Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt

       CHAPTER FOUR Expectations Raised and Dashed

      ‘Money is like muck’, wrote Francis Bacon (1561–1626), ‘not good except it be spread.’ And in his own lifetime there was much more of it about. In complete contrast to the severe and prolonged bullion famines of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Central European silver production had enormously increased. The formerly rich but long abandoned silver sources at Goslar, Freiberg and Kutná Hora had been made accessible again by more up-to-date technologies. And the new silver mines at Schneeberg (Saxony) and Schwaz (the Tirol) had come into full production by the 1470s, to be closely followed in the next generation by those at Annaberg (Saxony) and Joachimsthal (Bohemia).¹ In 1542, in the first known formulation of the quantity theory of money (according to which price levels are determined by the money supply), Sigismund of Poland’s counsellors reported: ‘This year the unmeasurable increase of the coinage has raised the value of the gulden very much and will raise it still further, if nothing is done … When now the gulden (which is a measure and standard of everything bought and sold) rises and becomes dearer, it follows that everything brought from abroad and grown at home must become dearer too.’² ‘As for the reason [for these price rises]’, wrote Peter Kmtia, Palatine of Cracow, that same year, ‘nobody is so foolish as not to see that the multitude of coins is to blame, which is in no relation to either the gulden or the things to be bought, as it used to be in former times.’³

      In his own terms, Kmtia’s analysis was perfectly correct: there was too much silver in circulation, forcing up the face value of the Polish gold gulden and causing prices to rise out of control. However, the population of the West was recovering swiftly also, and a superabundance of bullion – additionally swollen from the 1520s by Spanish-American gold and silver – was not the only explanation of the ‘price revolution’ which saw European prices, after their long stagnation, rise between three and four times in just one century. George Hakewill (d.1649), the English scholar and divine, saw this clearly. Writing in the 1620s, Hakewill recognized that it had not been ‘the plenty of coin’ alone which had caused the upward drift of prices but ‘the multitude of men’ – for ‘either of which asunder, but much more both together, must need be a means of raising the prices of all things’.⁴ ‘That the number of our people is multiplied’, wrote William Lambarde in the 1590s, ‘is both demonstrable to the eye and evident in reason’. And whereas Lambarde’s list of likely causes included the broods of married clergy – ‘which was not wont to be’ – he could also point more plausibly to the fact that ‘we have not, God be thanked, been touched [in England] with any extreme mortality, either by sword or sickness, that might abate the overgrown number of us.’⁵

      Just as everybody by the 1590s had a view on overcrowding, so the contemporary price inflation produced a literature of its own, explanations ranging from usury (the old enemy) to enclosure (the new), from harvest failures and civil commotion to state monopolies and excessive government spending. Fashion also took its share of the blame. Poland’s youths, Bishop Tarlo had complained during the currency scare of 1542, ‘cannot go comfortably and smoothly without foreign merchandise as nourishment and clothing’.⁶ And seven years later, it was Sir Thomas Smith’s lament that ‘there is no man [in England] can be contented now with any gloves than is made in France or in Spain; nor kersey, but it must be made of Flanders dye; nor cloth, but French or frizado; nor owche, brooch, nor aglet, but of Venice making or Milan; nor dagger, sword, nor girdle, or knife, but of Spanish making or some outward country; no, not as much as a spur, but that is fetched [bought] at the Milaners [milliners].’⁷

      Complaints of this kind are often heard, and are not usually given much credence. However, Sir Thomas – ‘physician, mathematician, astronomer, architect, historian, and orator’ – was no ordinary Colonel Blimp. And as one of the promoters of Edwardian England’s recovery from the chaos of Henry VIII’s Great Debasement, he was exceptionally well placed to appraise for himself the consequences of over-rapid growth. As to how it all began, historians today have yet to agree on fundamentals – ‘the price revolution was a phenomenon of [population-led] bullion velocity rather than of bullion imports’ (Harry Miskimin); ‘the price rises in England were not caused by the influx of precious metals but by … the upsurge of credit and the rise of banking and of the inland bill of exchange’ (Eric Kerridge); ‘the price revolution evidently began in Spain … [and was] a monetary phenomenon after all’ (Douglas Fisher).⁸ However, the fact remains that, after the long price stability of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, prices continued to rise through every decade of the next; that economies were growing and that their growth was real; and that it was not just prices which rose but profits also.

      Much emphasis has been placed on the inflationary effect of large-scale imports of Spanish-American bullion. And it is undoubtedly true that inflation in Spain from the 1520s forced up price levels in other nations also. But the turn-around of the West’s economy had begun much earlier. And it was in the late 1460s and 1470s, when silver returned and the mints re-opened, that rents and other revenues became collectable again and that the purses of the rich were replenished. It was not American gold that enabled Ludovico il Moro (d.1505), the Sforza ruler of Milan, to attract Donato Bramante from Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci from Florence, but a strong revival of Lombard industry and commerce. In Florence, it was the recovery of banking profits from the 1470s that allowed Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent) and his fellow bankers to commission work of the highest quality from Andrea del Verrocchio and Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio. And what supported Andrea Mantegna at Mantua, Francesco del Cossa at Ferrara, and Piero della Francesca at Urbino, was always less the old-style profits of war of their respective Gonzaga marquesses and Este and Montefeltro dukes, than a very visible escalation of landed wealth. Baldassare Castiglione’s hugely influential dialogue, Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), while first drafted at Urbino in 1508, took many more years to complete. And his cherished recollections of life in Duke Guidobaldo’s palace – ‘the very Mansion place of mirth and joy’ – no doubt improved in the telling. But Castiglione (like Sir Thomas Smith) was an expert witness: a professional courtier all his life. And his final judgement, in consequence, carries weight. ‘There was then to bee heard’, Castiglione remembered of those long evenings of lively talk, ‘pleasant communications and merie conceites, and in everie mans countenance a man might perceive painted a loving jocundnesse … And I beleeve it was never so tasted in other place, what manner a thing the sweete conversation is that is occasioned of an amiable and loving company, as it was once there.’⁹

      In April 1528, when his book was at last published, Castiglione was in Spain at the Court of Charles V, where he was Clement VII’s papal nuncio. Less than a year later, he was dead. However, there had been manuscript versions of Il Cortegiano in circulation for at least