Why Florence Made So Many Artists

I had a chance to visit Florence last year, and I fell in love with the city. I have never been a big art history guy, but recently I nudged myself to read about the Duomo and Leonardo da Vinci.

I love that when you are reading a history book about X, it mentions all the things that led to X, and those things are as interesting as the fact itself. In this case, I realized that Florence did not just have Leonardo da Vinci. It had Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea del Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo. So many names.

How is this possible? In the 1400s, this was a city of maybe 40,000 to 60,000 people. As I read, I saw that Florence had a system called the bottega, where Leonardo da Vinci worked as well. The most interesting part was that these young apprentices learned everything. They did painting, sculpture, anatomy, geometry. I mean, who learns such multi-disciplinary ideas in our supposedly developed world today?

Then I was searching why and how this was possible, and the answer was easier than I thought. Simply, this was not an educational system. The bottega was a shop. It served customers, and customers had all kinds of requirements, and so did the master and the apprentices. I think this has some implications for today’s university system. We promise kids jobs after university, and then for most of that period they are isolated from actual work and jobs.

Now this wasn’t the only part, of course. First, Florence was getting rich, and as you get rich, you have to show and signal that you are rich! (Otherwise, why get rich, I guess.) So art was a great way to show that you were rich, because only you could hire someone to make your sculpture. It can be argued that today this is going to an expensive Michelin star restaurant or flying private jets. At the time, you just didn’t have these things.

And part of it was religion. Lending money at interest was a sin, so the bankers of Florence paid for chapels and altarpieces, partly to make up for it. Religion has such an impact. It is a way of thinking, and it shapes your decisions, even what you spend your money on.

Also note this is a few decades after the Black Death. The plague killed a huge part of Florence in 1348, and with so few people left, labor became valuable. The people who survived were worth more.

The next part, and I absolutely believe in this, is that Florence held local competitions for various art projects. They were run by the guilds and merchants (even the famous dome of the Duomo was built this way!), and imagine you are a kid living in the neighbourhood. You would hear about this. You would talk about this. Your dad would mention it at dinner. Maybe he would say “Aha, Filippo claims he can build the dome without any support system! Good luck to him!” and maybe as a kid you would ask “What do you mean, dad, you cannot build the dome without a supporting structure?” and maybe… you just get interested in architecture.

Now imagine growing up in this environment, and then you pass by the Duomo on your way. I mean, how could you not get inspired by that, or start pondering about these things? I went to Florence once, and got interested in reading a few books and I am writing this now. Imagine being a kid growing up in Florence during the early Renaissance.

The final touch is the master-apprentice connection, and I believe this is true even for Nobel laureates. This is how you learn the secret sauce, and this was true 500 years ago, and true today. Verrocchio trained Leonardo. Ghirlandaio trained Michelangelo. The great ones came out of the same few workshops, one generation after another. Until Florence lost its power.

That is another important part of it: you need power and wealth. Poor places are rarely the sources of these incredible periods in history. When the money moved to Rome, so did Michelangelo.

So what are the bottegas of today, I wonder. We start to tinker so late. We are in a disciplined educational system with standardized education till 18, and even then most universities are just not conducive to the level of inspiration a bottega in Florence would have provided 500 years ago.

Maybe the closest thing today is a startup. I run one, so I may be biased, with the idea that “I do something special.” But it does force you to face reality and learn fast across disciplines. It is not art, though. Or I don’t know, what Steve Jobs did was art perhaps, but I am not there yet.