Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici

Abstract

The reputation of Cosimo de’ Medici (b. 1389–d. 1464) is that of the head of a successful business empire, banker to successive popes, director of Florence’s foreign policy, the first member of his family to subvert Florence’s republican constitution, and a cultural patron of such generosity that he could single-handedly change the appearance of his city. There are no obvious fault lines in Cosimo’s biography: the business interests, relations with popes and princes, political activity and cultural patronage were all so interrelated that it is difficult to separate them. The categories in this article have therefore been kept to a minimum, and many of the individual books and articles could reasonably appear under a number of headings. After Reference Works and Primary Sources, the section devoted to Histories and Biographies is subdivided into works written and/or published between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and those published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cosimo’s wealth and influence came from his direction of the Medici Bank and associated businesses, determining its place in the article. As the bank had branches beyond Florence, it in turn determined the nature of his Relations with Other States. As far as foreign princes were concerned, he was the face of republican Florence and a man with whom they could deal quite comfortably. That contributed to his status within Florence, but the employment created by his businesses counted for more, and his wealth mattered most of all. Wealth bought influence in the world of Florentine Politics, and the works in that section explore the detail behind that familiar generalization. Political patronage and cultural patronage operated along the same principles of mutual back-scratching, but the means by which Cosimo emerged as a significant cultural patron take us back to the world of commerce and Cosimo’s guilt at the means by which he amassed his fortune. Of his Religion there is perhaps relatively little to say, except that his conventional faith was manifested in his patronage of various religious communities. Such communities required buildings and were natural repositories of learning. This determines the order in which the bibliography addresses his Cultural Patronage: after general surveys that range across the visual arts and literary works, there are subsections on Architecture, Libraries, Humanists and Humanism. The article concludes with Collections of Papers, which cover diverse topics.