Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici eventually disobeys that order, which is why he will later be reverently known as Cosimo pater patriae, father of his country. His dates are 1389 to 1464 which makes him the longest lived of our five wealthy men. Having survived brief imprisonment and exile, Cosimo takes the Medici bank to its maximum extension and profitability and moves decisively into politics to the point of more or less running the Florentine Republic. He is a friend to philosophers, architects and painters, a patron to the arts and benefactor of major public works. At his death the bank has already entered a decline from which it will never recover.

Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici came to be known as Piero the Gouty. Many male members of the Medici family suffered from gout, a hereditary form of arthritis involving painful and ultimately chronic inflammation of the joints. If Piero was the one singled out for the unhappy nickname, it was simply because he didn’t outlive his father long enough to be known for much else. To Piero, however, goes the merit, or blame, of establishing a principle of succession there where no succession should have been. Piero was head of the Medici bank by hereditary right, but there was no constitutional reason why he should have taken over from Cosimo as key man in the Florentine state. Frail, bedridden and bad-tempered, he was nevertheless more determined and effective than his republican enemies. Born in 1416, Piero ran the show for just five years before handing over the vast family fortune more or less intact to eldest son Lorenzo in 1469.

Lorenzo was to be known as Il Magnifico. So much for keeping out of the public eye. Just twenty when thrust into the limelight, he puts his eggs in other baskets than finance and commerce, allowing the family bank to slide into now irretrievable decline. Like his father and grandfather Lorenzo survives a major conspiracy and shows great skills of political manipulation. Unlike them, he aspires to the aristocracy, writes poetry (good poetry), and barely seeks to disguise a vocation for dictatorship. In 1492, unable, due to the gout, to visit his portly mistress, Lorenzo finally succumbs to a variety of ailments at the age of 43.

Last of the five, Piero di Lorenzo would all too soon be known as Piero the Fatuous. His father’s artistic achievements and pretensions to nobility proved less transferable as assets than the vast monetary wealth left by his great grandfather, now drastically diminished. Born in 1472, his only talent a flair for the game of Florentine football, Piero’s two years as head of the family were an unhappy parody of his father’s more effective manoeuvrings. He fled Florence, perhaps unnecessarily, as French troops approached the city in 1494. The family wealth was confiscated, the bank collapsed, and ten years later Piero confirmed his incompetence, or perhaps just bad luck, when he drowned crossing the Garigliano, a river north of Naples.

The trajectory, then, is clear enough. One hundred years. Five generations. A vertiginous rise of fortune, first economic, then political, in the hands of two most able administrators. A brief hinge period presided over by a grumpy, middle-aged man in bed. Then two and a half decades of political ascendancy predicated on a wealth that is rapidly disappearing. Followed by sudden and complete collapse. To which we might add that despite their different characters, our five Medici have certain traits in common beyond the gout. They were all ugly, the Magnificent spectacularly so. And they were avid collectors: of sacred relics and ceremonial armour, of manuscripts, of jewels, of cameos. The collecting habit, with its impulse toward control, order and possession, is akin to the spheres of both banking and art.