Leonardo da Vinci mentions money and prices in his notebooks, almost in passing. He tells how much he paid gravediggers, for instance, and how much it costs to have your fortune told.
Leonardo counted money in lire, soldi and dinari:
- 1 lire = 20 soldi
- 1 soldo = 12 dinari
It is one soldo, two soldi.
Like the English pound, shilling and pence, these come from the Roman system of of libra, solidus and denarius. But the money in Italy lost its value far more quickly than in England so that by Leonardo’s time the soldi had pretty much the same value as Shakespeare’s penny.
The coins that Leonardo mentions (with their rough value in metric pennies, which have 0.5 grams of silver):
- ducat (120)
- florin (120)
- Rhenish florin (120)
- scudo (110)
- grossoni (40)
- lire (20)
- carlino (4-8?)
- soldo (1)
- dinari (0.083)
Ducats and florins were two crowns each ($26 in current money) , while a lire was a third of a crown.
The ducat was the gold coin of Venice, just as the florin was the gold coin of Florence. Both had 3.5 grams of gold and were accepted all over Europe. They are called “pieces of gold” in the Grimm stories.
The soldo and lire are silver coins. I put six lire to a florin, but in practice it was not that fixed. You might get anywhere between four to seven lire for a florin, depending on the going rate between silver and gold.
Leonardo generally got paid in ducats and florins. His income went up and down a lot, but in the long run he made about 50 to 100 ducats a year. That is equal to about a painting a year.
At the end of his life Leonardo worked for the king of France, who paid him 400 ducats a year. Compare that to Michelangelo, who got between 200 to 450 ducats for his sculptures.
One ducat was spending money for Leonardo, but for one of his students it was ten days’ pay.
In 1499, just before the fall of Milan, Leonardo had 600 ducats in the bank. In his will he gave his brother 400 ducats.
Some prices from his notebooks (in soldi):
225 a metre of velvet 140 bed 140 ring 120 to bury someone - bier, gravediggers, priests, the works 100 lined doublet 45 crockery 40 cloak 40 jerkin (up to 120) 40 pair of hose (up to 120) 30 for canvas 23 a metre of cloth (for a shirt) 22 gardener 21 sword and knife 20 anise comfits 20 cap 20 glasses 20 lock 18 for paper 16 for gravediggers to bury someone 13 shirt 13 jasper ring 11 sparkling stone 11 what a student of his could make in a day 11 to the barber 6 have your fortune told 5 pair of shoes (up to 14) 4 a dozen laces 3 rent a room for a day 3 melon 1 salad
See also:
I am writing a history of medieval Italy and I need a reliable source to convert Florentine currency around 1500 to the value in U.S. dollars in 2009.
What source did you use for this statement: “Ducats and florins were two crowns each ($26 in current money) , while a lire was a third of a crown.”?
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It is not at all an easy question. I use the price of silver and gold.
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Very interesting that Leonardo jot down the prices of various items.
Could you cite the exact source?
Kwan Choi
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ducat = 3.5 grams of gold = 26$??? one ducat = at least USD$150 even in todays 2014 depressed market, as gold was worth more in the renaissance than today a ducat was probably worth about 250$
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How many dinari in a florin, then?
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Reblogged this on Ca' d'Oro Salone and commented:
Money, money, money…
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[…] Source: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/money-in-leonardos-time/ and 1632.org/1632Slush/1632money.rtf […]
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[…] [3] https://abagond.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/money-in-leonardos-time/, consulted 01/04/2015 […]
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Thanks for this! I’m writing a novel set around this time, so I’m not too worried about tracking down your original sources – this is just very helpful for giving me a rough guideline.
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It’s pretty tricky to convert these coins by weight of gold to current U.S. dollars. I’d say it’s more useful to establish how much a factory working or an office clerk earned a month (or a year). So from what I am reading here, an average clerk would have earned 1 to 2 florins or ducats a month? Does that sound right?
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@ Norbert Haupt
That sounds about right.
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26$ = 1 ducat??? That yearly wage though for someone like Leonardo da Vinci, 1300$ to 2600$, at most 10,400$ paid by the French king himself… Well I guess that makes sense when a room just cost 0.65$ a day to rent and you could get a sword and a knife for just over 4$. Maybe the 26$ estimate needs an adjustment?
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I once had to answer this sort of puzzle for a project, and here is how I did it. Instead of using grams of gold or silver, which were not relatable to my audience, I compared the average wages of skilled tradespeople, since a carpenter now does much what a carpenter did then, against the cost of such staples as bread and milk and beer. Using that yardstick I could set equivalents, though beer was much cheaper then and milk much more expensive, or vice-versa (it was a long time ago) so using the “milk standard” gave very different results from using the “beer standard.”
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Richard Goldthwaite is an expert on the economy of Florence in the Renaissance, although I don’t have them in front of me, a couple of his books have graphs and equivalencies of currencies.
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