Travel: Florence

AS YOU exit Florence’s central train station, the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella rises up in front of you. It’s one of the city’s most imposing monuments, visited by thousands of people each year for the artworks inside.

But it’s the outside I find most mesmerising. Stand towards the back of the piazza, face the church, look up and you see a name chiselled in giant letters across the frieze of its green and white marble façade and the date of 1470. The name is Giovanni Rucellai, a Renaissance banker and big noise in his neighbourhood, a man who wrote about how he loved to burn eye-watering amounts of cash for the “glory of God, the honour of the city and the commemoration of myself”.

Rucellai’s flamboyant patronage at Santa Maria Novella, and the way he liked to think about it, reveals a tension that lay close to the heart of Renaissance culture. What do you do if you are a rich banker in a society where usury is a mortal sin? How do you square the circle between your desire to flaunt your wealth and boost your status, with the civic good and with God? Tweak them a little, and these are questions many believe today’s bankers, with their suspect profits and infeasible bonuses, should also be asking themselves.

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There’s a smart exhibition currently running in Florence that, with one eye firmly on the present, tackles all of this head on. Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities, at the Strozzi palace – a late 15th-century monolith of a building that oversubscribes to Rucellai’s dictum that man is put on earth “to procreate and to build” – takes you through how, by 1400, Florence had become the epicentre of international finance. It shows how merchants and bankers such as Rucellai did indeed attempt to square the circle, spending on sumptuous chapel art while looking with those same sacred images to expiate their avarice and elicit prayers for their souls. You can even play a computer game as you go, buying and selling alum, spices, slaves and currency from Bruges to Barcelona. If you end up making a quid, you’re invited to give up 10 per cent to a local hospital to atone for your usury. Two-thirds of visitors choose not to.

Out on the streets, you don’t have to search far for signs of this creative tension between hubris and humility – no further than the glittering legacy left by the Medici, who seized control of the Florentine republic in 1434 on the back of a banking fortune that had made them among the richest men in Europe.

Take the Medici palace on via Cavour. Inside there is a private chapel lavishly frescoed from top to bottom. The subject is the journey of the Magi. At the front of the procession are the three kings of the East. Behind them, snaking around the walls, are Cosimo de’ Medici, his son Piero and the young Lorenzo (later to be known as Lorenzo the Magnificent), with an entourage of their friends, allies and the humanist scholars they cultivated. All of them are heading towards the altar where the Virgin and Christ child are waiting to receive gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This was where the hard-nosed realities of politics, patronage and money were sanctified, where worldly lucre was converted into spiritual credit.

The Medici poured themselves into Magi symbolism. They ran a lay brotherhood that staged the city’s annual Epiphany festival, which overlaid the streets of Florence with an imaginary map of the Holy Land. At the end of the procession, once playing the part of Bethlehem, is the church of San Marco. In a town where there is far too much to see on a short trip, this is one of the places that really repays the effort. You may want to fuel up first – I’d recommend the noisy, no-nonsense Trattoria Mario, at the back of the food market on Via Rosina.

In the Medici palace chapel, Cosimo had himself pictured as a humble man riding a mule; at San Marco he went one better in the religious stakes. Unlike Santa Maria Novella, this was a monastery of Observant Dominicans, who took a stricter view about their vows of poverty. He rebuilt the whole place and used part of it to house a library of manuscripts collected by his humanist friends. It's a still, contemplative space, enhanced by the devotional images by Fra’ Angelico in each of the friars’ cells. At some point you will stumble across Cosimo’s own cell, frescoed again with the story of the Magi, a place where the banker briefly escaped the world and took on the mantle of a mendicant friar.

Head back into the centre and a few steps off Via dei Calzaiuoli, the street that connects Brunelleschi’s vast landmark Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio, there’s a place that is rarely visited but which tells another important piece of the same story. The tiny oratory of the Good Men of San Martino, on the corner of Via Dante Alighieri and Via dei Magazzini, is in the heart of what was the Florentine textile business during the Renaissance. Here the Medici funded acts of charity – depicted in frescoes around the walls – to the working poor. Cosimo had “accumulated quite a bit on his conscience”, one of his contemporaries said, and charity could square that with God. It also spread Medici patronage to the city’s disenfranchised majority, whose tacit support the first family needed to keep control of a city that one Florentine acidly described as a “paradise inhabited by devils”.

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On the way to catch a train back to Pisa airport, I pass Rucellai’s facade at Santa Maria Novella once again. Self-promotion, ostentatious expenditure, a marble petition to heaven? As the exhibition at the Strozzi palace points out, this uneasy harmony exploded in the 1490s, detonated by a radical preacher at San Marco called Girolamo Savonarola, of the Bonfire of the Vanities fame, a friar who gathered his own entourage of penitents and helped the enemies of the Medici eject them from power. Religion, politics and conspicuous consumption – it was a volatile cocktail.

The Strozzi palace exhibition runs until 22 January (www.palazzostrozzi.org).

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Flight details From Edinburgh, the cheapest way to get to Florence is with Easyjet (www.easyjet.com) to Pisa, via London Gatwick. From Pisa airport, there is a direct train to Florence.

Visit Hotel Lungarno (Borgo San Jacopo, 14), one of one of four boutique hotels in the Lungarno Collection (www.lungarnocollection.com), which has original, mainly early 20th-century, art in every room and balconies with views over the Arno and Ponte Vecchio. Try the Fusion Bar in Gallery Hotel Art (Vicolo dell’ Oro, 3) for cocktails.