The Brooklyn Rail

Amidst the consumerist frenzy after Thanksgiving, it might seem gruesome to think about ye old cashola, but two shows at the Morgan Library offer humorous images as well as strange moral presumptions that invite comparison to the frameworks of our own era. Money is a technology. So is language. So are forms of visualizing, by structuring the world around us. After all, ways of seeing represent ways of thinking. As one system emerges, another moves to the margins, which is how new technologies alter the distribution of sensible information about the world that surrounds us. At the Morgan Library, Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality alongside Seeds of Knowledge: Early Modern Illustrated Herbals made this plain. Considerations about our age of information profit from observing the transitions evident across the early modern.

Stepping into Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality (on view until March 10, 2024), the eye lands on a narrow case of slender coins, only to be consumed by the looming 800 pound steel trunk displayed just beyond it, the top open to reveal an elaborate locking mechanism. The chest could easily trap a person, introducing a rather terrifying metaphor echoed in the Hieronymus Bosch panel placed nearby. Though coins, stamps, and weights are present, the movement of money both literally and through its ideological implications is what’s on display here.

In these centuries-old illuminations, misogyny abounds alongside other current and prevailing values. The popular medieval figure Fortune, in snappy shoes and new chapeau, taunts and is then beaten up by crone Poverty, who has nothing left to lose from bad fortune (Marx might be said to reimagine this through his claim that the proletariat’s complete loss of humanity from the degradation of labor as commodity becomes the means to participation in a class and community that can arise to reject capitalism). A man on his deathbed reaches for a bag of coin offered by a demon, as an angel invites his gaze upward in the marvelous Bosch panel (Lacan secularizes the dilemma through the rhetorical question “your money or your life?” in his Seminar XI discussion of alienation). The popular fifteenth century text Art of Dying warned people not to be distracted by worldly goods … which included loved ones. Depictions of familiar and familial irritants include an illustration of Want, Necessity, Suffering and Hunger pestering a newlywed as his wife sleeps soundly in bed beside him.

Fiscal ethics appear across the works on display. The choice to renounce worldly wealth is admirable, but involuntary poverty is viewed suspiciously, and those with much who lose it seemingly damned. Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of The Prodigal Son amid Swine (ca. 1496) depicts the young man praying for salvation, at a point in the story when he is near suicide after (as the story goes) squandering his inheritance. The picture is strange in part because of the almost-but-not-quite linear perspective, a recent technique that transformed the visual culture of this period in Europe, as did long distance trade, banking, double ledger accounting (as I digressed a year ago in this column). Money materialized new values and perspectives.

I’ll jump to Florence, Italy here to mention the famous fresco by Masaccio in Brancacci Chapel, The Tribute Money (1426) that exemplifies the concurrent emergence of new visual, fiscal, political and moral structures. This renowned work of Renaissance Art adapts the Gospel of Matthew 17:24-27, where Jesus tells Peter to select a fish in the sea as there he’ll find a coin in the creature’s mouth to pay the tax man. The fresco provides multiple examples of new visualizing schemas amidst this fiscal foray: single point perspective converges on Christ’s head, atmospheric shading provides the illusion of depth, and the chiaroscuro for which Masaccio is rightly famous gives the bodies volume. Besides these formal innovations, the fanciful allegory presents a peculiar story that cultivates a fair bit of speculation about why Masaccio chose it. General references include a show of support for the pope’s right to tax, as the Vatican had increased in 1423 the tithe expected of the Florentine Church, which a silk merchant like Felice di Michele Brancacci would have to accept and pay, all occurring as the merchants of that city needed the pope’s unalloyed support of their war with Milan. The realism of Masaccio’s chapel fresco meets a realpolitik of the day, and an undeniable circulation of money and meaning-making presented through new ways of seeing the world. Or, so I speculate.

Seeds of Knowledge: Early Modern Illustrated Herbals (on view until January 14, 2024), on the ground floor of the Morgan Library, unexpectedly reinforces the importance of the rising mercantilism on view in the other show. Some parchment works give way to printed books enabled by the revolutionary printing press technology. A frontispiece that was copied and tweaked across three subsequent German herbals aptly tells the transition of the era (copyright did not yet exist to limit the mimicry enabled by the reproductive ease of printing). The image from 1485 shows a central figure holding a book, as does another robed scholar to the left, while the one on the right holds a flowering stem, with ten figures crowding behind this trio, all positioned in a garden with two trees in the background and a flowering lawn at their feet. Two other frontispieces, from 1487 and 1491, tighten the space and reverse the composition, but the one from 1486 presents the radical departure. It reduces the number of central figures to five, puts them in an apothecary with a servant mixing a potion at a table in the background against shelves packed with jars, all constrained by a brick wall at the foot of the central group emphasizing the interiority of the shop, even as an open door on the right limits a view beyond. No trees, except for what might be harvested and sold in the shop. One labors as others intellectualize. The new image speaks to a new culture, and likely celebrates it. The design and composition of these images points to the rise of new economic conditions and cultural expectations.

The beautifully illustrated Herbarum vivae eicones (translated as “Living images of herbs”) from 1531 shows the stunning naturalism of one of Dürer’s students, Hans Weiditz the Younger, whose work in this text apparently transformed botanical imagery to an expectation of realism, even as notions of such accuracy would shift, too. Less than a dozen years later, a new herbal appears with plain line illustrations without shading or color; though indebted to Weiditz, this even more “scientific or objective” manner of representation was so acclaimed that, for the first time ever, portraits of the artists were included in the printed book. We note across this fifty year period a shift in values and behaviors. From being a part of nature in our studies, analysis moves indoors. Education occurs within the realm of commerce. New ways of visualizing alter expectations of reality. A commerce in books proliferates knowledge of so many things…. Although as evidenced here, herbals with such excellent images made lessons no longer dependent on personal encounter with the plant in the garden or growing wild. Perhaps. I speculate.

If the root for speculation comes from the Latin for to see, look, observe, then it’s worth a meander through its subsequent meanings. Speculation appears in the fourteenth century for the “profound study of something” according to the inimitable Oxford English Dictionary, and through various rare or obsolete uses transforms by the eighteenth century into “The action or practice of buying and selling goods, land, stocks and shares, etc., in order to profit by the rise or fall in the market value,” evidenced in a 1774 letter by Horace Walpole deriding someone’s relationship to art! “Next to gaming … the predominant folly is pictures … Sir George Colbroke, a citizen, and martyr to what is called speculation, had his pictures sold by auction last week.” Two years later, we find the term in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776): “A bold adventurer may sometimes acquire a considerable fortune by two or three successful speculations.” Looking carefully leads to imagining possibilities and a profit in interest. Isn’t that interesting!

Money was metal, shaped as coin, weighed to match its trade good, then dematerialized as check or credit card, and now moves digitally from app to app while novel digital currencies emerge from mathematical computation. “All that is solid melts into air.” True as that line from Marx might feel, the increasingly ephemeral, phantasmagoric digital realm not only influences expectations of the material world, it also leans on the familiar; the lead image on the website for the cryptocurrency Ethereum begs for comparison to Raphael’s The School of Athens (1508–11). That city state brings me to Hannah Arendt’s essay “Culture and Politics,” where she examines the Athenian notion of the two spheres in her title in order to show how we’ve mangled both. The point was “not only not to resolve, once and for all, the conflict between culture and politics—the fight over whether the producing person or the acting person should be privileged—but, rather, to fan its flames even more.”

Culture and politics are distinct, but not antagonistic, because they serve each other by tempering each other, through distinct temporal frameworks. For Arendt, politics must never sacrifice the means for the end, and thereby stays present to the demands of the moment. Culture sacrifices the means for the ends, by felling the tree for a wood panel painting or, more likely these days, through a carbon impact for the electricity that powers the room and computer; it foregoes what exists now to produce objects of art that will last beyond the momentary, carrying thought for a future that will need to return to debate the ideas and values represented through the work. The problem, Arendt finds, is that culture and politics have traded their relations to means and ends, with expectations of culture doing work now that it can’t and politics released from ethical discourse.

The redistribution of sensible information produced by cultural objects is aesthetics, which Jacques Rancière rightly argues delivers politics. Art configures aspirations and losses, observed independently and by comparison to other works, which can contextualize how we arrived at current formulations—precisely in order to make political demands today. How things were arranged might no longer work, and things lost may need to be brought back. Cultural objects represent the values that are inherent to technologies, be they computational, economic, or visual methods of representation. Culture allows us to observe when, how, why, and for whom those arrangements became dominant or meaningful, as well as what they erase or obscure.

Jean Baudrillard writes in his essay “Towards the Vanishing Point of Art” about how art has been subsumed by advertising and capitalism. His recommendation in the face of art’s annihilation is that the “disappearance must remain alive.” Amidst assorted novelties and a new year, I urge the same.