FLORENCE, Italy—“It is a good thing to earn money, but even better is knowing how to spend it,” Giovanni Rucellai said in 1475.
As a merchant who became a patron, he entered the city’s history, along with some Florentine families—not for the enormous wealth he had accumulated, but for spending his money on the arts and culture of the Renaissance.
The art exhibit Money and Beauty—subtitled Bankers, Botticelli, and the Bonfire of the Vanities—in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, is in its last weeks. The exhibit tells the story of the global banking system and how the money overwhelmed the society of the time, for better or worse.
Money and Beauty are “two elements that seem antithetical and incompatible, but that, ultimately, through the commission, can be reconciled,” said Ludovica Sebregondi, art historian and curator of the exhibition.
Works were meticulously chosen by Sebregondi and arranged by architect Luigi Cupellini: coffers, bills of exchange, first-account records, and golden florins, the 24-carat pure-gold coins weighing 3.53 grams and produced by the Mint of Florence in 1252, from where everything began.
Protestant Flanders
Paintings by Flemish masters depicting the deeds of usurers are centrally positioned in the exhibit. Usurers were an entirely new figure in the European social structure at that time. In the paintings, their faces and bodies are visibly warped by their obsession with money.
In Van Reymerswaele’s “The Usurers,” what stands out are “the piercing hands, strong shadows, [their] watching their money in the middle, with the candle half-consumed, a symbol of vanitas, and in their faces the personification of that saying ’the money is the devil’s excrement,'” Sebregondi said, interpreting the body language used by the Dutch painter.
