Tommaso Portinari
Tommaso Portinari (c.1424? – 1501) was an Italian banker for the
Career
Portinari was an
He was the defendant in Ruffini v. Portinari in 1455,[2] one of the first legal cases to deal with separation of partnerships and legal liability: he was sued by the Milanese Damiano Ruffini for "defective packing of nine bales of wool bought by the plaintiff from the Medici branch in London. The defendant pointed out that the bales never belonged to the Bruges branch and that the plaintiff should sue the London branch." Portinari testified that the two branches were legally and commercially separate, apparently persuading the judge who denied Ruffini's suit, but upholding his right to sue the manager of the London branch.
Portraits
While at the height of his career, he had himself memorialized in religious paintings. One, the
Financial problems with the sale of
In popular culture
- He is a secondary character in Niccolò Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett, where he is one of a number of bankers' assistants in Bruges in 1459. An ostrich intended as a ducal gift eats the rings off his fingers.
Footnotes
- ISBN 0393058271.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). www.law.umich.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 May 2005. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ "In 1496 Portinari was among the negotiators of the Intercursus Magnus, the great treaty which for many years was to regulate commercial intercourse between England and the Low Countries." de Roover (1966).
References
- De Roover, Raymond Adrien (1948), The Medici Bank: its organization, management, and decline, New York: New York University Press – Largely a reprint of three articles De Roover published in The Journal of Economic History
- De Roover, Raymond Adrien (1963), The rise and decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494, Harvard studies in business history no. 21, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press – A complete rewrite of the above book, based on original research in the Florentine archives
Further reading
- Koster, Margaret L. (March 2003), "New Documentation for the Portinari Altar-Piece", The Burlington Magazine, 145 (1200): 164–79, JSTOR 3100633 – Koster posits that de Rover misrepresents the facts of Portinari's life, citing the Portinari family archives she discovered in the Archivio di Statoin Florence