In 1525, the market price of a tapestry like “Honor” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.396) – made for Érard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liège – would approximate 108 years of a laborer’s wage. A long-running installation at The Met, Relative Values: The Cost of Art in the Northern Renaissance (2017-2022) – curated by this reviewer – presented sixteenth-century hierarchies of worth by comparing prices gleaned from contemporaneous sources and converting all to a shared “currency” of milking cows. But were early modern patrons cognizant of these cavernous discrepancies of wealth and earnings, of the Haves and the Have-Nots? How exactly did sixteenth-century Europeans feel about the accumulation of wealth and expenditure of money, not just on art but across society’s spectrum? This is the gnarly topic tackled by guest curator Diane Wolfthal, with in-house curator Deirdre Jackson, in a recent exhibition and accompanying publication at The Morgan Library: Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality.

The Middle Ages heralded marked changes in the perception of money-matters and money-making in Europe. Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality reminds us that, although earning interest, whether by moneylending or investment, remained essentially sinful, already in the thirteenth century Dominicans like Thomas Aquinas and Franciscans including Peter Olivi acknowledged a grey area, conceding that money earners could gain grace through their contributions to the prosperity of Christian society. The early 1390s saw the implementation of Bologna’s Monte di pubbliche prestanze (“consolidated public loans’ fund”); in 1425, Florence’s Monte delle doti was created as a charity to raise dowries for the poor, chiefly funded by the city’s rich merchants. At the same time, trade and currency exchange – fiscal activities that had existed for millennia – were revolutionized by the introduction of hand-written bills of exchange, the versatile system of trust-based funding and payment which grew to eclipse the heavy, dirty, dangerous practice of carrying and swapping coinage. How to reconcile these seismic shifts with Church teaching, for whom money had always been the root of all evil? Cue an abundance of image and text pitting Avarice against Charity; the deathbed accounting of sinful accumulation versus philanthropy; warnings against the temptation to fund other sinful behaviors like gambling or prostitution; the thorny notion of purchasing indulgences for forgiveness of sins and the profits of the pardoners who sold them; and the fine line between banking and moneylending, the latter with its ever-present, nasty undertones of antisemitism.

This jewel of a show presented these themes across four spaces within The Morgan’s Engelhard Gallery, transformed by clever design to subtly evoke the spatial rhythms, apertures, and low ceilings of a merchant’s home. Opening with an eloquent juxtaposition of a horde of Venetian coins (one of many loans from the American Numismatic Society) and a massive Bavarian strong box (from The Met), the first section, “Your Money or Your Eternal Life?,” introduced what the curators deem “the tension between material gain and spiritual fulfilment.” Here, Hieronymus Bosch’s Death and the Miser (National Gallery of Art) rewarded close viewing with its miniature lurking demons and terrifying Death come to meet the dying miser who is comforted by an angel, urging Christian intervention via the tiny crucifix at the window. The second section, “Will Money Damn Your Soul?,” included one fifteenth-century French book of hours (Morgan Library Ms. M.1001) with a representation of Mammon so harrowing that a user scratched out most of Mammon’s name from his banderole in a primitive bid to exorcise his lure. Highlights in the third section, “Moral Responses to Money,” included the tiny Hours of Queen Claude de France (Morgan Ms. M.1166), open to a pair of engaging miniatures showing Saint Anthony in the Desert across from Saint Louis Giving Alms. A magnificent, and enormous, mid-fourteenth century, illuminated indulgence document (Morgan Ms. M.697) was displayed beside a much smaller, single-page, printed indulgence from London of 1508 (Morgan, PML 18221). The fourth and final section, “The Culture of Commerce,” shifted gears slightly away from moral dilemmas to a detailed look at portraits and material accoutrements of European mercantile life. Particularly engaging was the display of the Avignon minters and coiners’ Oath of Office, ca. 1411 (Morgan Ms. M.300), alongside one of the coins, a silver Cerlino (another loan from the American Numismatic Society), minted in Avignon in the same decade by those same coin-makers who had used the manuscript at its inception. Two volumes of the always-satisfying Hours of Catherine of Cleves (Morgan Ms. M.917/945) were on view; the extraordinary folio with Saint Gregory the Great surrounded by a border of trompe l’œil coins here given new resonance by a clever display alongside the actual coins represented (American Numismatic Society).

The curators are to be highly commended in their ability to corral this potentially ever-overwhelming theme – faith and the economy! – into a coherent, contained, and thought-provoking snapshot of the intersection of sacred and secular belief systems in a smallish corner of Europe over the course of roughly two hundred years. Subtly shifting wall colors from red ochre through soft blue and purple to green helped define transitions in the exhibition’s narrative. Sight lines through windows from one gallery space into the next rewarded the visitor, as when two monumental pieces of limestone sculpture – a relief depicting Avarice (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and a Dives and Lazarus capital (Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania) – were glimpsed as if from inside the merchant’s home of the final section. Although essentially showcasing splendid, mostly French, Netherlandish, and Italian, fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century manuscripts from The Morgan’s own collection, the exhibition was articulated by very well-chosen loans of panel paintings (including the engaging Saint Francis Renouncing his Worldly Goods, attributed to the Master of Saint Augustine, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Fra Angelico’s jewel-like Saint Anthony Shunning the Mass of Gold from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), prints (Dürer from The Met, Holbein from the National Gallery of Art), and surviving objects (like an iron and leather purse from The Met and a seventeenth-century German boxed balance and weights from the American Numismatic Society).

The accompanying publication does not claim to be an exhibition catalogue, though almost every exhibit is illustrated somewhere within it. That said, a checklist appendix would have provided a welcome record of this elegant show. The book covers broader ground than the exhibition. Deirdre Jackson’s introduction, ambitiously seeking to contextualize “The Origins and Uses of Money,” does an admirable job, starting in 1750 BCE, covering cowrie and wampum, bride-money and blood-money, spanning the globe from the Americas to Syria, Lydia, Africa and China, and engagingly quoting Marco Polo’s fascination with paper money. The second essay, Steven A. Epstein’s “The European Economy, 1200–1500,” is also ambitious in scope; indeed, Epstein somewhat shirks this stated range with his opening parry that “Europe is a geographical term defining no coherent sphere of late medieval economic and social history” (p. 21). The third essay, “Coinage and Medieval Monetary Systems,” by David Yoon, is a detailed analysis of the physical properties of coins: how and where they were made; why they look the way they do. Yoon provides fascinating insight about merchants’ handbooks filled with information about types of coins, reminding us that “calculations of currency exchange were the most common problems taught in medieval arithmetic textbooks” (p. 52). The final five chapters, written by Diane Wolfthal, pull the book back to the main themes of the exhibition: “Your Money or Your Eternal Life?”; “Will Money Damn Your Soul?”; “Can Money Save Your Soul?”; “Merchants and the Material Culture of Money”; “Money Management.” Though lacking some of the crisp coherence of the show, these chapters reward with a plethora of visual and textual sources, and more detailed discussion of many of the works displayed at The Morgan.

A twenty-first century foil to the fundamental publications of Peter Spufford (Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 1986; Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, 1988, among others), this book brings a wealth of contextual understanding to complement the objects and ideas in the exhibition itself. Along the way, the authors – often with engaging humor – remind us to disavow our present-day givens, whether it be Jackson’s breadcrumb thought-trail (the root of “pecuniary” being pecus, Latin for “cow”; “pay” taking its root from pacare – “to pacify, appease, or make peace with”), or Epstein’s ribcage nudges (“medieval universities contributed nothing to the prospects of a boom in technologies” [p. 27]; “the best thing medieval or early modern governments could have done to foster free markets and prosperity would have been to abolish the guilds” [p. 25]). Wolfthal reminds us how a magnificent fourteenth-century Parisian Avis aux Roys (Morgan, Ms. M.456) opined “There is none better than the middle way,” warning that the poor sinned in their jealousy of the rich, but that the rich were equally prone to sin through their oppression of the poor. Whatever their motivation, we can be grateful to medieval Europeans and their money dilemmas for generating such a treasure trove of art to study and enjoy.

Elizabeth Cleland
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York