Editors’ Note: Guido Alfani explores the concept of the ideal of “magnificence” and situates it in relation to “munificence” and “philanthropy,” based on a discussion in his new book, As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Why was Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492) called “the Magnificent”? Because of all he did for his Republic, Florence. He was a major patron of the arts, also establishing an art school, the Garden of San Marco, where the likes of Michelangelo were trained. He raised splendid buildings, such as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Prato and his own villa at Poggio a Caiano (both commissioned to Giuliano da Sangallo, one of the most celebrated architects of the time). A poet himself, he protected and promoted writers and intellectuals (Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola) and in general, he did much to strengthen the position of Florence as one of the main cultural hubs of Renaissance Europe. There is no doubt that to this day, the city continues to benefit from Lorenzo’s deeds.

But was Lorenzo also generous? He might have been, on a personal basis, but his magnificence was not “munificence,” that is, it was not selfless generosity – as it had important political implications. “Magnificence” is a concept that the Renaissance inherited from Classical Antiquity, and literally it means “doing great deeds.” The Greek philosopher Plato argued, in The Republic, that magnificence was one of the virtues that the philosopher-king must possess. And this is the point: magnificence is the attribute of a ruler, maybe a benign ruler, but a ruler nevertheless. In doing great deeds, Lorenzo de’ Medici was following the footsteps of his grandfather, Cosimo “the Elder,” who was praised by Renaissance writers, such as Giovanni Pontano, for having been the first to renew the ancient tradition of “changing private wealth into public benefit.” However, this benefit did not come for free: Cosimo was also the first in his family to acquire a de-facto leadership of Florence, and the intensification of his magnificence over time was meant to accompany his political rise. Two generations later, Lorenzo would be accused of having emptied the republican institutions of any actual meaning, leading, in 1478, to the conspiracy of the Pazzi family. This failed coup attempt gave Lorenzo the political opportunity to radically alter Florence’s institutional framework to better serve the interests of his family. In 1532, the Medici would also become formally the rulers of the state, when Pope Clement VII made them Dukes of Florence. The Pope, after all, was himself a Medici – and a magnificent patron of the arts (it was he who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome).

As I argue in my book As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton University Press), the concept of magnificence is useful not only to understand the social position of the rich, and particularly the super-rich, in past western societies, but also because it seems to speak to some current concerns. To grasp why, it is necessary to clarify why magnificence differs from philanthropy. Philanthropy is a modern concept, which gained widespread social currency from the eighteenth century onwards, and literally means “love of mankind.” The Société Philanthropique of Paris was founded in 1780, and in its manifesto, dated 1787, it declared that philanthropy was a civic duty. From the onset, philanthropy was closely related to earlier patronage, charity and magnificence, but it also had new features. Some point to its more systematic character compared to preindustrial charity, but this is questionable, as from the late Middle Ages charity and patronage could be organized in highly systematic and “entrepreneurial” ways, even making recourse to institutional arrangements, like foundations ruled by the donors and their descendants, which indeed look quite modern.

The real divide lay in the motivation of the donor: if she or he expected something in return, even simple influence or an increase in status, she or he could qualify as a benefactor (due to the ‘good’ done to others), but not as a philanthropist. Another difference was that, at least in its eighteenth-century original meaning, the concept of philanthropy had more to do with the willingness to dedicate one’s time to fighting for a good cause than with providing financial help to such a cause. This distinction, however, has mostly waned in the current use of the word, due to a process which has been dubbed the “monetization” of philanthropy. This process has affected the West as a whole, but possibly it has been particularly intense in the United States.

Arguably, monetized philanthropy is a modern take on the concept of munificence, which literally means “making gifts,” and consequently, philanthropy differs from magnificence for exactly the same reason that magnificence is not to be confused with munificence: there is nothing free and disinterested in magnificence—that is, there is no generosity. This distinction holds, at least, in theory, as not all that today is commonly referred to philanthropy or (to use another modern word) “giving” is truly disinterested. Now, does the fact of receiving something back from one’s giving, for example a boost to social status or some sort of political (and/or cultural) influence, prevent the recipients from reaping the intended benefit? Not at all. And is this sort of behavior on the part of rich or super-rich donors something unprecedented and which upturns social conventions? Again, not at all – indeed, there is a long tradition, deeply enrooted in western culture, which sees the likes of giving, charity, patronage and magnificence as one essential way by which the most affluent strata fulfilled their own specific social function. This brings us back to the end of the Middle Ages.

By the turn of the fifteenth century it had become clear that, in the most economically advanced parts of Europe, such as Italy or the Low Countries, some among the commoners had acquired command over vast economic resources, often obtained through international trade or finance (or both). The legitimacy of their affluence, however, remained questionable, as Medieval Christian theology frowned upon them as avaricious sinners. Why were they hoarding riches that could have been used to help the poor? What was their wealth for? Of course, feudal society had no quarrel with the wealth of the nobility, whose high status and greater access to resources was believed to correspond to God’s plans. Commoners, however, had no socially-accepted reasons to grow very rich, let alone super-rich. As I argue in As Gods Among Men, the increasingly jarring contrast between a theory of the perfect (Christian) society that considered the very presence of wealthy citizens as a negative and morally polluting feature, and a reality of growing real and perceived economic inequality, required a solution.

From the fifteenth century, a significant change was underway, which further strengthened during the sixteenth. The rich, and even the super-rich, who had previously been depicted by theologians and philosophers as socially troublesome sinners, began to be presented as important contributors to society. And what was this contribution? Based on late medieval authors, we can distinguish two specific aspects. First, the vast “private” resources of the rich could be considered a sort of reservoir into which the community could tap in times of crisis (by means of loans, voluntary or “forced,” or of taxation); in the humanist Poggio Bracciolini’s words, they were a sort of “private barn of money” similar in principle to the public granaries established to deal with food crises. Second, as also elucidated by Bracciolini, without the “magnificent houses, nice villas, temples, hospitals [built by the rich]… the cities would lack their main and prettiest ornaments” (Bracciolini, De Avaritia, 1428–9, 270, my translation). In the following decades, this view was echoed by other humanists, including the aforementioned Giovanni Pontano (admittedly, some among them were the direct beneficiaries of the patronage of the super-rich of the Renaissance).

Magnificence, then – that is, an interested way of changing one’s wealth into public benefit, thus signaling the fact of having a right to rule or at least to exert an oversized influence on politics and society – has been from the very beginning part of the social contract by which the wealthy found a role to play in western societies. Through this process, they became more socially accepted and could finally overcome their own doubts, and those of others, about the ethical and spiritual legitimacy of their wealth. In early modern times, the Protestant Reformation only strengthened the perception, increasingly shared across the richest strata, that the pursuit of wealth could be virtuous, and in practice magnificence continued to be a specific category of the action of the most affluent even when, after the Renaissance, the word became rarely used – think of the achievements of the American super-rich of the Gilded Age, of the cultural and educational institutions that they founded and of the art collections that they established and which are now displayed in public exhibits.

J.P. Morgan, who among other things contributed to the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870 and whose library continues to be a fine ornament of New York City, is a good example. He, however, is also exemplary of how the very notion of magnificence – the idea that by using their private resources for the public benefit, the super-rich could claim a right to rule or at least to heavily condition policymaking – was ultimately incompatible with the ideals of modern democracies, which include equality of rights and equality in access to public institutions. After helping to save his country from financial ruin during the bank “panic” of 1907, J.P. Morgan was hailed as the savior of his country: exactly as Cosimo de’ Medici had been when, in 1434, he was recalled from exile to Florence to bail out his almost-bankrupt city. But in the following years, this display of economic power only fueled suspicion toward the so-called “money trust” that (supposedly) controlled the country’s finances, and which (it was feared) might have tried to control its politics as well. In 1913, the Federal Reserve System was introduced so that the United States would never again need to be saved by the goodwill of private financiers.

Telling the story of how twentieth-century America tried to rein in the power of its super-rich and of how twenty-first-century America seems to be choosing differently is beyond the scope of this article (although the curious reader can find more in my book). Instead, the point that needs to be made is that the magnificence of the rich, while it does correspond to an enrooted western tradition, is at odds with the way in which modern democracies are supposed to function. The practical solution so far has been to replace magnificence with munificence, that is, with philanthropy and giving. If giving can be qualified as generosity pure and simple, with nothing received in exchange, then there is no reason to argue that it could have negative “political” consequences. But there is a growing concern that reality might be rather different. Today, many billionaires donate generously and are praised for their generosity, but how much influence on society and on politics do they gain in this way? Are they simply hiding magnificence behind the appearance of munificence? And for which purposes are they accumulating influence? Maybe to counteract policies not of their liking, such as more progressive taxation? (precisely the kind of policies, then, that at least on principle would allow societies to gain access to the resources needed not to depend upon the goodwill of the rich) Maybe history does not provide a clear answer to these questions, but it certainly suggests that they are very much worth asking – if only to fully understand the terms of the social bargain we are currently being offered.

-Guido Alfani

Guido Alfani is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). He is also an Affiliated Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality (New York), a Research Associate at the CAGE Research Centre (Warwick, U.K.) and a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London). His most recent books are The Lion’s Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (Cambridge, 2019, with Matteo Di Tullio) and As Gods among Men: A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton, 2023).