NEW YORK, NY.- Is it ironic that the Morgan Library and Museum is opening an ambitious exhibition about money in the Middle Ages?

Maybe, maybe not. “Suitable” was the word that Deirdre Jackson used. She is the on-site curator of “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” an exhibition that follows the rise of the monetary economy in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, long before J. Pierpont Morgan helped to cement the foundations of modern America’s financial infrastructure.

But the setting for “Medieval Money,” which opens on Nov. 10, does seem appropriate. After all, Morgan, who owned the mansion now occupied by the museum, assembled one of the finest collections of medieval manuscripts in North America. His holdings are at the heart of the exhibition, and Jackson said she had no doubt that Morgan was well aware of what the bankers of the Renaissance had accomplished.

“It’s not far-fetched to think that he was identifying with what they had done,” she said. A tapestry he owned — which had once belonged to Henry VIII — was called “Triumph of Avarice.” Morgan hung it over a fireplace on the first floor, where it remains.

Avarice is only one of the themes raised by the exhibition, which begins upstairs on the second floor. It looks at the ways that money redefined life, culture and politics in medieval Europe. The sound of money even worked its way into music: A 14th-century madrigal by Lorenzo Masini mimicked clinking coins.

And the themes that took root then are “as relevant as ever,” the Morgan’s director, Colin B. Bailey, wrote in the exhibition catalog, “as people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values and morality.”

The exhibition gave the curators — Diane Wolfthal, a professor emerita at Rice University, and Jackson — an opportunity to rethink some of the Morgan’s prized holdings, including illuminated manuscripts like “The Hours of Henry VIII” and the Prayer Book of Claude de France.

“The interesting thing about money is it hits everything in society,” Jackson said. Poverty was widespread in the Middle Ages even as “most people, even the poor,” were caught up in the new monetary economy, Jackson said. Famines, which were common in medieval Europe, “would have hit the poorest people the hardest,” she said.

Simultaneously, the foundations of banks were being laid, and new financial instruments were coming into being that let people pay for merchandise without metal coins. “It’s a lot easier to have pieces of paper than big pieces of metal to finance your business dealings,” Jackson said.

But coins were pervasive, and to show what was in medieval money chests and brass alms boxes, the curators placed a clump of coins as the first item visitors will see.

“Most museums will generally show you a hoard of treasure,” Jackson said. “They have either gold or silver coins that are attractive because of their shiny surfaces or their high value.”

Not here. The coins that greet visitors to “Medieval Money” are “low-value coins,” Jackson said.

“We’re subverting the idea of treasure, and we’re doing that to make the point that low-value coins were minted in huge numbers.” Such coins helped drive the economy, she said, and “made it possible for more people to participate in exchange networks and make a profit — or lose their shirts.”

“Medieval Money” also displays gold ducats, coins with images of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain minted in Castile in the late 15th or early 16th centuries. By then there was nothing new about coins: The earliest ones found outside China were discovered in the ruins of a Greek temple in Lydia, in what is now Turkey.




But as people started making more money in the Middle Ages, it was the spread of low-value coinage that allowed more people — and more classes of people — to participate in the economy. Now there were bankers, money changers, pawnbrokers and traders who reached beyond their immediate surroundings. Financial centers brought in outsiders: Italian merchants who did business at the Beurse, or stock exchange, in Bruges lived in an expatriate community in that Flemish city.

And as the new commercial economy spread, people started to worry about the ethical and religious ramifications of getting rich, because wealth seemed to contradict the Christian ideals of poverty and charity.

In a book published to accompany the exhibition, Wolfthal writes that merchant bankers in the 14th and 15th centuries were “plagued by anxiety about some of their business practices.” She also noted that as late as the 16th century, Martin Luther declared that “trade can be nothing but robbing and stealing the property of others.”

Still, artists showcased money, often in stunningly realistic detail. Eight coins, painted in meticulous detail, form the border of a page of one of the Morgan’s most famous holdings, “The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” a 15th-century illuminated manuscript that Wolfthal and Jackson say figured in the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it touched off.

At the center of the page is St. Gregory. Wolfthal writes that the placement points to the intermingling of religion and money — the coins might refer to the “very effective administrative system of channeling donations to the church to support the poor” that Gregory established as pope. But she says that the coins could also have been chosen because they figured in Catherine’s daily life. Even though Catherine was “estranged and alienated” from her husband, his name is on one of the coins.

Jackson was fascinated by the intricacy of the border and the way the coins were painted, showing shadows and wear from everyday use.

“This was painted by an artist who was based in the Netherlands but he has an awareness of coins from other places,” Jackson said. “It shows how many coins were circulating in Europe. They had books with the exchange rates. Money-changers had to know a lot.”

But so did the artist for “The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” who was known to scholars as the Master of Catherine of Cleves. “This guy was based in Utrecht and he’s painting this border with these 25 images of coins from Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.”

Another page in “The Hours” shows a deathbed scene that Wolfthal writes pointed to the futility of hoarding money, while also criticizing an heir’s greediness.

That choice between good and evil, between salvation and damnation, was the message in another deathbed scene in “Medieval Money,” Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death and the Miser.” It shows a dying man who is tempted to accept a sack of money. There’s also an angel pointing to a window with a crucifix.

Wolfthal wrote that Bosch originally showed the dying man taking the sack — from the devil. Bosch apparently had second thoughts about that, “and instead depicted a moment of indecision” on the part of the dying man, perhaps to prod viewers to think about the choices they could make in their own lives.

“He’s contemplating this moment,” Jackson said. “He can’t part with his material riches. An angel is trying to get him for a spiritual epiphany,” but he’s clearly torn.

There is no such ambivalence in a 16th-century Belgian painting of St. Francis of Assisi that is also shown in “Medieval Money.” “He’s stripping off his clothes, his stylish clothing,” Jackson said. “His father was a wealthy merchant. He dealt in textiles. Francis was designated to go into that profession and he rejected that, embraced his own lifestyle, which was not only to find spiritual enlightenment for himself but to devote his life to the poor. ”

“He’s deciding, consciously,” she said. “Unlike the actually destitute.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.