Patronage: the courage of choosing a long strategy

In the video, in Italian, I talk about the courage of those who choose a long strategic path and compare them to Renaissance patrons, quoting Aby Warburg. Here I tell the story of a contract signed in Florence in October 1485 and what it says, more than five centuries later, to a company that chooses to work with a strategist.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Aby Warburg, one of the greatest cultural historians of the twentieth century, wrote that the works of the Renaissance were born from mutual understanding between patrons and artists. They were not the result of an order, but of a negotiation. Of a dialogue.

The patron was not the one who paid. It was the one who had the courage to imagine something that did not yet exist. To invest time, resources and reputation in a project whose outcome they could not know.

Something similar happens in companies today. Whoever chooses a strategic path is betting on depth. They are giving up the quick fix in favor of a process that requires patience, presence and the ability to bear uncertainty.

Not everyone is willing to do it. Most prefer the visible result, the immediate return, total control over the process.

Whoever instead accepts complexity, whoever invests in the long term, is already expressing a vision. And that vision, even before any result, is already a form of positioning.

A contract signed in Florence on October 23, 1485

On October 23, 1485, Domenico Ghirlandaio undertook to paint an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi for the Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence’s foundling hospital. The contract set almost everything. The panel was to be colored and painted entirely by his own hand, following a drawing on paper; the blue had to be ultramarine, worth about four florins an ounce; delivery was due within thirty months, with a penalty of fifteen florins for delay. The price was 115 large florins, paid three a month, on one condition: that the work seemed worth it to Fra Bernardo di Francesco, the friar who had drawn up the agreement. The altarpiece is dated 1488.

A strategy’s patron does not buy a result: they agree to invest time and reputation in an outcome they do not know in advance.

The last clause is the one that strikes me most. The patron set everything that could be set, from pigments to deadlines, and left open the only thing that could not be fixed in advance: the value of the finished work. The art historian Michael Baxandall, who studied these contracts, opens his best-known book with a sentence that says it all: a fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship.

What Warburg wrote about Florentine patrons

Seventy years before Baxandall, Aby Warburg had looked at the same Florence from another angle. In his 1902 essay on the art of portraiture and the Florentine bourgeoisie, he studied the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita, frescoed by Ghirlandaio between 1483 and 1485. In one of the scenes, set in Piazza della Signoria, the patrons appear: the banker Francesco Sassetti with his son and, beside them, Lorenzo de’ Medici; on the stairs, Angelo Poliziano leads Lorenzo’s sons. The patron entered the painting, literally.

From that scene Warburg drew a trait of the whole age: a fundamental feature of early Florentine Renaissance civilization, he wrote, is that works of art owe their origin to the understanding, shared cooperation of patrons and artists, and are therefore in a sense the product of an interaction between the patron and the artist who carries out the work.

In the video I say “Renaissance.” Warburg is more precise and speaks of the early Florentine Renaissance: a city where bankers, merchants and painters knew each other, spent time together and discussed works while they were being made. The precision matters, because it describes a relationship possible only between people who talk to each other.

In fifteenth-century Florence a painting was born from a relationship between patron and artist, governed by precise contracts on materials, deadlines and payment.

From the price of blue to the value of the hand

Baxandall also notes a change over the century. The contracts of the early decades insist on precious materials, gold and ultramarine; as the years go by they mention them less, and more and more often ask for the painter’s skill. In 1487 Filippino Lippi’s contract for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella asks that the work be “tutto di sua mano, e massime le figure,” all by his own hand, and above all the figures.

The shift has a logic anyone who runs a company recognizes at once. Gold can be seen, weighed and paid for by weight: it is the guarantee of someone who cannot judge the work. Skill can be seen only when the work is finished, and paying for it means trusting your own judgment and the artist’s. The patron who asks for the master’s hand, and not just ultramarine, has learned to value what is not measured in ounces.

The patron learns to pay for the hand more than the material. It is the same shift I ask of those who choose a strategic path, and it also changes the way one thinks about what working with a business strategist costs. A document is the material, and it is worth little; what is worth something is the work of someone who thinks together with the company, month after month, until the choices become the way it works.

A strategy’s patron

The comparison in the video holds, with a correction that strengthens it. The Florentine patron had courage about the outcome, not about the conditions. He knew what he wanted, by when and at what price, and accepted not knowing what he would see at the end.

A strategy engagement works the same way. The conditions are set: the length, usually a year, the presence of the owners, regular meetings, the criteria for choosing. What stays open is the result, which is read over the months. When a business owner calls me to tell me what to do, and wants total control over the outcome too, I weigh the request before accepting: the work works when it starts from a real two-way dialogue, as in Florence.

Choosing the long term over the immediate return is already a stand taken by the company.

Many Italian companies were born from a gesture of this kind. A founder who invested years in a product without knowing whether the market would want it, a family that chose to stay in its region when leaving would have paid, a company that gave up a big order so as not to lose itself. These are a patron’s choices, and the identity of those companies often comes from there.

This choice says something about the company even before it produces results. A company that agrees to work in depth, and to bear uncertainty for months, is already telling its customers and its people what kind of company it wants to be. Helping a company make this choice, and hold to it in the months when results cannot yet be seen, is an important part of the work on direction and priorities. Florence, after all, left us its works also because someone wanted them without knowing how they would turn out.

What to do and what not to do

• Set the conditions of the work in writing: length, presence of the owners, meetings, criteria.
• Leave the result open, and judge it over the months, not at the first meeting.
• Pay for the work of the person who thinks with the company, not for the final document.
• Do not ask a strategist for total control over the outcome.
• Do not choose the quick fix to avoid uncertainty: the uncertainty remains, only no one governs it.

Sources

• Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Clarendon Press, 1972 (the 1485 contract on p. 6). https://archive.org/details/paintingexperien00baxa
• Aby Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie” (1902), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Getty Research Institute, 1999 (Italian edition: La rinascita del paganesimo antico, ed. Gertrud Bing, translated by Emma Cantimori, La Nuova Italia, 1966).