This book explores ways in which the potent and elusive concept of money was embodied and visualised in Western European culture between 1400 and 1750. At a moment when we increasingly use plastic cards or bank transfers to pay for goods and services and digital currency is gaining ground, the book concentrates on precious coins as artefacts and agents within works of art and literature. Topics range from Masaccio's Tribute Money in early fifteenth-century Florence, to a satirical poem in Stuart London, to a gold and tortoiseshell box presented to Prince Wilhelm IV of Orange by the Dutch West India Company in 1749. Coins’ double-sided form, emblematic character and the precious materials from which they were made had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. The efficacy of coins depended on faith in their intrinsic value and on the authority impressed into them, putatively guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. At the same time, coins also spoke of illusion, debasement, and counterfeiting. By exploring the signifying potential of precious coins in artefacts and different kinds of literature, this book considers parallels and intersections between early modern concepts of money and the ways in which meaning was produced by works of art.

“Money, which we hope to see and hold every day, is diabolically hard to comprehend in words,” writes James Buchan in Frozen Desire (2001), his highly regarded exploration of views of money across time and place. Money, as distinct from coins or notes or other tokens, is not in itself a material object but rather a medium of exchange, a means of enabling goods to circulate more easily and quickly. A monetary system overcomes the stoppages in a barter system caused by one party to an exchange not having anything to offer that is agreed or judged to be of equal value to the thing offered by the other party. For example, the catch of fish offered by Amir may not be deemed to be worth as much as the sack of corn offered by Bashaam, not because of any intrinsic or absolute difference in their value but rather due to a whole variety of factors such as Bashaam's taste for fish,desire to have that amount of a perishable commodity all at once, the amount of fish available elsewhere and even her willingness to spend her time bartering. A monetary system circumvents some of these issues through the device of price.

Introduction

When the Antwerp Mint's valued possessions and archive were removed shortly before the sale of the premises on 4 December 1797, the local antiquarian Jan Baptist van der Straelen (1761-1847) noted that the goods included “a fine painting depicting justice, painted in the year 1594 by Martin de Vos, which was decorated on either side with portraits of the serving members of the Serment as well as that of the painter […].” This picture is known as The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, the institution responsible for manufacturing gold and silver coins under the authority of the Duke of Brabant in present-day Belgium (fig. 1.1). Its painter, Maarten de Vos (1532-1603), was the city of Antwerp's leading master. The members of the Serment (Oath) were current officeholders within the college of ninety minters, each of whom had solemnly sworn loyalty to the Duke. Founded in 1291 by Duke Jan I of Brabant (1252/1253-1294), the consortium of Brabant Mints was already a venerable institution. In 1411 a subsequent duke had extended to the workmen and minters, their wives and households, the immense privilege of jurisdiction over their own affairs except for crimes of murder, rape or larceny. Members of the Mint also became exempt from military service and all property taxes, including excise tax on beer and wine. The Minters gained the right to bear arms and the position of Minter was largely the preserve of certain families, passed down from generation to generation, like a noble title.

Introduction

This fragment of poetry by Sappho begins DeSilvey's paper, “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things,” in which the author talks about decay as “a process that can be generative of a different kind of knowledge.” Here, using the same poem to frame the chapter, I explore another “different kind of knowledge,” generated not through the literal decay of objects but through what happens when artists and others are invited in to “poke among the beach rubble.” This may include actually accessing the hidden depths of museum storage and their often-forgotten collections, getting up close and personal with the stuff of the storerooms through touch, or imagining and making new things in response. All of this, I argue, is about an encounter with objects that is primarily an emotional or affective one, one without “prerequisite of information” yet where sensory encounter, particularly touch, can elicit an immediate and visceral response. Touch directly links audiences and/ or artists with the objects’ histories and contexts, their original makers or owners, and their material embodiment, not least through a connection of hands revealed by fingerprints, patina, or marks of wear and tear. In addition, building on work exploring artists’ interventions in museums and on activist projects such as that of artist Fred Wilson in his Mining the Museum exhibition, this chapter examines such artistic interventions and engagements particularly in relation to stored or hidden collections rather than displayed ones. These interventions provide important sources of interpreting collections, and thus they generate “a different kind of knowledge” that prioritizes an initial emotional “gut response.” This, I argue, has the potential to shape museum methods and practices both behind the scenes and within exhibitions.

A small but growing body of work is focused on museum storage areas as sites for museological research. Geoghegan and Hess note that “despite their invisibility to the public, stored objects and their stubborn physicality are at the heart of what defines a museum.” Brusius and Singh ask in their edited volume: “why is it that, when most museum objects lie in storage, it is the gallery and the exhibition that have come to take such an important place in both the self-representation of museums and the public's perception of these institutions?”