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YALE UNIVERSITY PURCHASES
RENAISSANCE ARCHIVE
Yale University has recently purchased
from a Swiss book dealer a large trove of
Italian Renaissance manuscripts forming
the archive of the Spinelli banking family
of Florence. The price was not announced.
Until 1920, the documents had been
housed in the 500-year old palace of the
Spinelli's in Florence. Included in the
150,000 documents in the archive are
business records and extensive correspondence
between the Spinellis and
many of the major figures of Renaissance
Italy, including Loren2o and Cosimo De'
Medici, several Popes, and many leading
merchant families. The sheer size of the
archive makes it the largest collection at
Yale, and the largest Renaissance archive
in the United States.
Although the materials consist largely
of accounting records, more than just accounting
historians will be interestd in
researching the archive since the Spinelli
bank was the treasurer for the Vatican.
Thus, many historians believe that the accounting
records will provide new information
on daily life during the
Renaissance and on the workings of the
Roman Catholic Church. A Yale professor
of history stated that account books such
as those in the archive are necessary to truly
understand the deal-making that went
on between the Church and those who
provided loans to the Church. It is believed
that these documents will yield new
light on the Vatican's financial activities.
It is almost unbelieveable that a collection
of such importance and covering such a
long period of time has survived the
ravages of rodents, floods, war, and time.
Since the account books cover a period
of five hundred years, it will be possible
to trace changes in the environment of
Europe, including such things as the progression
from a barter economy to a
money economy and the growth of
capitalism. In addition to the banking
records, the archive includes records from
many of the Spinelli family businesses. In
addition, cliometricians should find the
archive interesting in that 500 years of
numbers can be fed into a computer and
analyzed in limitless ways.
The Spinelli palace in Florence was next
to the home of Giorgio Vasari, the noted
painter, architect and historian of Italian
art. Vasari studied with Michaelangelo
and appears in a famous painting with
Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Luca Pacioli
(see the Spring, 1988, issue of The Accounting
Historians Notebook for a picture
of the painting). Vasari is best known
for his book entitled Lives of the Artists.
It seems that the Spinellis were the executors
of the Vasari estate and owned
thousands of Vasari's personal records. In
fact, Vasari's last will has already been uncovered
in the collection. The will lists all
of the paintings in Vasari's collection including
works by Botticelli, Leonardo,
Raphael and Durer. It should be recalled
that Vasari was one of the more influential
authors who spread the allegation that
Luca Pacioli had plagiarized much of his
material from Piero della Francesca. Thus,
it is possible that materials in the archive
could turn up new information on Pacioli
himself. For instance, documents in the
collection may explain Vasari's reasoning
as to how Pacioli plagiarized della
Francesca.
Given the possibilities, all accounting
history scholars with a working knowledge
of Latin and early Italian should plan to
examine the papers at Yale. The collection
is in the process of being catalogued.
The first portion of the archive was made
available in January, 1989.
10 The Accounting Historians Notebook, Spring, 1989