While journeying through “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” at the Morgan Library, take care not to fall at the first hurdle. Just inside the exhibition entrance is a glinting pile of coins from a late-fourteenth-century hoard found in Chalkis, Greece. These torneselli, forged from copper-silver alloy and stamped with the lion of St. Mark, were used for everyday transactions in the Republic of Venice’s Greek colonies.
After admiring the seductive shimmer of this loose change, visitors will encounter a quote on a nearby wall panel from Petrarch’s Remedies and Fortune Fair and Foul (1360): “The shape of money is noxious, its glitter poisonous and destructive. Like a golden serpent it delights with shiny scales, pleases the eye and strikes the soul.” Touché, Francesco. (The poet, a passionate collector of ancient Roman coins, perhaps felt this pull more keenly than any of us.)
Arranged by themes both faintly terrifying (“Will Money Damn Your Soul?”) and encouraging (“Moral Responses to Money”), this exhibition of illuminated manuscripts, paintings, stone carvings, merchants’ tools, and other artifacts reveals how people thought about wealth in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, which saw a massive growth in coin production, international trade, and banking, all propelled by an industrious and newly ascendant mercantile class. Artists and writers grappled with the age-old sin of avarice while participating in a monetary economy that revolved increasingly around commerce, investment, and banking.
The objects in the first room—“Your Money or Your Eternal Life?”—present a stark choice between God and Mammon. Death and the Miser (ca. 1485–90), a Hieronymus Bosch oil painting of a gaunt man on his deathbed, draws from Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), a popular fifteenth-century tract on avoiding temptation at the end of life. Competing for the Miser’s attention in the painting is a crucifix hanging in a window and a small demon brandishing a moneybag at the edge of the mattress. An enrobed skeleton, Death, creeps through a doorway clutching a thin arrow. The end is nigh: will the Miser take notice of the angel who gestures upward toward the sunlight-bathed image of Christ? Or will he think only of money and fall into the Devil’s grasp?
At the foot of the bed sits a strongbox. For comparison, the curators have displayed beside the painting an eight-hundred-pound steel example, complete with a sophisticated nine-bolt locking mechanism. In the foreground, Bosch paints a slightly younger Miser dropping a coin into a pot of money held by a rodent-like demon inside the coffer. Hanging from the Miser’s cloak are both a rosary and the strongbox’s key, emphasizing his torn loyalties.
Artists often used the motif of a strongbox or moneybag to signify greed. If medieval Christians could not follow the example of Saint Anthony or Saint Francis and take a vow of poverty, they were still expected to donate excess money to the poor or use it in other fruitful ways, rather than storing it up where “moth and rust destroy.” A man personifying avarice in a fifteenth-century book of hours, for example, carries a moneybag on his waist belt and carelessly empties gold coins from another onto the ground. In a twelfth-century limestone relief from a church in Limousin, France, a man mimics prayer while kneeling on a strongbox as a demon places a hand on his shoulder, sealing an unholy pact. The drawstring of a moneybag hangs like a noose around the man’s neck, alluding to the suicide of Judas, known then as mercator pessimus, the worst possible merchant, for betraying Christ—thereby foregoing eternal life—for a comparably worthless sack of silver. The moneybag-as-noose motif reappears in a fourteenth-century manuscript illustration depicting the fate of usurers (naked, on burning sand, rained on by fire) in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The parables of Jesus were a common source of wisdom on monetary matters. Images of the Prodigal Son warn against spending money on sinful frivolities, as does a stained-glass window depicting the related figure of Sorgheloos, a character from Netherlandish morality plays who ends up destitute due to his own folly. In both a twelfth-century limestone carving from Burgundy and a sixteenth-century book of hours illustrated by Jean Poyer, we see contrasting scenes from the Parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in which the former refuses the leprous beggar crumbs from his table and is later tortured in hell as Lazarus enters heaven.
It is not all fire and brimstone, however. Medieval artists, we learn, were just as ready to celebrate liberality as they were to condemn greed. The virtues of generosity and charity—which presumably included paying for gilded manuscripts and church decorations—are extolled in some of the most beautiful objects on display. A sixteenth-century prayer book of Queen Claude of France, for example, depicts King Louis IX distributing alms to paupers, while a page in a richly colored book of hours from the fifteenth century shows the Magi offering gifts to the newborn Christ.
Later sections delve into the material culture of commerce. We see coins, a balance and weights, and the remarkably well-preserved goatskin binder of Lanfredino Lanfredini, one of the wealthiest Florentine bankers. There are also several merchant portraits, including one by Jan Gossaert. Though by 1200 the sin of usury was understood as charging excessive interest on a loan—reasonable percentages were considered fair compensation for shouldering risk—amassing wealth without physical labor was still treated with suspicion. Merchants were understandably anxious to advertise their skills in literacy and numeracy and burnish their reputations for fairness. Gossaert’s portrait thus contains many writing instruments but only a few coins, positioned next to a balance to suggest honesty.
Of the images of unscrupulous merchants on display, several contain disturbing anti-Semitic elements. As the historian Steven A. Epstein explains in the catalogue, medieval Jews in northern Europe were excluded not only from agriculture, but also from guilds of bankers and money changers, leaving them to pursue only the riskiest forms of moneylending, such as pawnbroking. They were often the target of damning caricatures, such as a sixteenth-century illustration of a tale that supposedly took place in the thirteenth. In the scene, a woman pawns a consecrated host for a dress; the Jewish pawnbroker stabs the wafer, causing it to bleed. Later in the story, he attempts to destroy it in other ways. While the host survives unscathed, the man is burned at the stake.
The image also points toward the anxieties surrounding the doctrine of transubstantiation at the time of the Reformation. Hanging nearby are examples of indulgences, the controversial ecclesiastical permits relieving sinners of punishments in purgatory which could be bought and sold, provoking the ire of Martin Luther and other reformers.
While that particular debate has thankfully cooled, discussions about “income inequality” remain as heated as ever. The internal fight against envy and greed, too, rages on. For an exhibition on the Middle Ages, “Medieval Money” is surprisingly relevant.