In Madrid, When Money-Counting Goes Artistic

A superb Prado exhibition looks in detail at tax collectors and moneylenders.

I f Marinus van Reymerswaele isn’t a marquee name in your town, don’t let it leave you red-faced. I’d never heard of him, either. As a brilliant, small exhibition at the Prado tells us, this Netherlandish painter is the inventor of an entirely new genre. Marinus (c. 1489–c. 1546) specialized in tax collectors and money changers. Marinus: Painter from Reymerswaele is the first exhibition dedicated to this enigmatic artist, whose work makes counting money an aesthetically delectable, even exotic adventure.

The Prado owns five of his 15 or so known paintings. It has borrowed work by the artist from the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, the San Fernando Academy in Madrid, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, its neighbor across the road. The exhibition is small, with only ten paintings, but it’s a tour de force of incisive research, focus, and revelation. It looks gorgeous, too, as do all the Prado’s shows.

It’s the zenith of common sense, too. The Prado is committed to blockbusters but also to focused shows of the work of little-known masters such as Marinus. There’s a big conservation aspect, too, as all the paintings in the show were analyzed and cleaned. It’s satisfying, old-fashioned art history.

The City Treasurer and His Wife, from 1535, belongs to the Prado and anchors the exhibition. It’s a big, bold painting, 31 by 42 inches, about two people immersed in money. The picture often appears in economics textbooks. It’s easily read, and there isn’t much Old Master art about money in which someone isn’t going to hell. Coins, a money bag, a weight box, a weight, and an account book are meticulously painted. Both figures are intensely focused on money, though the man surely was most attentive to his hat when he got dressed that morning. The couple is middle-aged and not unattractive. They’re prosperous, but they work for a living. They’re entirely secular. There’s nothing religious in the picture. It’s about money and work.

Marinus’s style is obsessively linear, with hands and faces painted with minute precision. He used tiny brushstrokes of dark hatches and white highlights to create a look of relief that’s more compelling and more dynamic since his subjects aren’t conventionally beautiful.

Marinus worked primarily in Antwerp and seems to have specialized in money handlers, though he painted St. Jerome, too. He’s part of a group of artists in the circle of Quentin Massys (1466–1530) who are Netherlandish realists painting crisply finished and intricate religious paintings, portraits, and scenes of everyday life. They worked at a time when each genre was changing to accommodate a new class of affluent, bourgeois buyers rather than only the rich.

The arrangement of art in the galleries is spacious, with meaty labels that give us a good sense of place and time. In the late 15th century, with a deep port and access to English, French, Burgundian, and what is now northern-German cities, Antwerp boomed. This created a new, immense art market to meet the demand for fancy goods. The art market in Antwerp was structured, accidentally or by design, to promote creativity. The artists’ guild took most comers. Other cities had artist guilds designed to keep competition at bay.

In Antwerp, painters and sculptors in wood and stone belonged to the same guild, facilitating the exchange of ideas and creative matchmaking. And there was a big, central market for artists, clients, and browsers to meet.

This raises a good question. Is Marinus’s painting meant to satirize tax collectors and money handlers? The figures are, after all, often foppish and decidedly unhandsome, a formula that might, at least, evoke vanity. Once Marinus delivers one vice, might he not have suggested others, like avarice? If the art isn’t satire, is it religious? Behind virtue and vice are heaven and hell.

It’s an important question since the exhibition explores not only Marinus but the development of secular painting in Antwerp and its part of the world.

The exhibition parses the space between usury, which academics and clergy for hundreds of years considered a sin, and the reality of people working in credit markets essential to the new system we’d call capitalism. One challenge is that Marinus’s paintings of people in the money business are neither religious nor history paintings nor portraits of the rich, which were all established categories of art. They’re more like scenes of everyday life that might also be portraits of people in business, both entirely new genres.

The curators come down on the side of a new, uncritical genre centered on people in what we’d call the financial-services industry. Marinus’s figures are focused and calm. He’s fascinated by coinage, which he paints exactingly. His coins are from half-a-dozen realms, evoking Antwerp’s internationalism as a hub. Weights and boxes propose a scrupulous and uniform system of accounting. In The City Treasurer and His Wife, coins from Portugal, Spain, France, Bohemia, and Guelders propose a stable economic system organized by central governments with a practical, beneficial impact on the local level.

There are dozens of documents in Marinus’s pictures, which the curators translated from Middle Dutch. Paper money didn’t exist then, but there were paper instruments for transferring capital.

We feel we can walk into Marinus paintings in part because of their hyperrealism but also because everything is familiar. Even in today’s virtual world, there’s plenty of paper, and we might not use inkwells and weights, but we’re well aware of our own infrastructure for communicating with others or for our own accounting of money. There’s nothing menacing about the environment. His figures have faces that are worn and craggy. They aren’t frightening, though, or grimacing or mean. Marinus’s St. Jerome in His Study, for instance, is no more or less intense or menacing than Marinus’s money handlers.

Sections in the show and book consider fashion in Marinus’s art. In studying The Tax Collectors, from 1535, the curators examine hat styles, finding them old-fashioned but not sharp and not gaudy. Would you rather have a money manager who wears an old three-piece pin-striped suit or one dressed in 2021 bleeding-edge style, wearing a beanie, a tunic decorated with car emojis, and loafers with foot-long titanium tassels?

Marinus’s Calling of St. Matthew, from 1530, is illuminating, too. Matthew was a tax collector who famously renounced his profession and bourgeois life to join Jesus’s crusade. But is this a renunciation scene? Yes and no. Later in the 16th century, we learn, religious scholars and painters focused on St. Matthew’s conversion, usually through dramatic renunciation like the ones Caravaggio painted in Rome in 1599 and 1602.

Marinus’s scene, the show argues, hasn’t reached that boiling point but, rather, suggests Jesus’s admonition to “render under Caesar what is Caesar’s.” For Marinus, paying taxes isn’t a bad thing. Good archival research tells us not who bought Marinus’s work but, through inventories, who owned some of it in the generation or so after his death. Two owners were tax collectors, suggesting they saw his work as entirely complimentary.

The City Treasurer, from 1530, is, the exhibition tells us, still a question mark, suggesting how easy it might have been for Marinus to tweak his compositions to present a moralizing dichotomy. Here, the figure in the red, ruffled headdress is absorbed in recording the payment of annuities on behalf of the city of Antwerp. He’s more likely the embodiment of the Christian man of virtue. The younger man next to him does nothing but gesture to the viewer. His headgear is à la mode and green as opposed to the contrasting red of the older man. These juxtapositions suggest a counter-image illustrating the vice of avarice.

Like lots of good art history, the Prado’s show is a detective story. By the 18th century, Marinus had been forgotten. Not a single record of a Marinus painting from the artist’s lifetime exists, not a receipt, not a line in an account, not a letter from a moneylender to Mom saying, “Gee, just got my portrait painted by this dude Marinus.” That the town of Reymerswaele doesn’t exist any more makes for a problem. It’s what the Dutch call a “drowned land,” flooded so often that by the 1630s everyone called it quits. Most of its archives, which might have made Marinus studies easier, are underwater.

In the 1860s, as art history focusing on his era developed, scholars deciphered his signature on a group of paintings with similar subjects and paint handling, prying him from the sea of unknown artists in the circle of Antwerp heavyweights Massys and Joachim Patiner (1480–1524).

For years, scholars thought Marinus was not only a painter but a zealot Puritan who, in 1566, was a leader in that year’s Iconoclastic Fury and the riots that trashed churches in Middleburg in the Netherlands. He was quickly banished. The exhibition establishes that there were two men with the same name, one the artist and the other the rock-throwing, bad-tempered kook.

This discovery matters, since views of Marinus’s work as indictments of money lending drew in part on the presumption that he was an extremist. Adri Mackor, one of the catalogue essayists, discovered the artist Marinus’s college transcript from 1504 from Leuven University. Marinus, we learn from Mackor’s research, was a scholarship student and excelled in Latin and law. Mackor traced Marinus from that point through his ownership of several houses, moves after Reymerswaele was inundated in 1540, and his two marriages. In 1547, his second wife was called “the widow of Marinus” when she purchased a house. Soon after that, Marinus’s children went to an orphanage.

Mackor did superb archival research, discovering in out-of-the-way places the handful of documents tracing Marinus’s life and establishing that, since Marinus seems to have died before 1547, he could not have been a window-smashing 76-year-old zealot in Middleburg in 1566.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Alice Neel show at the Met. I said the curators drop terms like “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy” as if that’s art history, but it’s just sloganeering. In the Marinus show, the Prado’s curators display what art history is at its best, and that involves a bit more effort. I also wrote about a rambling, not entirely useful exhibition on Homer and Remington.

I think no one will be looking at the Met’s Neel catalogue after a year or so, since there’s nothing new in it. The Marinus book will be a resource for this artist and that period for years.

Marinus used a quill, not a brush, to paint the abundant writing in his work, whether in documents on a desk, account books, or sheets framed or pinned to walls. He is clearly a master of cursive script. It’s visually elegant, but it’s not only decorative. The curators translated its Middle Dutch. Many of the transactions actually occurred among people they could trace through archives. The use of text in art isn’t something Picasso and Braque invented, and what Marinus does isn’t exactly what Dürer did in combining biblical texts and images. Marinus seems to suggest there’s an art in handling money.

It’s creative, but it’s also artifice, like the money business.

Contemporary comments about Marinus’s work in letters from the 1560s and 1570s — there were no art critics in those days — find the paintings to be witty takes on occupations that weren’t exactly white-shoe but were, all the same, necessary to a mercantile economy. These paintings were often copied by artists who sharpened wit into satirical sting. In this way, neutral or even complimentary work done by Marinus assumed a moralizing take on usury, avarice, and Jews in business.

There’s a small section in the exhibition on Marinus’s technique, essential in identifying work he did himself and subsequent copies or rip-offs. This section is helpfully and thoroughly expanded in the catalogue. The material at first seems the stuff of insiders, but I think everyone with a speck of connoisseurship would enjoy not necessarily all the minutiae the curators pursued but the idea of meticulous inquiry.

Planks of wood and tree rings together inform age and authorship. The City Treasurer and His Wife, from 1524, and The Money Changer and His Wife, from 1533, are painted on panels from the same tree, for instance. The technique chapter in the book also examines Marinus’s colors and his use of grids and tracings. Marinus probably painted multiple versions of subjects that had some demand. Grids and tracings helped him make these new versions quickly and think about how he could accommodate a client’s wish for special features. It’s great stuff.

Christine Seidel is the curator of the show. She’s a specialist in this field at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and got a fellowship from the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation to study Marinus’s work at the Prado. This foundation does fantastic work and has a brilliant new art space in Madrid for its own outstanding art collection. Mitsubishi and the Friends of the Prado supported the exhibition itself and paid for the English-language catalogue. It’s a collaboration of the very highest quality.