ABSTRACT

Two pictures and a proverb together pose the question addressed in this chapter. The two paintings are the familiar The Moneychanger and his Wife by Quenten Massys (Figure 8.13) and The Banker and His Client, a frequently copied painting of Massys, now lost, but perhaps best known in the version by Marinus van Reymerswaele. Both issue from early sixteenth-century Antwerp, even though the subjects are clad in fashions of the mid-fifteenth century, harking back perhaps to an earlier composition.1 In each painting, a scene from the business life of a banker/moneychanger is depicted: in one the moneychanger is picking and culling coins, while his wife looks on over the folios of a book of hours.2 In the other, a banker and his customer are interrupted as an entry is being made in the ledger: as in the former painting, coins are prominently displayed. There is a remarkable shift in tone from the first painting to the second; where the first represents moral choice and ambiguity, where good is still a possibility, the second is “aggressively ugly,” satirical and condemnatory. “Secular satire has become the new form of sermonizing, where instruction in the good emerges from the hostile presentation of the vicious.”3 In other words, both paintings depict the profession of banking as morally ambiguous at best, and as evil and corrupting at worst.