the Florence Baptistery. Warned not to disturb the Byzantine austerity of the space, the architects built upward rather than outward, but lavishly. The sculpted words, IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA (“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope”), offered disturbing food for thought for Florentine worshippers.
In the medium of writing, creating this territory must have seemed easy enough: one rediscovered the literature of Rome and later Greece, made new copies, discussed it, wrote books about it. But the visual arts were almost entirely devotional in nature. How would the secular ever find some elbow room here? Slowly, is the answer, by stealth. The Medici played their part.
Of the four illustrious men appointed as executors of Baldassarre/Giovanni XXIII’s will, one was his banker, Giovanni di Bicci. The ex-pope wanted to be buried in the Baptistery, the oldest, the most holy place of worship right in the center of Florence. Only three other bishops had ever been buried there, and only in the simplest and sparest of stone boxes. Decoration on the walls was a rigid black-and-white marble patterning. Nothing must distract attention from the final division of the blessed and the damned on the ceiling.
Cosimo took over the venture and got together the young architect and sculptor Michelozzo and the versatile genius Donatello. The Merchants’ Guild, which was responsible for the church’s interior decoration, expressed scepticism. No fancy stuff, they warned. The tomb must not project into the floor space. The artists placed their work between two existing pillars that stood against the wall. It did not project, but rose, through a loophole in the rules, twenty-four magnificent feet up the side of the church. Above three marble bas-reliefs showing standing female figures — Faith, Hope, and Charity — rested the sarcophagus, on the side of which two naked angels unfurled a scroll. Above the sarcophagus, carved in marble, was a narrow bed complete with mattress and pillow; and lying on the bed, entirely human and apparently asleep, his handsome, intelligent face turned toward the congregation, lay Baldassarre/Giovanni, cast in gleaming bronze. Above the reclining figure, taking the monument even higher, rises the most elegant bedroom canopy, again carved in stone and with its curtains apparently just drawn apart, and at the apex of the canopy, a ring appears to fix the whole structure to a point where the wall of the church juts out. The scroll, held by the angels on the side of the sarcophagus, announced IOHANNES XXIII QUONDAM PAPA—“John XXIII, erstwhile Pope.”
Was the monument obtrusive? It obeyed orders about depth. But the bronze did gleam so brightly in the early sunlight while morning mass was recited; the reclining figure was so very human, so clearly a man of character, and so evidently neither in heaven or hell, that it was hard not to be distracted. Above all, that inscription, “erstwhile Pope,” brought a gust of schism and ambiguity into the eternally still air of the Byzantine mosaics. Had he been pope or not? Nothing is more inimical to the diktat of revealed truth than the complexity of human history. Martin V hated the monument. Baldassarre was never pope, he insisted. The Giovanni XXIII domain was still available. This man was the Medici’s friend, people whispered. They paid for this tomb. How fascinating it all was! As if, in the niche of the medieval church, where one expected to find a rigid symbolic representation of this or that virtue, a real person appears, not easily judged or categorized. The effect is not unlike those moments in Dante’s Inferno when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic toward.
Did the Medici banker know what he would be getting when he commissioned Baldassarre Cossa’s tomb? We do not know. But whatever his intentions may have been — to honor a family friend, to embellish a church, to suggest the power of Medici money — Cosimo was a man who saw when there was a lesson to be learned. Something had shifted in the hitherto-timeless stasis of the church. From now on, Donatello would be Cosimo’s favorite sculptor, Michelozzo his preferred architect.
3. The Rise to Power
Cosimo was thirty-one. It was 1420, and his father, turning sixty, retired from the bank. Piero di Cosimo, first of the next generation, was four. A second son, Giovanni, was on the way. The wife and mother, Contessina de’ Bardi, was jolly, tubby, and practical. Uneducated, she was not allowed in Cosimo’s study. Away on business, he rarely wrote. Marriages were arranged and that was that. She was a Bardi and he a Medici. Neither complained. On the contrary.
Taking over the bank, Cosimo went down to Rome for three years where Martin V’s preferred bankers had just failed and the Medici were back in the papal saddle again. A relief. What kind of man is Cosimo? Polite, unostentatious. He prefers a mule to a horse. Challenged, he is pithy and cryptic. “Cosimo, I wish you would say things clearly so I could understand you.” “First learn my language,” he replies. “Cosimo, how should I behave on this diplomatic mission?” “Dress like a lord and say as little as possible.” It’s a style that allows you to be smart, without giving much away. To confide in a man is to become his slave.