The Economy in Leonardo Da Vinci's Time

HISTORICAL HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS WORKING PAPER SERIES HHB working papers are circulated for discussion purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed by external referees or been subject to the review by the HHB Advisory Board. You can copy, download or print HHB content for your own use, and you may include excerpts from HHB publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgment of HHB as source and copyright owner is given. All requests for commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to [email protected]. Comments are welcome and may be sent to [email protected]. Please cite this paper as: A’Hearn, B., Chianese, S. and Vecchi, G. (2019). ‘The Economy in Leonardo da Vinci’s Time’, HHB Working Paper Series, No. 17, May 2019, Rome. HHB Project Via Columbia, 2 00133 Rome Italy http://hhbproject.com/ © 2019 Historical Household Budgets All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit is given to the source. The Economy in Leonardo da Vinci’s Time Brian A’Hearn Pembroke College, University of Oxford Stefano Chianese University of Rome “Tor Vergata” Giovanni Vecchi University of Rome “Tor Vergata” May 2019 Abstract This paper presents the main economic features, in quantitative terms, of the society in which Leonardo Da Vinci lived from the second half of the 15th century to the early 16th century. Using data from Florence’s Land Register of 1427 combined with new data on the household budgets of Leonardo and of his family, the paper proposes two hypotheses. The first regards the importance of the demand for goods linked to art and culture. The city’s economic élite managed to appropriate about two thirds of the economy’s surplus for itself (i.e. what was left after the population had been guaranteed a minimum level of subsistence) and it showed a growing demand for luxury goods that permitted and incentivized the work of talented individuals of the time. In this context, Leonardo’s genius fell on fertile ground. The second hypothesis regards pre-industrial social mobility (upward mobility in particular): Leonardo’s household accounts support the theory that the economic fluidity of renaissance Florence may have been considerably greater than the literature on economic history would have us believe. Keywords: Renaissance; Tuscany; Florence; household budgets; living standards; economic inequality; social mobility. JEL classification: N01, N33, I30, D63. 1 Introduction What has economics to say about the Renaissance? One certainly feels an unease about reducing one of western civilisation’s great moments to the working of supply and demand; yet there is something in it. The supply of artistic and intellectual innovations may have been a cultural phenomenon, following its own internal dynamic. But even here the development of a commercial society, with its requirements for literacy and numeracy, its bustling cities and entrepreneurial spirit, and its links with trading partners throughout the known world, cannot have been without importance. And when it comes to the demand for art, architecture, and ideas, it is impossible to ignore the role of wealth, incomes, prices, and the market, properly the realm of economics. Leonardo’s Florence, and North-Central Italy more broadly, was an unusual time and place in preindustrial Europe. It offered an unparalleled concentration of wealth, which found its way into status competition, conspicuous consumption, and a market for cultural innovations. In this paper, inspired by the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, we therefore investigate two areas of interest. First, we describe, in quantitative terms, the main characteristics of the economy in Leonardo’s day, covering a timespan running from about 1450 to 1520. The methodological approach is mainly quantitative (and ‘cliometric’), thanks to the availability of new and fairly abundant micro- and macroeconomic data (Section 2). The second area of study involves estimating Leonardo’s standard of living, looking for confirmation in his own household accounts (Section 3). Our interest in Leonardo’s family budgets, which is all the more justified by this aspect of his life having been little examined as yet, provides us with the opportunity to look at two questions of wider interest (Section 4). The first is whether Leonardo was able to become one of the greatest geniuses of all time thanks to supply- side factors (‘Leonardo as the expression of the extraordinary level of culture reached in Florence in the 15th century’) or, on the contrary, thanks to economic factors on the demand side (‘Leonardo as a response to the growing demand for luxury and artistic goods by an élite appropriating the surplus of a thriving Florentine economy’). The second question deals with the issue of social mobility: Leonardo’s economic life does not, of course, allow us to make any statistical inferences, but it suggests or at least contributes to the hypothesis that, even in pre-industrial societies, merit and talent make 1 it possible to climb the social and economic ladder more easily than has been suggested by most of the historiography (Barone and Mocetti, 2018). 2 How prosperous was the economy in Leonardo’s time? The reconstruction of historical statistics covering several centuries has made much progress over the last few decades. Economic historians have tended to focus on macroeconomic indicators, typically those defined in national accounts systems, and they have given priority to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is neither an easy task at the empirical level, nor from the conceptual point of view. As regards the difficulty of finding suitable sources and data, there is not much to add to the problems listed by the pioneers of this discipline – time and technology have simply enabled the production of historical statistical series to accelerate. From the conceptual point of view, even if this not the occasion to go into detail, it is important to remember Fenoaltea’s (2018) claim that despite its name, GDP may not be a good measure of a nation’s total product, but only of a part, i.e. ‘predominantly market-oriented, paid-employment-generating economic activity’. The home production carried out by women, to give just one concrete example, is not included in the calculation of GDP. This is a very significant omission given that this indicator is used to study the distant past, when the economy was predominantly rural and women worked primarily in the home. With these caveats in mind, we shall begin this section by examining the estimates of Italy’s GDP over the last seven centuries. 2.1 Italy The long-term trend of Italy’s per capita GDP (see Figure 1) shows that there was substantial stagnation during the entire pre-unification period. There is a significant difference between the level of per capita GDP prevailing in the pre-industrial economy and the levels observed today – there has been a 13-fold increase, net of inflation. The scale used in Figure 1 obscures both the frequency and the intensity of annual variations. It should be borne in mind that although the Italian economy was probably ahead of its time, technologically speaking, in the early Middle Ages (Cipolla 1952), 2 Figure 1 – Italy’s per capita GDP, from 1300 to the present day. 40000 World Wars 30000 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) 20000 (2011 US$) (2011 GDP percapita GDP 10000 0 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 Year Source: for the years 1300-1860, the Maddison project. From 1861, estimates based on Brunetti et al. (2017). there were frequent famines, even within the same generation, and the same was true of wars, epidemics and numerous other calamities, the effects of which were clearly significant for the living conditions of the population. Figure 1 traces a long flat line that is a useful stylization to capture the radical change that took place with the advent of “modern economic development”, as described by Kuznets (1966), but it doesn’t do justice to the cyclical movements of the series. These can be seen by isolating the pre- industrial era (Figure 2). According to Figure 2, in Leonardo’s time, or, more precisely, at the time Leonardo was born, north-central Italy was the richest place in Europe: the place to be. Yet the graph shows a clear downward trend: decade after decade, despite an increase in the total GDP of the Italian economy, we observe a slow but inexorable decline in per capita GDP, as the former was accompanied by an even greater increase in the population, (Malanima 2006, 21). Despite this decline, Italy remained one of the most advanced countries until the mid-1700s. 3 Figure 2 – GDP per capita in selected European economies, 1300–1800. 3000 Britain 2500 Netherlands Italy 2000 1500 GDP percapita $(1990) GDP Sweden 1000 Spain 500 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 Source: A’Hearn (2014). The graph shows 3-year moving averages. 2.2 Tuscany To understand the living conditions that prevailed in the Tuscan economy at the time of the renaissance, Figure 3 makes a comparison with the situation four centuries later, immediately after unification in 1861. For this period, we have tolerably accurate estimates of GDP, according to which per capita GDP in the center-north was about €2,246 at 2013 prices (Brunetti et al. 2017). Today, the figure is more than 14 times greater! Other indicators for northern Italy paint a picture of considerable backwardness. Absolute poverty, defined by the standards of the day, stood at roughly 35% of the population, perhaps half of them in extreme poverty – unable even to purchase an adequate diet (Amendola et al.

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