Authors: Eric Weiner
THREE
GENIUS IS EXPENSIVE: FLORENCE
GREAT MINDS DON’T NECESSARILY THINK alike, but they do gravitate to one another, drawn by some powerful, unnamed force. Consider the remarkable gathering that transpired in one room, in Florence, Italy, on January 25, 1504. More than two dozen of the greatest artists of the Renaissance—of any era—were in attendance. Leonardo da Vinci was there, as was a young rising star with the surname of Buonarroti but better known by his first name, Michelangelo. So, too, were Botticelli and Rosselli and Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo, among others. Their collective works could fill a museum, and in fact they do; today, the iconic Uffizi Gallery sits only a few yards from the hall where this gathering took place.
The purpose of the meeting was to choose a location, “convenient and courageous,” to display the city’s latest masterpiece, Michelangelo’s
David
, a work so large, in every sense of the word, that Florentines referred to it simply as the Giant. The seemingly cordial meeting was also palpably rife with rivalries and animosities simmering like a pot of pasta puttanesca. Florence midwifed not only scores of geniuses but also the
concept of individual genius, as well as its ugly sidekick,
l’enfant terrible
. In that room, on that day, we would instantly recognize twenty-nine versions of the tempestuous genius. It would be unbearable. And irresistible.
Not since Athens has one city produced so many brilliant minds and good ideas—and in such a brief time. We know what the Renaissance (literally “rebirth”) was and have the art to prove it, but
why
it happened at all remains a mystery. Was it the discovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts? The relatively enlightened leadership? Something else?
An even bigger mystery, though, is
where
it happened. Florence was by no means a natural location for such an extraordinary explosion of genius. The city was swampy, malarial, and prone to regular outbreaks of fire, flood, and the bubonic plague. It had no port and was surrounded by spiteful, occasionally bellicose, neighbors. Some of these other city-states were bigger (Venice had a population three times that of Florence) or, such as Milan, stronger militarily. Yet the Renaissance shined brightest not in these places but in Florence. Why? To answer that question, I take a step back, to Plato.
What is honored in a country will be cultivated there
. Athens honored wisdom and got Socrates. Rome honored power and got an empire. What did Florence honor?
An important clue resides in one tiny, circular trinket, about the size of a thumbnail. Of all the art to emerge from Renaissance Florence, this piece soars high above all the rest and helps explain the rest. Without it, these geniuses wouldn’t exist, and most likely the Renaissance wouldn’t have happened.
Yet chances are you’ve never contemplated its importance. You probably don’t even consider it art. But art it is. Made of pure gold, it contains an engraving of John the Baptist on one side and a lily on the other. It is the florin, the symbol of Florentine wealth and taste and its unique form of reckless pragmatism. Instantly recognized in its day from Cairo to London, it was the world’s first international currency. Others tried to imitate it but failed. Some despised it, including one of Florence’s own, Dante, who wrote of the “accursed flower” and consigned moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell, where amid murky vapors they would languish for eternity staring at the money bags hanging around their necks.
But without this little gold coin, and all it represented, we would not have Michelangelo’s
David
or Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
or Brunelleschi’s cupola. And since the Renaissance was not merely an artistic revolution but a philosophical and scientific one as well, it’s quite possible that without that “accursed flower” the modern world itself would not exist.
The story of Florence is the story of money and genius. Two words, I concede, not normally uttered in the same sentence. Genius, we think, occupies rarefied air unsullied by the gritty world of cash or transfer payments or, heaven forbid, actuarial tables. Genius is above all that. Genius is pure. Genius certainly can’t be bought.
It is a nice idea. It is also wrong. Money and genius are intertwined, as inseparable as two young lovers.
But what exactly is the connection between money and genius? Is it true that, as D. H. Lawrence put it so colorfully, all culture is built on the “deep dung of cash”? In other words, did Florence have a Renaissance because it could afford one? Or is the relationship between money and genius more complicated than that? I am determined to answer that question, and I have a plan. It entails some deep reading, on-the-ground research, and an art historian with a dog.
His name (the art historian’s, not the dog’s) is Eugene Martinez. Of all the tour guides, art historians, wayward graduate students, and sundry others who earn their living at the teat of Florentine culture, Eugene Martinez got my attention—at first digitally and then in the analog or, as I quaintly like to think of it, real world.
Eugene, fittingly, is a bit of a Renaissance man—tour guide, art expert, gourmand, dog lover. His tour company is called Ars Opulenta, which is Latin for “abundantly luxuriant art.” I like the way that sounds, so unapologetically decadent and overflowing with goodness. What really sold me on Eugene, though, was his dog. While the other websites featured somber men and women striking serious art-is-no-laughing-matter poses in front of the Uffizi or the Bargello or some other sober Florentine landmark, the Ars Opulenta site greeted me with a photo of Eugene and a hound of indeterminate breed. Both are smiling, with the red-tiled roof and shiny gold spire of the Duomo barely visible in the distance. The
landmark building is almost an afterthought, a backdrop for what Eugene considers the real purpose of all this glorious art: joy. “Enjoying enjoying,” Eugene would later tell me. That was the essence of Florence and still is.
Eugene grew up in the shadow of the Cloisters, in a still-scruffy New York, a city of squeegee men and strip clubs and debt. At a young age the visual arts called, and Eugene answered. He majored in art history at NYU, and just in case, by some fluke of fate, that degree proved to be something other than the path to easy riches, he also studied graphic design. His first job was at an ad agency designing advertisements for a bank. Not exactly high art, but it paid the bills. His second job was with
Beaver
magazine, which was even less high art but also paid the bills.
He didn’t last long, though. He fell in love with an Italian, then with Italy. He moved there for six months. That was thirty years ago. At first, like all newcomers to Italy, he made a fool of himself. He ordered a cappuccino at 2:00 p.m. and everyone in the café stared at him as if he were a moron, or possibly American. No respectable Italian would ever,
ever
, order a cappuccino after noon. Eugene soon navigated such cultural land mines, learned Italian, and mastered the art of enjoying enjoying.
He launched Ars Opulenta, his tour company, and quickly realized that his dog was good for business. People trust an art historian with a dog. This makes sense. Dogs are comforting, reassuring, while all this art, this
genius
, is intimidating. What if we don’t “get” it? What if we say something silly that exposes our ignorance? What if—and this cuts to the heart of our encounter with greatness—we are not worthy? A smiling canine presence puts people at ease.
I am walking to meet Eugene now, a short journey that requires navigating a sea of tourists. I am not Moses and this sea does not part, so I shoulder my way through, inching past the gelaterias and the caricature artists, past the hawkers selling Bob Marley portraits, and past the accordion players before finding the little café where we had agreed to meet.
Eugene has come alone. No dog. I like him anyway. Despite his three decades in Italy, first Rome, then Florence, he has not lost his New Yorker’s purposeful gait and endearing bluntness. Not tall, he is carrying a few
extra pounds and possesses a fashion sensibility that is more South Bronx than southern Italian.
Eugene orders a coffee the size of a thimble; I, still in the grips of China, opt for a green tea. We find a table and talk.
Eugene is comfortable with what he knows and with what he doesn’t. His genius, if I can call it that, is the genius of the outsider. He is a Hispanic American living in Italy, a gay man in a straight world, a straight talker in a field notorious for its obfuscation. Eugene knows his history and his art but feels no compunction to dress them up in the pretentious and largely impenetrable language of the art historian.
During our conversation at the café, I keep tripping over all those slippery Italian names, so Eugene anglicizes them for me. Michelangelo becomes Mike. Leonardo da Vinci becomes Leo; Lorenzo Ghiberti, Larry; Filippo Brunelleschi, Phil. At first, this strikes me as a sacrilege, like referring to Moses as Mo, but I soon warm to the idea. It retrieves these lofty geniuses from the heavens and brings them back down to earth, where they belong. Despite the stubborn mythology, geniuses are not gods, and we do both us and them a huge disservice by pretending they are.
I like the way Eugene says crazy, blasphemous things such as “I don’t care for the Renaissance.” That strikes me not only as heresy, but also career suicide. Eugene is a tour guide; he earns his living from the Renaissance. It’s the equivalent of a meteorologist who doesn’t care much for the weather, or a comedian who can’t stand the sound of laughter.
“What?” I say. “You don’t like the Renaissance?”
“I don’t. It’s too pretty for me.” I’m pondering what he means by that when he says, “Give it a few days. You’ll see what I mean.”
I promise him I will.
I explain my quixotic search for the geography of genius. Eugene listens intently. He doesn’t laugh, which further endears him to me. You’d be surprised how many people do laugh. So deeply ingrained is the myth of lone genius that any other explanation for human greatness strikes many as absurd.
Our plan is to sit and talk, fortify ourselves with caffeine, then cross the Arno River like an invading army of two. This doesn’t happen, not
today at least. The famous Tuscan sun has gone AWOL, replaced by a steady and cold rain. The café is warm and cozy, a self-contained universe, and Eugene and I have a few hundred years to cover. The world out there, across the Arno, can wait.
Where to begin my dissection of the Renaissance? The obvious starting point is the artists and poets, right?
No, says Eugene. Florence was a city of merchants and bankers. Walk the city’s cobblestoned streets to the Mercato Vecchio, the old market, and you’d find industrious men sitting at long wooden tables, changing money, arranging loans, cutting deals. (When a bank went out of business, its table was broken; thus the word
bankrupt
means “broken table.”) At the dawn of the Renaissance, Florence boasted nearly eighty banks.
One, though, towered high above the others: the bank of the Medicis. The family held enormous influence over Florence from the twelfth century onward and for a period of about fifty years was its de facto ruler. As their name suggests, the Medicis were originally apothecaries—their coat of arms looked like six pills arranged in a circle—and that is, in a way, the role they played. They revved up the metabolism of Florence, like a dose of caffeine. As with many drugs, the Medici medicine came with side effects, and a real risk of dependency. But theirs was by and large good medicine, and the patient thrived.
The Medicis were great patrons of the arts. But what does that mean? Before arriving in Florence, I had only the vaguest idea. I pictured wealthy socialites, with more money than taste, ordering expensive art the way the rest of us order a pizza. And who can blame me? The very word
patronage
smacks of overweening elitism. Patrons, let’s face it, tend to be patronizing.
Not the Medicis, Eugene explains. Theirs was the good kind of patronage, one that aimed not only at satisfying their own private desires for beauty but also the public’s. They cared what the average Florentine thought about the artwork they commissioned. Perhaps this was their way of currying favor and thus securing their position as top dog. Who cares? Everyone benefited. In that sense, the art world was more democratic in Renaissance Florence than it is today, where judgment on the
quality of art rests in the hands of a few critics and gallery owners. We have cleaved the art world from the world.
Patrons, the good kind, do more than write checks. They inspire. They challenge. The Medicis actively encouraged the city’s artists to take risks and placed huge bets that, though they seem wise today, were at the time wildly reckless.
The Medicis didn’t merely tolerate innovation. They demanded it, Eugene explains. “These people had more money than God. They wanted the best of the best of the best. And when they already had the best of the best of the best they wanted something else, so they sent people out to develop it.” The Medicis were, when it came to taste, no different from other Florentines, only wealthier and, therefore, better able to amass what the humanist Matteo Palmieri called
per bellezza di vita
, “all those things needed to enhance one’s life with beauty.” Forget
la dolce vita.
In Florence, life was not sweet. It was (and is) beautiful.
The Medicis weren’t some clueless art collectors in it for the prestige. They
got
art. Anyone who makes the observation, as the patriarch of the clan, Cosimo de’ Medici, did, that “every painter paints himself” is clearly someone with a deep understanding of creativity. A curious relationship, based on intuition, developed between Cosimo and the city’s artists. Cosimo didn’t need to ask for a certain statue or painting; the artists, such as Donatello, “divined from the slightest indication all that Cosimo desired.”
Cosimo was the Bill Gates of his day. He spent the first half of his life making a fortune and the second half giving it away. He found the latter half much more satisfying, once confiding in a friend that his greatest regret was that he did not begin giving away his wealth ten years earlier. Cosimo recognized money for what it is: potential energy, with a limited shelf life. Either spend it or watch it slowly deplete, like yesterday’s birthday balloon.