Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities

Masterpieces by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, Piero del Pollaiolo,the Della Robbia family,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. Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire 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. We 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 all time were able to flourish.
Curated by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi, author of Iconography of Girolamo Savonarola, 1495-1998, and Tim Parks, writer, translator and author of Medici Money - Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence