The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert Page A

as one of the most valuable in the world. For years past, his agents all over Europe and in the Near East had been buying on his instructions rare and important books and manuscripts whenever they became available, particularly in German monasteries where the monks were supposed to have little idea of their worth. In 1437 the death of Niccolò Niccoli, who was deeply in Cosimo’s debt, placed eight hundred more volumes in his hands. The religious books he gave to the monastery of San Marco; the others he kept for himself. Open to all his friends who cared to study there, it was the first library of its kind in Europe, and a generation later served as a model for the Vatican Library in Rome. Constantly increased by Cosimo and his heirs, it was eventually to contain no less than ten thousand
codices
of Latin and Greek authors, hundreds of priceless manuscripts from the time of Dante and Petrarch as well as others from Florence’s remoter past. 2
    While spending immense sums on his library, Cosimo also followed his father’s example in lavishing money upon the adornment of Florence. Giovanni di Bicci had never much cared for books. Indeed, according to an inventory of his possessions made in 1418, he only owned three books altogether, a Latin life of St Margaret, a sermon by Fra Giovanni also in Latin, and a copy of the Gospels in Italian. But he had always recognized that the honour of the city, and the personal credit of the rich citizen who cared for honour, demanded donations to public building and to the enrichment of buildings already in existence.
    The first important project with which Giovanni may have become involved was the provision of new doors for San Giovanni Battista. The Baptistery, ‘
il mio bel Giovanni
’ as Dante called it, was already at least two hundred and fifty years old. 3 Its southern doors, depicting scenes from the life of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, were made by Andrea Pisano in 1330; and in 1402, a year of plague, it had been decided to provide new doors for the northern front as a votive offering, a plea to God not to repeat that dreadful visitation of 1348 when so many thousands of citizens had died in a fearful epidemic that had swept northwards across Europe from Naples. The doors were to be cast in bronze of the most exquisite workmanship, and seven of the leading artists of the day had each been asked to submit a design for a competition of which Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was probably one of the judges.
    The design was to be for a bronze panel representing the sacrifice of Isaac; and, when all the works had been handed in, the judges decided to give special consideration to the submissions of three young artists, all of them in their twenties, Jacopo della Quercia from Siena, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both Florentines. After lengthy deliberations the choice fell upon Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; but when these two were asked to collaborate, the suggestion so annoyed the fiery-tempered Brunelleschi that he stormed out of Florence and went to study architecture in Rome, handing the bronze he had made to Cosimo de’ Medici who afterwards placed it in the old sacristy at San Lorenzo where it was displayed behind the altar.
    Ghiberti, to whom the sole responsibility was now entrusted, was highly versatile, as a true Renaissance artist was required to be. Trained as a goldsmith, he was painter and architect as well as sculptor. He designed windows for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as well as golden tiaras for Martin V and Eugenius IV, the gold setting for a cornelian cameo depicting Apollo and Marsyas which belonged to Giovanni de’ Medici, and, for Cosimo, a reliquary for the bones of three now forgotten martyrs. At the time of his first commission for the Baptistery he was twenty-three; he was to be seventy-three before his work there was completed. A most exactingperfectionist, he cast and re-cast panel after panel before he was satisfied that