Medieval Money Matters, from Macabre to Moral

A Morgan Library show reminds us that money paves the road to hell, then as now.

I’ ve written about the Morgan Library a half dozen times or so over the years. It’s an oasis and a treasure trove, never vapid, never fake, never preachy. It never sticks a codpiece in its trousers. It’s 100 this year and, correctly, the museum is reflecting on its past and tipping its hat to its audience of connoisseurs and art lovers. And no one needs a degree, much less a pedigree, to love art or to discern quality. A good eye and good taste help, as does an open mind, but the Morgan Library, as a place, soothes and heals. In frenzied Manhattan, you need to want that to enjoy it.

For the first time in a year or so, I visited last week, wanting to see what I knew would be delicious art but also to see how it projects itself. Money, the Bible, Tiepolo, and, of course, J. P. Morgan star. There’s a show on herbals for the crunchy.

Who is J. P. Morgan? It’s hard to feel safe when asking who knows what. Not too long ago, a friend’s daughter, a senior in college, told me she’d never heard of Greta Garbo. I was too bereft of speech to ask her who shot Lincoln. Morgan (1837–1913) was the Zeus of the American financial world during the Gilded Age, but he was also an art-history major. That’s my retort to anyone who ever says a degree in art history is useless. By the early 1890s, Morgan was collecting rare books, illuminated manuscripts, and Old Master prints and drawings. He also bought medieval ivories, tapestries, porcelain, and, along the way, a Raphael altarpiece.

Around 1902, he hired Charles McKim to design a library next to his house on Madison Avenue, and it had to be fit for a Renaissance prince. It’s still the anchor space of the museum and, with the Sorolla Room at the Hispanic Society, the grandest space in New York. The Morgan opened to the public in 1924.

I spent most of my visit in Medieval Money: Merchants and Morality, a Morgan-organized exhibition. It’s a smart launch of the Morgan’s 100th anniversary. The mogul Morgan made a ton of money and was a committed, devout Christian. He saw the acquisition of wealth and Christian ethics as overlapping affairs. And, of course, money makes Manhattan not only go round but spin like a happy, crazy top.

Money and commerce are not as old as humanity since Adam and Eve lived off the land, but both go way back together. The presence and force of money in daily life, though, grew in Europe after, say, 1200. How people perceived and used money depended as much on religious beliefs as access to capital. It’s a huge topic. The Morgan examines these themes mostly through art from its own collection, with some topical loans.

To draw from the Gospel of Luke, it’s easier for a rich man to get into Heaven than to thread this needle. The Morgan does a good job straddling realms. It introduces complexity, does a deep dive here and there, and, I think, leaves the visitor happy enough to visit the Morgan’s very good shop, as I did to buy the catalogue. I learned a lot. It requires close looking since many of the objects are illustrated books. I’m game for this, but the lighting wasn’t ideal for close looking, a function of the sensitivities of paper and pigment. I understand this, but it’s a problem for the visitor who’s there to see art.

Your money or your life? Your eternal life, that is. Death and the Miser, by Hieronymus Bosch, introduces the exhibition and frames the question. Death, in the form of a skeleton carrying a money bag, enters a miser’s bedroom. At the same moment, an angel asks the miser to pray to God for redemption. A crucifix pops through a window. Will he pick a life of money-grubbing or a moral life? Heaven on Earth, as money buys comfort and power, or an eternity in the Hot Place?

Bosch doesn’t tell us how the story ends, though we know the way of all flesh. St. Paul tells us in his letters to Timothy that money is the root of all evil, but Paul tells us a lot of things, and he spent more time than most think on fundraising. Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver was the ultimate display of avarice. The Morgan’s Hungarian Anjou Legendary — an illuminated book of stories about the saints from around 1330 — depicts Judas as a gruesome suicide, hanging from a tree as his soul flees from his mouth. I hope he likes toasted marshmallows.

I’m a sucker for medieval macabre. A limestone relief from 1125 offers up a man holding a money bag strangled by an imp. A money counter gets a visit from one of those flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. In the Book of Hours belonging to Catherine of Cleves, one of the Morgan’s great treasures, from 1440, a two-page spread shows a deathbed scene on the left and, on the right, the Beast of Hell, jaws agape. The naked sinners in his maw aren’t looking happy.

An 800-pound Nuremberg strongbox from around 1600 is, I have to say, impressive. The label describes how it was manufactured, but, more to the point, the thing tells us that a family’s fortune was normally in tangibles such as hard money, land, silver and gold, buildings, and farm animals. Banks existed but could go bust and sometimes did. Stock markets, IRAs, off-shore accounts, and hedge funds didn’t exist.

Of course, we can renounce wealth altogether, as Saint Francis of Assisi did. A painting by the anonymous painter known as Master of St. Augustine shows this son of a rich merchant stripping off his fancy clothes. Commendable but no fun, and the exhibition rightly moves to good and bad ways of making money and spending it. Usury — charging interest — was a medieval no-no until it became a no-but and, by, say, 1500, a giddy “yes we can.” I wish the exhibition had looked more closely on this evolution, which seems central.

“Thou shalt not charge interest” isn’t one of the Ten Commandments, but I can’t think of any human act beyond these ten core imperatives that the Bible denounces more often, more than homosexuality, more than divorce, more than eating a tasty pork loin. Usury was exploitation. It was robbery. A very early manuscript of Dante’s Inferno reminds us, if we need it, that usurers spent eternity naked in the Seventh Ring of Hell, pelted with fire, sharing the joint with sodomists, murderers, blasphemers, and suicides. Speculation and profiteering are wrong, too. It causes inflation.

Relaxing the moral and ethical bans on usury propelled western Europe’s social, economic, and political orders from feudalism to capitalism. It’s a big topic, one that the Strozzi Palace considered in its 2011 exhibition Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli, and the Bonfire of the Vanities. I don’t think that exhibition plumbed how interest — the cost of using money — became acceptable, but it’s a rich topic. Medieval Money tells us usury is wrong, but how did lending with interest become fine and dandy?

And then there are good ways to use money. I’ll skip living prudently, which the exhibition considers but, let’s face it, isn’t much fun, and jump into the economy of indulgences. Indulgences, sold by the Roman Catholic Church, were meant to cut the buyer’s time in Purgatory, but in reality, they financed the operations of bishops, cardinals, and popes. What an Establishment flimflam. A certified indulgence on display is as nifty as the strongbox. The 1343 certificate, on vellum and with a fancy fringe, is decorated with images of Mary, little Jesus, three saints, and symbols of the Evangelists. In the Latin text, three archbishops and 15 bishops guarantee the efficacy of the indulgence.

There’s charity, of course. Andrea di Bartolo’s Joachim and Mary Giving Food to the Poor and Offerings to the Temple, from around 1400, shows the couple — Mary’s parents — delivering bread to the lame and halt. It’s a lovely painting. The exhibition also displays Dürer’s Prodigal Son amid the Swine, an engraving from 1496, in this section. The Prodigal Son is the beacon light of money mismanagement. My, how the snotty, rich, entitled, know-it-all kid has fallen.

A French Book of Hours from around 1500 is opened to two pages depicting St. Matthew writing his Gospel and the Calling of St. Matthew. There’s next to nothing in the exhibition or the catalogue on taxation. Surely rich patrons groused about what they had to render unto Caesar, and surely churches resented greedy governments who took money that might have gone to them. Is taxation a good or bad use of money?

There are too many coins in the exhibition. Sometimes they make good points. For instance, minters were essential in protecting the integrity of hard money. A small section on their business was informative. They’re too small to see. A section on money purses ends the exhibition with a bit of a fizzle. Chanel’s crocodile-skin flap bags these aren’t.

Like all Morgan exhibitions, Medieval Money has high production values, but dark labels displaying dark type makes for legibility problems. The space feels too tight, though that’s the case with most of the exhibitions in this suite of galleries.

I’ve written about what the Bible says about money, but what was J. P. Morgan’s taste in Bibles? Morgan’s Bibles: Splendor in Scripture displays some of the grandest and rarest in his Bible collection in the context of his deep Christian identity and beliefs. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and other titans of industry are called “ruthless,” often by academics who couldn’t capitalize their way out of a roll of quarters. These men and others, and we’re all sinners, were also Christians and, in Morgan’s case, close readers of the Bible. Morgan wasn’t much into church rituals or dogma but, rather, looked to the Bible for inspiration and saw it as the foundation of the laws, culture, and economy of the English-speaking world.

Splendor in Scripture isn’t an exhibition about the Bible’s lessons but, rather, a show about exquisite bindings, biblical archaeology, evocative illustrations, and early texts, all of which, Morgan felt, enriched and deepened the Bible’s themes.

On view, for instance, is the earliest surviving Greek text of the first lines of the Book of Genesis, owned by Morgan, and a Mesopotamian account of the Great Flood, circa 1600 b.c. These appealed to Morgan’s antiquarian side as well as his desire to commune with biblical events via earliest accounts.

Texts such as the Algonquin Bible, an early Native American Bible, and William Tynedale’s English Bibles from the 1530s show how Christianity’s messaging evolved. Tynedale paid for his assertive, personal translation with a one-way visit to the stake. The Morgan Library owns not one, not two, but three editions of Gutenberg’s Bible, the book that changed the world. Each is on view.

Morgan’s Study for the Dead Christ, by Van Dyck from about 1635, is there along with Rembrandt etchings treating specific passages in the New Testament. Morgan admired their faithfulness to the text as well as their expressiveness. Morgan bought a Bible said to belong to Spain’s Philip II. Its silver gilt and gold-enameled cover replete with diamonds, pearls, emeralds, and rubies is fit for a king, but it’s a 19th-century Viennese copy. Still, its craftsmanship is magnificent. Luxury, illuminated psalters, and Bibles are aplenty, as well as tapestries depicting biblical scenes.

What a good exhibition. I’m a church-going Methodist and Bible Study veteran, so seeing these treasures was a thrill. Again, the art’s not for the faint of heart. Close looking is demanded. Whether you believe or not, the Holy Spirit will give you the stamina.

I spent so much time in these two exhibitions that I had only a few moments in an exhibition of the drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo and his son, Domenico. The Morgan owns 300 drawings between the two artists, the largest collection in the world, and I’ll have to go back to confirm or to renounce my view that Papa was by far the better artist.

Medieval Money celebrates the lucre that made the Morgan Library possible. Splendor in Scripture introduces us to Morgan’s spiritual side and also gives his library a place in the sun, dimmed by rules governing light exposures. The Tiepolo exhibition flexes the collection’s muscles. The Morgan’s exhibition program for the rest of the year is wonderfully, thoughtfully balanced, and smart, with good shows devoted to acquisitions since Morgan’s death, illustrations for Beatrix Potter’s books, and drawings and music manuscripts related to the Ballets Russes.