申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。

Masterpieces by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Beato Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Donatello, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Domenico Veneziano and Lorenzo di Credi – the cream of Renaissance artists – show how the modern banking system developed in parallel alongside the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world. The exhibition also explores the links between that unique interweave of high finance, economy and art, and the religious and political upheavals of the time.

Money and Beauty. From Bankers to Botticelli and the Bonfires of the Vanities recounts the birth of our modern banking system and of the economic boom that it triggered, providing a reconstruction of European life and the continent’s economy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Visitors can delve into the daily life of the families that controlled the banking system and perceive the ongoing clash between spiritual and economic values that was such a feature of it. The saga of the art patrons is closely linked to that of the bankers who financed the ventures of princes and nobles alike, and indeed it was that very convergence that provided the humus in which some of the leading artists of the time were able to flourish.

The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey to the roots of Florentine power in Europe, but it also explores the economic mechanisms which allowed the Florentines to dominate the world of trade and business 500 years before modern communication methods were invented, and in so doing, to finance the Renaissance. The exhibition analyses the systems that bankers used to build up their immense fortunes, it illustrates the way in which they handled international relations and it also sheds light on the birth of modern art patronage, which frequently began as a penitential gesture only to then turn into a tool for wielding power.

Curated by writer and translator Tim Parks, author of Medici Money - Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence, and by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi, the exhibition aims to provide the visitor with an opportunity to look at art from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving economists, politicians and diplomats, and to examine the story of how the Florentine Renaissance began from the standpoint of the (open, but more often hidden) relationship between art, power and money. Hence its title: Money and Beauty.

Crucial to the illustration of this story are the masterpieces created for the great banking families, while the trajectory of Florence’s great families, rocked by financial setbacks, drew to a close with the political and religious storm triggered by Savonarola. With his “bonfires of the vanities”, the Dominican friar rejected everything that the Renaissance had stood for, even though he was part and parcel of it himself. A multimedia reconstruction illustrates and interprets the bonfires’ significance and content.

The exhibition also uses the detailed depiction of episodes in bankers’ daily lives (the work of several leading Flemish artists) to illustrate the era when Florence was the financial capital of the world, and an array of multimedia tools help the visitor to get a clear perception of the ways in which trade was conducted and money travelled throughout the known world at the time.

申し訳ありません、このコンテンツはただ今　Italianoと English　のみです。