Francesco Sassetti

Francesco Sassetti was the general manager of the Medici Bank for nearly three decades — which sounds like a straightforward career until you understand what the Medici Bank actually was in the 1460s and 70s. It was less a financial institution than a sovereign power operating without a flag. It held the papal account. It moved money across eight countries. Kings owed it favors. Sassetti ran all of it from Florence, and he ran it badly enough that by the time Lorenzo de' Medici finally pushed him aside in 1490, the bank's northern branches were collapsing one after another like dominos in slow motion.

The Lyon branch. The Bruges branch. The London branch. Each one hemorrhaging money through a combination of bad loans to unreliable aristocrats and, in the case of Bruges, a manager named Tommaso Portinari who Sassetti trusted far too long and who made spectacularly catastrophic decisions that would have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Sassetti was paying attention to other things. Specifically, he was paying attention to his own legacy, his image, his posthumous reputation — the 15th-century Florentine equivalent of obsessing over how you'll be remembered.

This is where the chapel comes in. Sassetti commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint the family chapel in Santa Trinita between 1483 and 1486, and what Ghirlandaio produced was something genuinely strange: a fresco cycle depicting the life of Saint Francis that somehow also contained detailed portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, various Florentine luminaries, and Sassetti himself, kneeling, in the presence of the divine. It was devotion and social climbing stitched into the same image. The frescoes are extraordinary. They are also a document of a man trying to paint himself into a version of history more flattering than the one the ledgers were writing.

What the ledgers wrote was damning. Historians examining Medici Bank records have traced much of the institution's late-century decline directly to Sassetti's supervisory failures — his reluctance to discipline branch managers, his preference for personal loyalty over financial oversight. He died in 1490, the same year his tenure officially ended. The bank outlasted him by four years, barely.