Last weekend, at this time of intense financial crisis and economic uncertainty, I found myself addressing some of Europe's most important money men. The occasion was a conference organised by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, entitled Finance and the Arts: Where is the Florence of the 21st Century? We were in the Palazzo itself, described by the director of the museum it now houses as the Trump Tower of the 15th century.
Beyond the big windows on the fifth floor, the sun was setting over the most picturesque panorama imaginable: the Florentine campanili sloping down to the Arno, encircled by pinkish Tuscan hills.
My duty was to talk about the show I had co-curated, Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities. All the same, it's hard to pass up an opportunity to say something pertinent when, for the only time in your life, you have in front of you such people as the governor of the Bank of England, the chairman of Lloyds TSB and similarly important figures from the ECB, the Federal Reserve and the Swiss National Bank, not to mention 70 or so hedge-fund managers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, academics, curators, art dealers, artists and collectors.
If we wish to understand, I began, why the banking families of 15th-century Florence financed such an extraordinary flowering of the finest art, we have to take seriously the enemies of banking, and, above all, the church's ban on all interest-bearing loans – something the theologians called usury, and believed ran contrary to God's natural law. Why? Because making money from loan interests involved a renunciation of honest toil and a refusal of the trade and social position you were born into. The banker/usurer, and quite probably the borrower, too, was trying to hurry up the social scale. It was socially disruptive. Chaos would surely ensue.
All this seems naive to us. We cannot believe a rigid social hierarchy is ordained by God, or its preservation in anyone's interest but that of the privileged folk at the top. But there is more: the moneylender, as the church saw him, was inevitably an obsessive and conflicted person. "Thus the usurer," complains Bernardino of Siena, "always at first Mass kissing saints' feet and burning candles under their noses. He comes early because he can't sleep for hankering after money."
The church had understood that when financial deals become complex ("money copulating on money") then the mind locks into the process, it grows excited, it can't sleep. If people can change their status by dint of playing with money, they will think of nothing else. Then they hurry to mass because they don't want others to realise what mental condition they're in.
The artists of 15th-century Florence didn't depict usurers. Nobody wanted to go there. But the Flemish painters of the 16th century interpreted the church's position well enough. Switching on PowerPoint, I showed my bankers Quentin Metsys's The Usurers, where spiritual ugliness is stamped on miserly faces as surely as the king's head on a coin. Even more provocative is Marinus van Reymerswaele's The Money Lender and His Wife. Here the man and woman are attractive, ordinary people like you and me. But their attention is entirely captured by the gold coins they are counting. They relate to each other through money, not touch or conversation. And their hands are tense and claw-like. "Remember well, oh usurers," St Anthony of Padua had preached a couple of centuries before, "that the devil has possessed your hands that they might not do charitable works".
It was the Renaissance bankers' fear of this obsession, and the social stigma that might ensue, that turned their minds to charity and penitential gestures. Having developed the art of commerce-linked currency exchanges into a lucrative form of derivative – to avoid making straight loans – they were never sure whether they were usurers or not. So they restored churches, commissioned devotional paintings, and, in so doing, discovered beauty and demonstrated that they were not merely money men to be defined and summed up by their account books.
The morning after my talk, the conference proper began. Seventy of us sat in concentric circles, provided with electronic voting devices that enabled us to express our views on such questions as, "Will the west remain the dominant force in world art markets?"; 44% thought it would, 37% that it wouldn't.
