Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 (Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700) 9463726071, 9789463726078

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V I S U A L A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , 13 0 0 -17 0 0

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 Edited by Natasha Seaman and Joanna Woodall

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Jean Saint and Francois Thuret, Detail of lid of Box of the Dutch West India Company, 1749, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 607 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 578 9 doi 10.5117/9789463726078 nur 654 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgments 13 Introduction: Embodying Value

Joanna Woodall with Natasha Seaman

15

Power and Authority in the Mint 1. Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594 47 Joanna Woodall

2. Scaling the World: Allegory of Coinage and Monetary Governance in the Dutch Republic Sebastian Felten and Jessica Stevenson Stewart

79

Currency and the Anxieties of Global Trade 3. Market Stall in Batavia: Money, Value, and Uncertainty in the Age of Global Trade

107

4. Beyond the Mint: Picturing Gold on the Rijksmuseum’s Box of the Dutch West India Company

131

Angela Ho

Carrie Anderson

Coins and Persons 5. The Heft of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Plays 155 Rana Choi

6. Identity, Agency, Motion: Taylor’s Twelvepence and the Poetry of Commodity 179 Heather G.S. Johnson

Coins in and out of Circulation 7. Margarethe Butzbach and the Florin Extorted by Blows Coins Securing Social Bonds in Fifteenth-Century Germany Allison Stielau

203

8. Centring the Coin in Jacob Backer’s Woman with a Coin 227 Natasha Seaman

Credit and Risk 9. Accounting Faith and Seeing ‘Ghost Money’ in Masaccio’s Tribute Money 253 Roger J. Crum

10. Monetary Transactions and Pictorial Gambles in Georges de La Tour Dalia Judovitz

273

Afterword The Work of Art: The Installations of Kelli Rae Adams Natasha Seaman

299

Index 309

I

II

III IV V

VI 1.1 1.2 1.3

1.4

List of Illustrations Leonhard Beck, The Young Emperor Maximilian Visiting a Mint, c. 1514–1516, woodcut, dimensions unknown, for Marx Treitzsauerwein, Der Weißkunig, privately circulated, 1526. Illustration from the edition commercially published by Joseph Kurzboeck, Vienna, 1775. Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art.19 Jost Amman (designer), Hartman Schopper (author), Monetarius, 1568, woodcut and letterpress, 148 × 79 mm (print 90 × 61), from Panoplia Omnium Illiberalium Mechanicarum (The Book of Trades), Frankfurt: Sigmund Feierabend, 1568.20 Unknown artist, Group Portrait of Mintmaster Clemens van Eembrugge and His Companions, 1581, oil on panel, dimensions unknown. ’s-Heerenberg, Netherlands, Huis Bergh Castle.21 Unknown Indo-Christian artist, The Virgin of Mount Potosí, c. 1740, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Potosí, Museo de la Casa Nacional de Moneda.27 Jacob Jonghelinck, medal of Philip II of Spain to commemorate the victory of Saint Quentin. Obverse: Philip II laureate, reverse: Saint Quentin with commemorative inscription, 1557, silver, 35 mm diameter. Location unknown.34 Frans Francken the Younger, The Cabinet of a Collector with Paintings, Shells, Coins, Fossils and Flowers, 1619, oil on panel, 85 × 56 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.35 Maarten de Vos, The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, datable to 1594, oil on panel, 142.5 × 187.5 cm. Antwerp, Museum Snijders Rockoxhuis (KBC Bank).48 List of the Officers depicted in Maarten de Vos, The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint. Original lost, formatted as transcribed by the antiquarian Jan Baptist van der Straelen (1761–1847).51 Maarten de Vos, drawing for The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, datable to c. 1594, pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk within brown-ink framing lines, 29.5 × 39.8 cm. Antwerp, Museum Snijders Rockoxhuis (KBC Bank).52 Unknown designer, real of Philip II, Mint of the Duchy of Brabant, Antwerp, 1555–1576. Obverse and reverse, gold, dimensions unknown. Amsterdam, The National Numismatic Collection, managed by De Nederlandsche Bank.54

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Money Mat ters in European Art work s and Liter ature, c.1400 -1750

1.5 1.6

1.7 1.8

1.9

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

2.5

2.6

Pieter Paul Rubens, sketch for The Arch of the Mint ( front with Moneta), datable to c. 1635, oil on panel, 104 × 71 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.58 Pieter van der Borcht, Public Stage on the Market Place, 1594–1595, etching, 32.5 × 20.4 cm, from Joannes Bochius, Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis, Spectaculorum et Ludorum, in Adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae, Antwerp: Ex Officina Plantiniana, 1595. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.60 Ioan Wouters, apprentice proof of competence. Obverse: Saint John the Baptist, reverse: moneyer’s balance, April 1614, silver, 25 mm diameter. Antwerp, Museum aan de Stroom.54 Detail from Joost Amman (designer), Michael Manger (printmaker), Aigentliche Abbildung deß Gantzen Gewerbs der Löblichen Kauffmanschafft und Fürnehmsten Handelstadt (Allegory of Commerce, the Glory of Antwerp), 1585, woodcut and letterpress, 108.5 × 88.2 cm (complete print). London, British Museum.64 Guillaum de Neve, boxed coin weights and hand balance for weighing silver coins, c. 1644, various media, dimensions unknown. Amsterdam, The National Numismatic Collection, managed by De Nederlandsche Bank.69 Romeyn de Hooghe (attributed), Allegory of Coinage, after 1681, oil on canvas, 135 × 178 × 8.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.80 Unknown designer, duit, c. 1590–1596. Reverse, copper, 24 mm diameter. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.84 Unknown designer, guilder of the Dutch Republic, Mint of Holland, Dordrecht, 1682. Obverse, silver, 33 mm diameter. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.85 Theodor de Bry, “Nigritae in Scrutandis Venis Metallicis/ ab Hispanis in Insulas” (Blacks Examining Metallic Veins/ from Spaniards on the Islands), Part 5 of Americae, Frankfurt am Main, 1595, engraving, image 15.9 × 19.5 cm (overall 34.5 × 23.5 cm). London, The Wellcome Collection.86 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Vastgestelde Geloof” (Established Faith), Chapter 36 of his Hieroglyphica oft Merkbeelden der Oude Volkeren, Amsterdam, 1735, etching, overall 26 × 19.2 cm. Urbana, The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.88 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Van de Joodsche Stand by Christus Tyden” (On the Position of the Jews at the Time of Christ), Chapter 30 of his Hieroglyphica oft Merkbeelden der Oude Volkeren,

List of Illustr ations 

2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Amsterdam, 1735, etching, overall 26 × 19.2 cm. Urbana, The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.89 Jan Luyken, “De Munter” (The Coiner), from Casper Luyken and Jan Luyken, Spiegel van het Menselyk Bedryf, Amsterdam, 1704, etching, 14.3 × 8.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.91 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Peace before the Invasion of France,” Schouwburg der Nederlandse Verandering, Amsterdam, 1674, etching, 23.2 × 35 cm. London, The British Museum.95 Simon Fokke, Willem V Neemt Zitting als Bewindhebber bij de VOC (Willem V Sits as Director of the VOC), 1768, etching, 29.7 × 40.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.97 Andries Beeckman (attributed), A Market Stall in Batavia, c. 1650s– 1660s, oil on canvas, 106 × 174.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.97 Julius Milheuser after Johannes Vinckboons, View of Batavia, 1619–1680, etching, 42.7 × 95.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.112 Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, 1661, oil on canvas, 108 × 151.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.113 Gabriel Metsu, A Woman Selling Poultry and Fish, 1656–1658. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.114 Joachim Beuckelaer, Vegetable Seller, 1563, oil on panel, 112.2 × 163.5 cm. Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts.114 Gabriel Metsu, Vegetable Market in Amsterdam, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 97 × 83 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.115 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Moneychanger and His Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 79 × 107 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado.120 Quentin Metsys, Money Changer and His Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 74 × 68 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.122 Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company, 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.134 Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, lid), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.135 Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, “Curaçao”), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.136 Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, “St. George Delmina”), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.136

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4.5 4.6

4.7 5.1 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, base), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.137 Pieter Jannsen Bas, 12-guilder emergency coin issued by the Dutch West India Company during the Portuguese siege of Pernambuco. Obverse and reverse, 1645–1646, gold, 18 × 18 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.147 Unknown designer, medal struck by the Groningen chamber of the Dutch West India Company, 1683. Obverse and reverse, silver, 45 mm diameter. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.148 Unknown designer, “Old Coppernose” English testoon, 1546–1551. Obverse, silver and copper, dimensions unknown. Llantrisant, Pontyclun, The Royal Mint Museum.159 Unknown designer, shilling of Edward VI, r. 1550–1553. Obverse and reverse, silver, 31.8 mm diameter. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Museum.185 John Taylor, A Shilling, or The Travailes of Twelve-Pence, frontispiece, 1621, woodcut and print, dimensions unknown. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library.187 Wenzel von Olmütz, Woman Weighing Coins, c. 1480, engraving, dimensions unknown. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.208 Unknown designer, florin, Miltenberg, 1350–1353. Reverse and obverse, gold, dimensions unknown. Stuttgart, Münzkabinett, Landesmuseum Württemberg.210 Unknown designer, guilder, Mainz, 1491. Reverse and obverse, gold, 23 mm diameter. Berlin, Münzkabinett, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin.212 Hans Schaur, Warning about Counterfeit Coins, 1482, hand-coloured woodcut, 22.2 × 15.6 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.213 Israhel van Meckenem, The Fight over the Trousers, c. 1495, engraving, 16.8 × 10.9 cm. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago.221 Jacob Backer, Woman with a Coin, c. 1636, oil on canvas, 64.5 × 56.5 cm. Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.228 Jacob van der Merck, Woman with a Coin, 1628–1658, oil on panel, 78 × 64 cm. Dieren (Rheden), art dealer D. Katz.230 Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin, c. 1480, oil on panel, 23 × 31 cm. Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts.231 Unknown designer, one ducat, Erfurt, Germany, 1634. Obverse, gold, 21.3 mm diameter. Washington, DC: Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History.232

List of Illustr ations 

8.5

Jacob Backer, Portrait of a Family Group with the Preaching of John the Baptist, c. 1637, oil on canvas, 140.6 × 151.1 cm. Sale Stuttgart (Nagel), 24–26 September 1979.235 8.6 Crispijn van de Passe the Younger, title page, Spiegel der Alderschoonste Cortisanen (Mirror of the Most Beautiful Courtesans), 1631, engraving, 14 × 19.2 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.238 8.7 Detail of Figure 8.1.244 9.1 Masaccio, Tribute Money, mid-1420s, fresco, 247 × 547 cm. Florence, Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine.254 9.2 Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Coronation of the Virgin, 1372–1373, tempera on panel, 350 × 190 cm. Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia.255 9.3 Unknown designer, florin, Florence, after 1252. Obverse and reverse, gold, 19 mm diameter. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery.257 9.4 Lorenzo Ghiberti, St. Matthew, 1419–1423, bronze, 270 cm. Florence, Museo di Orsanmichele.258 10.1 Georges de La Tour, Payment of Taxes (Payment of Dues), c. 1618–1620, oil on canvas, 99 × 152 cm. Lviv, Lviv National Art Gallery.275 10.2 Joachim Anthonisz. Wtewael, Adoration of the Shepherds, signed and dated 1607, oil on canvas, 35.5 × 48.5 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.276 10.3 Marinus van Reymerswaele, The Parable of the Unjust Steward, c. 1540, oil on panel, 77 × 96.5 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.278 10.4 Georges de La Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, c. 1635, oil on canvas, 106 × 146 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.282 10.5 Jacques Callot, The Card Game, or the Prodigal Son, 1628, etching, 22 × 28 cm. Princeton, Princeton University Art Museum.283 10.6 Georges de La Tour, The Fortune Teller, c. 1630–1634, oil on canvas, 101.9 × 123.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.286 10.7 Georges de La Tour, The Denial of Saint Peter, 1650, oil on canvas, 135.2 × 175.6 cm. Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts.288 10.8 Georges de La Tour, The Dice Players, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 92.2 × 130.5 cm. Stockton-on-Tees, Preston Hall Museum.289 A.1 Kelli Rae Adams, Breaking Even, 2013, installation, porcelain, porcelain greenware, foodstuffs, canning jars, water, overall 15 × 20 × 40 ft. (4.6 × 6 × 12 m). Providence, RI, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University.301

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Money Mat ters in European Art work s and Liter ature, c.1400 -1750

A.2

A.3

Kelli Rae Adams, Forever in Your Debt, 2019–, installation, wheelthrown stoneware and collected coins, dimensions variable (each bowl approximately 15 cm diameter). Washington, DC, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design.302 Kelli Rae Adams, Beg, Borrow, Steal (detail), 2019, installation, US dollar bills, adhesive, gouache, water colour, graphite, each 140 × 178 cm.303

Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank Casey Caldwell, Stephen Deng, Caylen Heckel, Lauren Jacobi, Christine Göttler, Elizabeth Honig, Diane Wolfthal, and Michael Zell for their contributions to the ideas presented in this volume. It has also been a pleasure to work with the authors who have contributed chapters to this book. Natasha Seaman would further like to acknowledge Anthony Apesos, Amanda Seaman, and Pam Mullins for their assistance throughout the project, as well as the librarians at the Adams Library at Rhode Island College. Joanna Woodall would like to extend her thanks to the staff of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, who supported her initial interest in this topic, and to Mechthild Fend, Rose Marie San Juan, Katie Scott and the members of the Courtauld Early Modern Research Group 2020-21. Aspects of this project were supported by the Committee on Faculty Scholarship and Development at Rhode Island College and by the Research Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art. This is much appreciated.



Introduction: Embodying Value Joanna Woodall with Natasha Seaman

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.1 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.2 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, 1 Deng, “Introduction,” Money in the Renaissance (electronic resource, n.p., Paragraph 9). 2 Buchan, Frozen Desire, 17.

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_intro

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Joanna Woodall with Natasha Seaman

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. It also provides the means for Amir to obtain the sack of corn he wants by paying an amount to Bashaam in numerical units of a medium of exchange, an intermediary instrument that represents an agreed standard of value. This numerical amount can then be stored by Bashaam and mobilised in the future as purchasing power to obtain the desired quantity of what she actually wants, at any time and from anywhere participating in the monetary system. For the monetary system to work, there must be units of purchasing power, like units of electric power or current, so that the price of a commodity can be agreed or set numerically. The units of money used in the establishment of prices and the settlement of transactions are called currency. This has historically taken the form of material tokens that can be physically counted, transported and stored. Today money has become fiat currency, not pegged to the price or availability of a physical commodity, increasingly digital and “stored” online. Value ascribed to the currency as a tangible artifact is now apparently irrelevant, although the graphic designs of cryptocurrencies reveal that the visual form of the coin form still has potency. The essential thing seems to be that there is a general willingness to agree to and trust in a displayed unit of value and to rely on it to power future transactions. The difficulty in grasping money, as Buchan suggests, comes in part from our intense familiarity with it. It is no less demanding to comprehend how money and currency were imagined half a millennium ago in Europe. Gold and silver coins united a “noble” metal – perceived to have intrinsic value – with a physical imprint – consisting of both texts and images – that expressed the presence of the authority that guaranteed the coin’s specific value.3 This dual character differs from other forms of currency then used across the globe, such as cowrie shells, beads, cacao beans, textiles and animal skins. Bronze tokens or coins had been used in China since the millennium before Christ and paper “flying cash” was used early in the Song dynasty (960-1279) by elite merchants and financiers in Szechuan, where printing had been invented. 4 By the end of the sixteenth century, however, China had become a silver-based economy, in the form of both bullion and coins.5 In Europe, by contrast, the expansion of trade into Asia and the Americas, the growing volume of circulating coin and the extension of trade routes made it more convenient and safer to issue promissory notes that promised to pay on demand, rather than physically transport large quantities of cash. Yet gold and silver coins 3 For def initions of money and further literature: Wang, “Textiles as Money,” 165-166; Pettifor, Just Money, 15-69. On value: Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 56-200; Appadurai, Social Life of Things, 3-63. 4 Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, 43-44; Wang, “Textiles as Money,” 165-168. 5 Flynn and Giráldez, “Silver Spoon,” 207-209.

Introduc tion: Embodying Value 

remained an immensely powerful form of money; indeed, acquiring the bullion to make it motivated much international expansion. The coin’s familiar circular form, with images and words literally beaten into it, had both a long pedigree and sacred significance, particularly in Christendom and the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean.6 Christ’s incarnation offered a model of divine authority in embodied form. Marc Shell, whose work on art and money is foundational, states: Money is a particularly tender subject in Christian thinking because money is a universal equivalent and also because money expresses, as does Jesus as god-man, a manifestation of an ideal and a real thing. Money is thus understood as a manifestation of authority and substance, of mind and matter, of soul and body; […] Money is the expression of inscription and inscribed.7

In the sixteenth century, the construction of value as both intrinsic and imprinted relates to theological debates between Protestant reformers and Catholics about whether sacred objects of faith have inherent “presence” or are “representations” of a divine power that exists elsewhere. In what sense, if any, did a potent force that could fulfil every desire in life or the afterlife reside in a statue of Christ or in the eucharistic wafer – or in a gold coin?8 Unlike the promissory note on paper, which was recognisably a form of performative rhetoric whose efficacy was dependent upon trust between those party to it, the coin ideally embodied the (purchasing) power of its possessor, so that the acquisition and exchange of goods no longer had to involve an immediate personal encounter – it could be deferred to a different time and place. This power originated not only in the value of the precious metal in the coin but also in the issuing authority, a prince or governing body, which claimed to derive its own sovereignty ultimately from God. Bonds of faith and law between the issuing authority and those who produced and used their coins created, through their joint commitment to it, an entity that could claim to be “backed up,” guaranteed and absolute. At the same time, the spread of the new technology of printing on paper began to challenge received belief in physical impress as a means of transmitting authority (like a wax seal) and introduced the possibility that the multiple could be merely an “empty” reproduction or representation of an authoritative original that existed elsewhere.9 Thus the coin was central to shifting and contested conceptions of knowledge and value in the early modern period. 6 Gorini, “The Coin.” 7 Marc Shell, Art and Money, 8. See also this volume, Choi. 8 Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 51. 9 On contact as a means of transmitting knowledge and presence, see Balfe and Woodall, Ad vivum, 19-21. Compare Benjamin, “Mechanical Reproduction;” Deng, “Money, Ritual and Religion” (electronic resource, n.p. Paragraph 12).

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In contrast to the claims made for coinage, the value of individual coins was in practice variable, uncertain and difficult to determine. To begin with, the traditional method of striking coins by hand does not create identical products, although it sustains this ideal. A woodcut of the 1510s provides evidence of this process (fig. I).10 The creation of a coin involves the design of two “dies” in which the images and texts for the final coin are inverted. These are impressed onto the obverse and reverse of a blank circular metal disk called a planchet. Minters’ workshops produced sheets of a gold or silver alloy of the purity demanded by the issuing authority in their furnaces (fig. I, centre). This was then cut, filed and hammered by the sizer to produce a sheet or strip of metal of the required weight and thickness, which was cut with shears into planchets (fig. I, left). The reverse die was fixed into a block of wood on which the moneyer placed the planchet and then the obverse die. Using a hammer, he forcefully struck the upper die to reform the metal in accordance with the die designs (fig. I, right). The impression did not have to be perfect and, in part because “coin collars” were not used to ensure a standard shape and defined rim, there was considerable variation in coins of the same denomination, as surviving examples reveal (figs. 1.4, 2.2, 6.1). Even though – or perhaps because – it made adulteration, clipping and shaving easier, the handmade character of struck coins was sustained into the seventeenth and even eighteenth century.11 A mechanical process of minting was developed in Augsburg around 1550 which involved rolling bullion to the required thickness, cutting the blanks with metal punches and using two heavy iron screws to press or “mill” the dies into the planchet. This made counterfeiting difficult because the coins were more standardised, with marked edges, and the technology was more sophisticated than the relatively simple equipment needed for striking. In 1551 Henry II de Valois, King of France (1519-1559) established a mechanised mint in Paris, the Monnaie du Moulin des Étuves (Mint of the Mill of the Furnaces), but this did not function for long, in part because Minters themselves resisted the new technology.12 It reduced the demand for their labour and offered fewer opportunities to manipulate the amount of metal in coins for their own benefit. The issue of honesty when producing coins is evident in a comparison between two depictions of the minting process (figs. I, II). In The young Emperor Maximilian visiting a Mint, a woodcut of 1514-1516 by Leonhard Beck (1480-1542), the virtuous prince is present as the issuing authority, every stage in the process is visible and the composition is carefully balanced around a central axis. The balance scales, used 10 But compare Cooper, Coinmaking, 37. The woodcut was made for Marx Treitzsauerwein (c. 1450-1527), Der Weisskunig (privately circulated, 1526). Illustrated with 251 prints, it was not published but presented to selected recipients. 11 Cooper, Coinmaking, 37-121. Giráldez, Technologies. 12 Sargent and Velde, Small Change, 45-61.

Introduc tion: Embodying Value 

I  Leonhard Beck, The Young Emperor Maximilian Visiting a Mint, c. 1514–1516, woodcut, dimensions unknown, for Marx Treitzsauerwein, Der Weißkunig, privately circulated, 1526. Illustration from the edition commercially published by Joseph Kurzboeck, Vienna, 1775. Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Image: (CC0 1.0).

to measure quantities of metal and to ensure that coins accorded with a standard value, are evidently level because they parallel the perspectival orthogonals. This print contrasts with a later woodcut depicting the minting of coins in Jost Amman (1539-1591) and Hartman Schopper’s (1494-1576) Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum (The Book of Trades), published in Frankfurt in 1568 (fig. II). Here the sharply tipped scales on the workbench and the ruffian with a moneybag at the open window hint strongly at the corruption in the minting process that was

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II  Jost Amman (designer), Hartman Schopper (author), Monetarius, 1568, woodcut and letterpress, 148 × 79 mm (print 90 × 61), from Panoplia Omnium Illiberalium Mechanicarum (The Book of Trades), Frankfurt: Sigmund Feierabend, 1568. © Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

widespread at this period.13 The view is oblique and the gentlemanly minter obscures what his workman partner’s hands are up to. In the foreground, the wine flask and what may be a receptacle for beer recall another potential source of profit for the

13 The same print is used for both “Monetarius/Muntmeister” and “Numerarius militum/ Pfenningmeister.” British Museum: 1904,0206.103.31, 1904,0206.103.128.

Introduc tion: Embodying Value 

III Unknown artist, Group Portrait of Mintmaster Clemens van Eembrugge and His Companions, 1581, oil on panel, dimensions unknown. ’s-Heerenberg, Netherlands, Huis Bergh Castle.

Mint: the exemption granted by their governing authority from excise taxes on alcohol, which might then be sold on to the general public.14 An extraordinary group portrait by an unknown sixteenth century Netherlandish or German artist points to the dark side of the Mint, its Mafia-like potential to mirror criminally the institution’s supposedly honest operations, expressed in the portraits and inscriptions on coins (fig. III). Honorific portrayal claims the presence and virtue of elite, named subjects and is one of the reasons why a portrait head of the sovereign issuing authority is conventionally chosen for the design of the obverse of coins. In the painting the inscription on the counter states that Clemens van Eembrugge was the Mint-Master in Maastricht, in Zaltbommel and for the lord of Bergh, and that he and his companions performed their job with honesty and with faith. In fact, Clemens was running a gang of counterfeiters alongside his legitimate activity, most probably in cahoots with his brother Anthonis, who was also a Mint Master. Clemens seems to have fled the country soon after 1581 (the date

14 A privilege enjoyed by the Mint of Brabant in Antwerp. Woodall, this volume, 56.

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of the painting) and Anthonis was executed by hanging, probably in 1591.15 A close examination of the group portrait suggests that it too is a counterfeit, playing on a then-current Dutch term for copy and portrait (but not false money): conterfeyt. The Latin root of this word is to make in opposition (contra-facere), practically speaking to produce an immediate but reversed image by making a contact impression, like a wax seal or the die for a coin.16 Here the trustworthiness of the portrayed figures is undermined by shifting glances, shady facial expressions and fluctuating lighting and viewpoints. The portrayed man in the centre, presumably Clemens, is haughty rather than noble, with raised eyebrow, nose in the air and an oblique, downward look. Whilst he proffers a coin to the beholder, his other hand indicates his own fat purse. The inscription, written in the vernacular and in lower-case italics rather than impressed in Latin capitals like the text on a sound coin, is interrupted and obscured by coins. In the right background, a figure dressed as a jester indicates that the image is a hoax. Even when coins entered the economy legally, a number of currencies using gold and silver of different degrees of purity circulated in any given location, often beyond the borders of the realm in which they had been issued. A sovereign under whose authority a currency was minted could officially “debase” it by reissuing coins of similar form and appearance but using an alloy containing a lower amount of precious metal, so that the material value did not coincide with the nominal “face value.” Those responsible for valuing gold and silver, who included assayers at the mint, goldsmith-moneychangers and more or less official bankers, therefore had to be able to recognise and compare coins of different currencies, such as florins and ducats, and to be aware of different issues of the same coin. Those who had access to precious coins, such as minters, rich merchants and tax collectors, as well as thieves, could also shave or clip them to extract small quantities of precious metal, which could be melted down and redeployed. Constant handling could wear coins down, reducing their worth, as was the case with the Shilling discussed by Heather Johnson in Chapter Six.17 Value was thus in practice uncertain and unstable, putting pressure on belief in the absolute, intrinsic value attributed to the ideal coin and engendering doubt about the consonance between appearance and reality. Establishing the “real value” on which the system relied required special expertise, personal scrutiny and moral acuity. For personal exchanges between trusted associates, it may have been sufficient to weigh a coin by hand as a token of value inseparable from the moral worth of

15 De Graaf, “Van Eembrugge,” 114-119. 16 Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta.” Compare Felfe, “Naer het leven,” 69-74. 17 Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 49-50, with further literature. Johnson, this volume, 185-186.

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the human parties to the transaction.18 However, without this personal assurance of worth, assaying – physical testing to determine the purity of the gold or silver alloy – was necessary to establish a value relative to the weight and purity of standard coins of that denomination and to the abstract “money of account” which was used to price different commodities.19 Assaying was traditionally undertaken by using a finely calibrated balance scale to measure coins against standard weights (Fig. 1.9).20 Another long-established means of testing was a touchstone, a small tablet of finely grained dark stone such as slate, on which a soft metal such as gold leaves a visible trace (fig. 10.1).21 The colour of the trace differs for alloys of different purity and can be compared against standard examples. Cupellation, which involves heating to separate “noble” from “base” metals, is a more accurate technique but since it involves sampling the metal to be tested would have been less suitable for coins in circulation than for ores and alloys in the production process and for coins and gold artifacts intended to be melted down (fig. 2.1).22 Thus, the efficacy of coins as agents of exchange depended on faith in their intrinsic value and the physical impression of authority. However, as material and symbolic entities coins were susceptible to manipulation, debasement, and counterfeiting and their value was, in practice, difficult to determine and reliant on special expertise – a kind of connoisseurship. Because of the complex paths coins weave between absolute and relative value, faith and doubt, presence and representation, material and moral value, substance and appearance, they can serve as models for thinking about the construction of meaning. The resonances of coins, well-known to viewers and readers, provided rich signifying potential to artists and writers in this period. Indeed, some chapters in the book argue that works of art participated in what has been termed a “monetary imaginary,” founded in historical conceptions and uses of precious coinage.23 Yet historians of visual, material and to a lesser extent literary culture have often seen coins simply as a store of wealth or as a symbol of greed and preferred to concentrate on theological and intellectual frames of reference – an attitude that may reflect their own disregard or suspicion of money.24 The studies in this volume redress this oversight, investigating their topics with attention to the full range of ways in which a monetary system founded on precious coins was imagined and deployed. Whilst the approach is historical, all contributions bear relevance to issues of truth and value that are highly relevant 18 Choi, this volume, 157, 164. 19 For money of account see below 38. 20 This volume, Felten and Stewart, 92-93; Woodall, 49, 63-70; Crum 261-263. 21 This volume, Judovitz, 276, 280-81. 22 This volume, Felten and Stewart, 92. 23 Parsons, Making Money, 237-281; Jacobi, The Architecture of Banking, 2. 24 For an exception to this neglect: Honig, Painting and the Market, and Honig, “Money and Representation.”

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today. The shared topic of money in all its complexity unites the chapters, despite the various media and contexts under examination. The book is organised around five themes: Power and authority in the Mint, Currency and the anxieties of global trade, Coins and persons, Coins in and out of circulation and Credit and risk.  The remainder of the introduction will explain how each theme is exemplified by two complementary chapters and reveal ways in which the themes extend and overlap throughout the book. An Afterword addressing the numismatic investigations of an American contemporary artist, Kelli Rae Adams, emphasises the book’s commitment to a “past imperfect” that remains open to the present.

Power and authority in the Mint The manufacture of coins was a highly charged matter. A distinction had to be maintained between legal currency and counterfeit coins, even though the technology and at times the people involved in the production of coins on both sides of the law were the same. Mints, as official institutions established by the noble or civic authority under which coins were issued, were not just coin factories but the practical and symbolic gatekeepers between “real” and false value in Christian Europe, as Carrie Anderson discusses in Chapter Four.25 Mints were there to keep costly raw materials safe and to control the quantity, precious metal content and weight of the legal tender produced. As has been explained, coins produced in a Mint were not just tokens of value but embodiments of the authority and presence of the issuer’s God-given power. Mints were thus important institutions of the state, defined as a community organised under one governing authority. Coins embodied wealth, and their manufacture was profitable owing to “seignioriage:” the difference between the actual cost of raw materials and the face-value attributed to the coin itself. The issuing authority of the mint benefited from this as did the moneyers, the manufacturers of coins who also received regular pay. Although they worked with their hands, minters were thus a wealthy elite which enjoyed – and often defended – ancient privileges amounting to quasi-noble status, granted by the mint’s governing authority to ensure loyalty. The location of Mints in different cities and the tensions between the interests of the issuing authority and local moneyers meant that Mints were sites of political manoeuvring as well as of wealth and prestige.26 Both chapters in this section take a painting belonging to a Netherlandish Mint as a case-study. Joanna Woodall examines Tribunal of the Brabant Mint by Maarten 25 Anderson, this volume, 132-133. 26 Parsons, Making Money, 7-11 (with reference to sixteenth-century France).

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de Vos (1532-1603), a monumental oil painting on panel produced in 1594 for the Antwerp branch of the Mints of Brabant (fig. 1.1). Sebastian Felten and Jessica Stewart analyse Allegory of Coinage, a somewhat smaller work on canvas attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) that was probably made for the Councilors and Masters-General of the Mints of the Dutch Republic sometime after 1681 (fig. 2.1). Tribunal of the Brabant Mint was displayed in the courtroom of the Mint complex in Antwerp, which may well have housed other assemblies and meetings of the consortium of Mints of Brabant, a province in present-day Belgium. Allegory of Coinage was apparently a chimney-piece made for the muntkamer (mint-room) of the Mints of the United Dutch Provinces, now known as The Netherlands. The iconography of both pictures is unusually complicated, claiming learning and wisdom that asserts the authority of the Mint as an institution, and the dignity and status of its members, by overwhelming lesser mortals. The complex iconography also acknowledges the demands of characterising coin money visually and articulates the political position of the two Mint consortia at different historical moments. The Tribunal is dated 1594, less than a decade after the restoration of control over the city of Antwerp by Philip of Habsburg, King of Spain and Duke of Brabant. Besides exemplifying the value of justice, the picture is linked by Woodall with the 1594 Joyous Entry into Antwerp of Philip’s governor, during which ancient privileges such as those of the Minters were normally confirmed. In 1594, however, the political situation in Antwerp remained unsettled after the failure of the Protestant-led, iconoclastic rebellion against Catholic, Habsburg authority. Woodall suggests that the unusual iconography, obscure texts and collage-like character of the work register tension, even fracture, between the central, divinely sanctioned authority of the Duke of Brabant and a faction within the local Mint at a delicate, transitional moment. By contrast, Allegory of Coinage was commissioned nearly a century later, in the economically successful confederation of provinces in the northern Netherlands, born from the same rebellion in which the city of Antwerp had unsuccessfully participated. Felten and Stewart show that, when Allegory of Coinage was painted, the Dutch polity – in the shape of the States of Holland, the States-General and the Mint council – had successfully countered challenges to centralised government by local Mints that asserted their privileges as institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. This resulted in the unilateral adoption of the guilder as the new standard specie in 1680. Emblazoned with the image of Pallas Athena, ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, this coin features prominently among the currencies depicted on the cornucopia in Allegory of Coinage. Both pictures are organised around a central female figure. In De Vos’s earlier work, sovereign authority is personified by an almost sacred figure of “Justice,” not only as an exemplary virtue in the courtroom but also as a reference to the immense privilege of judicial autonomy historically enjoyed, and fiercely defended,

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by members of the Mint. Lady Justice is flanked by historical legal authorities in a rather similar way to a Virgin Mary surrounded by Saints, but the presence of sacred authority associated with an altarpiece, or an ideal coin, is strained and undone by the hybrid character of the work and multiple points of view. To coin a numismatic analogy, the picture asserts its value by fiat as much as by appealing to belief in its inherent reality. In Allegory of Coinage another originally Marian figure, an enthroned “Maiden of Holland,” receives wealth and homage from different peoples across the world, and even from the double-sided deity Hermathena, a combination of Hermes, god of trade and eloquence and Athena, goddess of wisdom.27 In both Mint paintings, the richly-dressed female figures also invoke Moneta, the personification of money that traces its origins to the divine protector of money, Juno Moneta (Juno the warner or Juno the unique one), whose temple on the Capitoline Hill was attached to the silver mint in ancient Rome. In Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, this allusion is made through the balance scales, which are an attribute of Moneta as well as Justice and engage the beholder in the judgement or assessment of value, like the assessor of a coin. In Allegory of Coinage, the Maiden of Holland holds Moneta’s other main attribute, a cornucopia, erect on her open lap. Instead of the fruits of the earth that traditionally spill forth from the Horn of Plenty, the silver vessel brims with gold coins whose own origin in the body of the earth is made clear by the labouring figures in the background. In this later painting, the Mint is identified with a globally influential Maiden of Holland whose potency is located in money in the form of coins openly derived from the industry of others and guaranteed by her own superior knowledge. As Felten and Stewart say, “the painting centres governance in the production of coinage.”28

Currency and the anxieties of global trade Gold and silver coinage has a close, complex relationship with the expansion of global trade. It is inseparable from trade in that bullion is a commodity, transported from the sites where ores are mined and initially smelted to the institutions where they are further processed and minted. The resulting coins can either be put into domestic circulation or exported elsewhere. During the period covered by this book, silver was traded and marketed globally in the form of European coins. Historically mined in Saxony and Bohemia in present-day Germany, the supply of silver was hugely increased by Spanish exploitation of silver deposits in Mexico and Peru, and 27 On Marian connotations: Van Winter, “Hollandse tuin,” 37, 47-50, 59-65 and passim; Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 53-54, 56. 28 This volume, Felten and Stewart, 81.

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IV Unknown Indo-Christian artist, The Virgin of Mount Potosí, c. 1740, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Potosí, Museo de la Casa Nacional de Moneda. Photo © Julie Laurent/Julyinireland (Flickr).

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Mount Potosí in Bolivia, the so called “Rich Mountain” that produced an estimated sixty per cent of silver mined in the world during the second half of the sixteenth century (fig. IV). About a third of this ended up in China, in the form of bullion and European coins. Silver was priced more highly in China than in Europe, and silver specie and bullion were essential items of trade for European merchants, who were interested in purchasing luxury goods such as silk and porcelain. Japan was also a major supplier of silver to China and forged a link in a multilateral trade, including Europeans, within Southeast Asia.29 Although ultimately less lucrative than silver, it was the quest for gold that motivated European voyages of exploration. The gold supply was infamously expanded by Spanish access to deposits in central America and the west of South America, and by the acquisition of gold artefacts from civilizations in which unworked gold was not believed to have intrinsic value.30 As Carrie Anderson discusses in Chapter Four, there was also trade in gold, as well as human beings, between the Portuguese, Dutch and British and the kingdoms of the Coast of Guinea, the so-called Gold Coast, such as the Asante. The risks and expense of transporting coin specie across long distances on the high seas suggest that the dominance of precious coins was not solely due to the durability and material and visual properties of gold and silver as is often assumed. It also resulted from the control and use of tokens of value that effectively embodied divine and divinely-sanctioned Christian authority by militarily, technologically and economically powerful and ruthless Europeans in their engagement with the wider world. Moreover, the origin of precious metals in the veins and bowels of “mother earth” and the human labour and sacrifice involved in their extraction meant that gold and silver coins embodied the power to pay in a physical sense. In Shakespeare’s play of the late 1590s a pound of flesh was legally granted to Shylock when the Venetian merchant Antonio defaulted because his ships were lost at sea.31 Today, someone who fails to pay for a meal in a restaurant in money is proverbially asked to wash the dishes. In contrast to present-day ignorance of supply chains and production methods, there are references in period works of art and literature to the physical production of precious metals by subordinated peoples in faraway lands. This suggests that the power of coinage was at this time also acknowledged to derive from control over unremitting, forced labour, which physically guaranteed payment to obtain what was desired. In Allegory of Coinage, the Maiden of Holland’s position of power as Moneta is predicated on the unceasing labour of the diminutive 29 Flynn and Giráldez, “Silver Spoon,” 202; Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, 13-141. 30 Fisher, “Gold in the Search for the Americas.” 31 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1 and passim. Compare Deng “Money, Ritual and Religion” (electronic resource, n.p. Paragraph 12.45).

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figures quarrying the mountain as well as the tribute of the turbaned, black and brown men presented by Hermathena, deity of trade and knowledge (fig. 2.1). As an eighteenth-century painting by an unknown Indo-Christian artist indicates, this exploitation was conceived in terms of sacred natural fertility by both the Spanish conquerors, who identified the “Rich Mountain” Potosí with the Virgin Mary and the indigenous peoples of the Andes, for whom mountains represent Pachamama (Mother Earth) (fig. IV). As Heather Johnson shows in her chapter on the comic poem A Shilling or, The Travailes of Twelve-Pence, published in London in 1621 by John Taylor, the painful birth of the coin by “men-midwives” from “America’s rude barbarous bounds” explicitly haunts its subsequent life: “And that poore Slaves which were condemn’d to dye, / Were forc’d to digge for me laboriously.”32 The power embodied by precious metal coins, including the willingness and capacity to force or enslave labour, rendered other currencies “weak” and ultimately disconnected them from the hegemonic monetary system, so that the balance of trade and accrual of “wealth” was almost entirely in favour of Europe.33 European governments delegated the authority to issue coins to trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for circulation in their areas of trading and military activity abroad.34 Yet despite this extension of Western monetary power, judging the value of precious metals and use of precious coinage by or on behalf of Europeans in far-flung regions of the world was an anxious business. Europeans had to trade with and rely upon people whom they considered to be without “credentials” (whose Latin root credere – to believe – is shared with credit), who did not speak the same language and came from unfamiliar cultures with different values and beliefs. In this second section, Carrie Anderson discusses a gold and tortoiseshell box whose theme is the appropriation and transformation of precious raw material and embodied human value in “Africa” to European wealth and culture (f igs. 4.1-5 and cover). On the lid, a kneeling “African” man offers a huge elephant tusk and an “African” woman displays her charms and holds out a pan containing a large, unrefined nugget of gold. This rock is surmounted by Mercury/Hermes, the European god of trade, bearing a shield impressed with the monogram of the Dutch West India company (GWC), which monopolised Dutch trade through the Coast of Guinea.35 The struggling GWC presented the box to the Stadtholder Wilhelm IV in 1749 with a request for his patronage. The box offers him in miniature, in “refined” form and in a double-sided design, control over the gold, ivory and human labour of 32 Taylor, Travailes of Twelve-Pence, lines 23-6. See further Johnson, 191. 33 Green, A Fistful of Shells, 5-6 and passim. 34 Bucknill, Dutch East Indies. VOC: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie. 35 GWC: Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie.

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West Africa. Shallow reliefs to each side of the three figures idealise and naturalise the laborious extraction of alluvial gold and the Dutch procurement of enslaved people. On the sides of the box there are reliefs of named military forts on the Gold Coast, which protected Dutch imports and exports from other European powers (figs. 4.3, 4.4). Anderson argues that the box allays Dutch anxieties about dealing with distant, unfamiliar and distrusted trading partners. Since the usual in-person methods of assaying were no longer sufficient, the value of the raw materials was secured through processes analogous to the minting of coins: reworking and the impress of authoritative iconography and texts. Angela Ho’s chapter concerns A Market Stall in Batavia, an oil painting created almost a century earlier than the gold box and now attributed to Andries Beeckman (fig. 3.1). The picture also advertises the benefits of global trade through the Dutch India companies and betrays the anxieties and effects of distanced, mediated exchanges. It includes an array of tropical fruit, named in Dutch and Malay in an illusionistic list at lower right, and two women and a youth identifiable as Indonesian through their skin tone and clothing. It was probably owned by Joan Huydecoper, Amsterdam burgomaster and director of the VOC, whose regional capital in South-East Asia was Batavia, present-day Jakarta (Sunda Kelapa). Ho’s study focuses on the man with stereotypical Chinese features who is counting out generic coins in a market transaction with the Indonesians. By arguing that Dutch viewers would have perceived the foreign scene through the lens of domestic paintings of comparable subjects, Ho shows that the characterization of the Chinese merchant is ambivalent. She draws an analogy between coins circulating in an unfamiliar realm, beyond the boundaries of the minting authority, and the uncertain value attributed to the Chinese traders in Batavia, who acted both as agents for the Dutch, as a means of obtaining goods such as textiles and porcelain, and in their own interests. A comparison can also be drawn between the coins being counted by the Chinese merchant and the natural goods laid out in the painting. However, unlike the endless abundance pouring from a cornucopia, or golden coins spilling over a counter in a domestic setting, the Indonesian fruits are fully visible, laid out in order and analysed visually through dissection. Dutch viewers of A Market Stall in Batavia could not determine the value of the indecipherable coins, unfamiliar fruits and the inscrutable Chinese figure by “weighing them up” or reference to some kind of touchstone. At such a physical and cultural distance, and lacking in the trustworthy knowledge arising from contact, they were reliant on received knowledge and expectations and close, systematic observation (or surveillance).36 Value was not reaped directly but through a more abstract process of accounting: balancing profits against loss. 36 Kambaskovic and Wolfe, “The Senses” (n.p., digital content).

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Coins and persons Our case studies show that works of art and literature in this period acknowledged a connection between the forced labour of generic human beings involved in the extraction of gold and silver in faraway, pagan lands and the coins in Christian Europe forcefully “branded” with the iconography of named sovereign authorities.37 In not only constituting “frozen desire” but also embodying, guaranteeing and mobilising the physical power to pay, coins acted as agents for their owners in the sense that they caused events to happen. They can usefully be considered in relation to the concept of “distributed personhood” proposed in 1998 by Alfred Gell in his Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. As “social persons,” Gell suggests, “we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency.”38 Precious coins epitomise Gell’s description of things that embody and transmit human will or agency, although “presence” in coins was conceived in terms of different kinds of human labour and force exercised in relation to potent materials, rather than the enchanting technical virtuosity through which Gell characterised the magical power of a work of art.39 In this section, the investment of human presence in precious coins is explored through English literature. Rana Choi examines how Shakespeare’s plays use coins as a model to imagine the human subject, especially how to grasp the “true value” of characters as they move through and act in relation to a variety of exchanges. Choi describes how the relationship between the nominal or “face value” and the intrinsic value of specie was undermined in sixteenth-century England, making reference to Henry VIII’s “Great Debasement” of coinage in 1542-51 and the Recoinage of November 1560 by his daughter Elizabeth I. It is notable that the numismatic Great Debasement was immediately preceded and paralleled by a comparable undermining of the potency of sacred objects of devotion. Beginning in the 1530s, the sovereign-led English reformation involved the destruction of devotional artefacts and seizure and melting down of the wealth of the monasteries for the royal coffers. Choi shows that the ideals of consonance between materiality and divine authority, appearance and intrinsic reality, continued to be pursued. However, the experience in the following decades was of unstable prices and exchange rates and ultimately an increased reliance on informal credit exchanges, which heightened the importance of personal trust and reputation. Choi argues that, in the climate of uncertainty before recognition of the sufficiency of credit, debased 37 In this volume, Felten and Stewart, Anderson, Johnson. 38 Gell, Art and Agency, 103. 39 Gell, “Enchantment,” 163-164, 166 and passim.

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coinage metaphors in the plot and language of Shakespeare’s plays register anxieties about establishing whether others will deliver on their promises, even in face-toface relationships. In Choi’s interpretation, Shakespeare’s plots strategize ways to overcome the moral and social dimensions of debasement to determine the truth about a person’s real moral worth – especially in relation to the embodied exchange of marriage, which ideally generates wealth through profitable alliances and the “minting” of offspring. 40 Five years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, his fellow Londoner John Taylor, an early journalist, war correspondent, adventurer, poet-impresario and political pamphleteer, published A Shilling or, The Travailes of Twelve-Pence. The text forms part of the pamphlet literature produced in a year of intense economic debate. 41 Heather Johnson examines the poem and its emblematized frontispiece in relation to Taylor’s identity as the “water-poet,” a workaday ferryman traversing the capital’s central artery of the river Thames (fig. 6.2). In so doing, she teases out the coin’s agency and impact on all who encounter it. The poem is mostly narrated by a shilling coin, which describes its violent, unnatural birth in the silver mines of America and its painful acquisition of “breeding”, “badge”, “face”, “name and cross” in the London Mint. The coin is named as a shilling created seventy years earlier, under the authority of Henry VIII’s Protestant son Edward VI, and the poem undermines the impression of divinely sanctioned authority by referring to the boy-king’s lack of beard and the worn-down nose on the coin’s head (fig. 6.1). It also notices that the coin’s spending power has been reduced by inflation. Yet we are no longer in Shakespeare’s dramatic world of belief or doubt in a sacred object/subject of divine authority: “A shilling is but Twelvepence, all men know, I am the same I was, ’tis only men, have lost the consciences they harbour’d then.”42 In Taylor’s modernising world, money has no intrinsic or impressed virtue, there is no divine presence or power in the sovereign’s face or in the metal. The “distributed self” embodied by the shilling is only too human and relates to the myriad subjects through whose hands it passes. Johnson explores how the poem sets down these “Masters of Twelvepence not in order as they are in degree, but as he travelled from man to man, good and bad, poore and rich, without any order.” Probably in alliance with the devil, the shilling constantly moves (travels) and labours (travails) in the service of subjects distinguished only by the nature of their occupation, their personal desires and the politics of gender. He is in most cases ultimately their “Infidell” master or god, shaping them as moral beings. 40 Shell, Art and Money, 29-30, 126-127; Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 42, 51, 54. 41 Suprinyak, “Merchants and Councillors”. 42 Taylor, Travailes of Twelve-Pence, n.p.

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Coins in and out of circulation In relation to the dizzying array of hands through which it has passed, Taylor’s personified shilling states, “Thus have I ofte been tossed to and fro.”43 He is referring to circulation, the movement of money through the market. The scarcity of coins in the early modern period – especially before, but even after the influx of New World gold and silver – meant that, for the proper functioning of the market, the ideal condition of the coin was to be in movement. The frequently depicted sin of Avarice, manifested in hoarding, was thus a compound error, damaging to the miser’s immortal soul and starving the economy of money.44 The movement of coins through the market and thus society, as well as their ideal (if not actual) nature as identical units, is reflected in Dutch proverbs such as “Boeren gheld is soo goet als Heeren Munt,” (“A farmer’s money is just as good as a nobleman’s”). 45 Nearly three centuries later, the German philosopher of money Georg Simmel emphasized the same interchangeable quality in the circulation of modern money, arguing that its anonymity erased personal connection. 46 The circulation of coins in the monetary economy during our period found a parallel in the function of medals in elite social networks. Both coins and medals were inspired by the coins of ancient Greece and Rome, and visually they are similar: conventionally circular and double-sided, with a portrait head of an honoured figure on the obverse, a device on the reverse and a text, often in Latin and around the rim (fig. 1.4, fig. V). Both coins and medals are likely to be made of valuable metals, although the use of burnished bronze for medals shifts attention from intrinsic value to the visual and tactile properties of the material. High relief and the use of casting (as well as striking) to produce medals also implies a more integrated relationship between substance and subject than the coin’s forceful union between the precious metal and the expressions of governing authority that are impressed into it. 47 The combination of invention and skill necessary to achieve the sculptural quality and uniformity of an edition of medals contrasts with the separation of invention from execution in a coin, where more or less skilful moneyers hammered repeatedly on dies created from previous designs to produce multiples that, while somewhat variable in workmanship and appearance, were interchangeable in economic use. Although medals may be distributed or exchanged as gifts, or sold, they are not fully fungible because the value of a particular medal in an edition is not quantified and depends not 43 Taylor, Travailes of Twelve-Pence, n.p. 44 Hamon, “L’avarice.” 45 Van de Venne, Tafereel, 189. For further examples: Honig, “Money and Representation,” n. 34. 46 For example, Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 349. 47 Stahl, “Mint and Medal,” 137-143; Sargent and Velde, Small Change, 53.

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V  Jacob Jonghelinck, medal of Philip II of Spain to commemorate the victory of Saint Quentin. Obverse: Philip II laureate, reverse: Saint Quentin with commemorative inscription, 1557, silver, 35 mm diameter. Location unknown. © Artokoloro/ Alamy Stock Photo

only on its quality as an artefact but also on its personal associations. Medals have no purchasing power per se and their ostensible raison d’être is not circulation. Their primary function is to celebrate or commemorate a particular subject and/ or event in perpetuity. Coins, on the other hand, feature portraits not to commemorate but to imbue the metal with the honour and authority of the depicted legal entity. Coins are issued in this entity’s image and name to guarantee their legality and value in circulation and economic exchanges. Coins function in relation to specific times and places. Yet whilst they are to our eyes conceptually distinct, coins and medals could be designed by the same people and, as a painting by Frans Francken the Younger reveals, could appear together in the numismatic and encyclopaedic collections that were avidly pursued by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European elites (fig. VI). In the mid-sixteenth century, there was a controversy over whether ancient coins were intended as medals. 48 Both coins and medals were founded in belief in personal honour, virtue and authority derived from God and when coins were stilled, excluded from exchange and prized individually, they could acquire the personal, commemorative associations of medals. In our period medals could equally function within a gift economy of trust, honour, obligation and exchange that complemented the monetary economy.

48 Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 136-137.

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VI Frans Francken the Younger, The Cabinet of a Collector with Paintings, Shells, Coins, Fossils and Flowers, 1619, oil on panel, 85 × 56 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Photo: Hugo Maertens, Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community (CC0).

While “stilled” numismatic objects, including ancient coins as well as medals, constructed subjects and events as stable and eternal, the circulation of money was connected to fertility and reproduction. As it moves through the market and participates in exchanges, money is seen to produce wealth for all who touch it. In a related way, Adam and Eve’s progeny were construed as coins that received the impress of God’s likeness from their parents. The inevitable errors of reproduction in this human minting process contrast with the perfected form of Christ, directly formed from God in the pure gold of Mary’s virginity. 49 In secular contexts, coin purses symbolized both male and female genitals, and both coins and metal were linked with semen. Aristotle condemned usury, the practice of charging someone to use money that would otherwise remain out of circulation, as way of money begetting money without exchange (or intercourse): Usury is most reasonably hated, because its gain comes from money itself and not from that for the sake of which money was invented. For money was brought into existence for the purpose of exchange, but interest increases the amount of the money itself […]: offspring resembles parent, and interest is money born of 49 Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 42-44, 51, 56, with further literature.

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money; consequently this form of the business of getting wealth is of all forms the most contrary to nature.50

Both the articles in this section consider the significance of circulation in relation to a single coin. In both, the coin gains special significance, especially for being possessed by a woman and being received from a man. In “Margarethe Butzbach and the Florin Extorted by Blows: Coins Securing Social Bonds in Late Medieval Germany” Allison Stielau examines a little-discussed event in the 1506 autobiography of the German cleric Johannes Butzbach (1477-1516), in which Johannes’s stepfather savagely beat his mother, Margarethe, in an attempt to extract from her a particular gold florin to pay her son’s school fee. The coin that Margarethe Butzbach is willing to defend with her body, Stielau argues, was an Ehepfennig, or “marriage penny,” given to her by her first husband. Men gave coins to women at the time of betrothal as a sign of the promise made between the couple. This changed function plucks the coin from circulation, freighting it with a commemorative function and emotional significance. Johannes’s father dies, leaving Margarethe a widow. In the context of her new marriage, the coin’s special status comes under threat. Johannes’s stepfather, usurping the position of husband, wishes to violently dislodge the coin from its position as a quasi-relic and send it back into circulation at the same time that the child of Margaretha’s first marriage is also sent into the world. The woman in Natasha Seaman’s “Centring the Coin in Jacob Backer’s Woman with a Coin,” is a prostitute (fig. 8.1). Although the painting has some of the qualities of a portrait, it is a tronie, a peculiarly Dutch genre of painting that depicts character types rather than named individuals and was typically sold on the open market. Contrasting Backer’s painting of the prostitute with her coin to a portrait by him of a wife with her child – like Margarethe, bound to her household – Seaman identifies the shared quality of circulation of the woman and the coin. Unlike a wife, the prostitute belongs to no household except for its counterfeit, the brothel. While the women’s coins – and lives – differ in their circulation, they both defy Simmel’s characterization of money as impersonal. Margarethe’s coin, linked to her dead husband, could not be replaced by another of equal value. For her son Johannes too, once it comes into dispute, the coin is sullied by the violence over it and he refuses to take it. At both moments, it is more than a mere store of economic value. In Backer’s painting, the coin enacts a personal connection to the viewer by drawing us closer to the prostitute to attempt to read its (illegible) text. As a payment, it also serves as an index of her paying male admirer, emphasized in the 50 Shell, End of Kinship, 29-30, 126-127; Aristotle’s Politics, 1.1258b: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/te xt?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D1258b [accessed December 18th 2021]; Deng, “Money, Ritual and Religion” (electronic resource, n.p. Paragraph 12.60 ff, “Usury”).

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male portrait head shown to the viewer. In both instances, the coin materializes the women’s relationship to men, in line with Buchan’s formulation of “frozen desire.” The way they grasp the coin, one tightly, one lightly, corresponds to how they – and the coin – move through the world.

Credit and risk According to the contemporary political economist Ann Pettifor, “the thing we call money has its original basis in a promise, a social relationship: ‘I trust that in exchange for my favour to you, you will (promise) to repay me ‒ now or at some time in the future’.” According to her, the monetary system is thus based on credit, derived from the Latin credo, “I believe.” When we use money we are saying, in essence, “I believe that you will pay, or repay me for my goods and services.”51 In the period covered by this book, the monetary system was equally reliant on trust and belief, although this was complicated by the intrinsic value ascribed to gold and silver and the divine authority ascribed to the governing authorities that issued and guaranteed legal tender. We have seen that the promise to pay could also be fulfilled by forced labour and that Moneta’s horn of plenty implicitly associated coins with food, which could be relied upon to sustain life and thus fulfil the promise to pay in a different way.52 In this period, in which institutions and legal instruments which might compel economic compliance (especially across political borders) were relatively weak, belief and trust in money was based on the authority of the Mints, on the personal honour, reputation and connections of the parties to an exchange and ultimately on the absolute value and virtue of an eternal, unchanging God. As described earlier, the extension of trade routes produced anxieties about monetary dealings with distant, unknown trading partners or agents who were not subject to the same God. Within Christendom, however, keeping or breaking faith or promise was not only a matter of economic or even personal relations in the here and now but also of connection with the eternal, absolute and beneficent reality personified and guaranteed by God. The two chapters in this section address monetary credit and risk in this world of human activities and sacred realities. They are both concerned with paintings and, in common with other contributions to the book, they explore not just the iconography of coins but how concepts of money (here embodied in precious coinage) can illuminate the structure, rhetoric and reception of painting as, itself, a medium of exchange.53 Roger Crum discusses The Tribute Money by Masaccio 51 Pettifor, Just Money, 19. Compare Agamben, Oath. 52 For recognition of food as a more fundamental value than coinage, see Crum, this volume, 263. 53 This volume, Seaman, Woodall.

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(1401-1428) in the family chapel of the Brancacci within the basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (fig. 9.1). This rare subject, part of a fresco cycle on the life of Saint Peter, concerns a miracle at the fishing port of Capernaum (Kefar Naḥum) in which Jesus directs Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish, to pay a tax-collector for the temple.54 Dalia Judovitz considers works by Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), who spent his career in the Duchy of Lorraine in present-day north-eastern France. Judovitz analyses La Tour’s depictions of scenes of payment of taxes, gambling and fortune-telling in which money plays a central role, showing how they allude to transactions involving faith, promise and risk. Crum considers the fresco in relation to the widespread use of money of account in fifteenth-century Florence. By referring to a common, abstract unit of value, money of account enables funds to be transferred through space and time without the physical movement of hard currency.55 Crum explores the ways in which “abstract” properties of Masaccio’s fresco, especially the spatial arrangement of the narrative and use of one-point perspective, can be related to the unfolding of Christ’s authority through the miraculous discovery of the coin in the fish and transfer of its value to the tax-collector. As Crum points out, this is also an enactment of Peter’s faith in Christ, which is materialised through the appearance of the coin in the mouth of the fish and implied when Peter hands over the coin, which is now invisible to us, to the temple attendant. Crum evokes Baxandall’s concept of “the period eye” to suggest that the monetary culture of early fifteenth-century Florence, particularly the spatio-temporal simultaneity, abstract thinking and faith involved in the use of money of account, shaped the creation and comprehension of The Tribute Money. In her close analysis of a number of paintings by Georges de la Tour in which coins are depicted, Judovitz pursues the idea that monetary transactions that involve keeping or breaking faith or promise reference not just economic concerns but also ethical and religious beliefs. She examines depictions of Biblical parables and scenes of gambling and theft as different kinds of transactions: the financial and moral obligations involved in keeping account books and settling debts and the vicarious personal risk and expenditure involved in games of fortune. Privileging credo, in the sense of spiritual faith or belief rather than explicitly monetary credit, and generosity rather than greed, La Tour’s pictorial representations of biblical parables explore and elaborate the meanings attached to divine grace. Judovitz argues that by raising issues of breaking faith or promise, his scenes of gambling and fortune both bear witness to moments of moral and spiritual lapse and provide an artistic reflection on the risks attached to painting as a visual medium. La Tour thus exposes unfamiliar connections between economic and 54 Matthew’s Gospel (17:24-27). 55 Sargent and Velde, Small Change, Chapter 9.

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spiritual gains and losses through pictorial light and darkness, proportion and perspective. Skilful portrayals attest to the virtuosity of painting in duplicating – or counterfeiting – presence, while glimmering reflections on pieces of armour and clothing put on display the “aureum” of painting, its visual coinage and currency. Rife with references to their own making, his works compare painting’s credibility with monetary exchanges that involve both the transmission of “true value” and deceitful illusionism.

Afterword The book concludes with Natasha Seaman’s meditation on the recent ceramic installations of the contemporary United States artist Kelli Rae Adams (b. 1977) in the light of the previous chapters. Seaman begins by drawing attention to the parallel between “f iat money” and “f iat art.” The former’s value is asserted by those in authority and accepted in the market of traders rather than grounded in the ostensibly intrinsic value of a precious metal. The value of “fiat art” is decreed by the “author” and accepted in the market of beholders, rather than grounded in naturalised western artistic hierarchies, categories and skills. However, all artworks are embodied in some way, even the most abstract and conceptual, and all are products of mental and/or physical labour, undertaken by the artist themself or by others in their service. Works by professional artists are also, indirectly, a means of sustaining their embodied existence. This embodiment allows Seaman to juxtapose Adams’ installations to the book’s case studies on precious coinage, describing how the artist’s use of the medium of clay both engages with and challenges the intrinsic, permanent value attributed to metals across history. In Seaman’s interpretation, Adams’ works also evoke the human labour and sustenance which we have recognised as fundamental values implicit in precious coinage during our period. Consonant with the character of our own time, Adams explores a social imaginary of usurious indebtedness rather than the dream of cornucopian wealth. She questions the value of her education in relation to the status and authority that it has given her as an artist and the labour and sacrifice needed to fulfil her promise to pay.

Conclusion Ann Pettifor asserts that “Money is not, and never has been a commodity like a car, or oil, or gold – although coins and notes have, like your credit card, been used as a convenient measure of the trust between individuals engaged in making

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transactions.”56 Whilst this book draws deeply on the insight that the monetary system is reliant on social relationships of trust, credit and the promise to pay in return for a transaction, it pays equal attention to the precious coin as the distinctive and powerful way in which money was embodied in Christian Europe during the early modern period. In an article first published in 1996, the French thinker Bruno Latour compared a map, which points to and identifies a site which the users of the map want to travel to, with a work of art, in which beholders are interested in the process of mediation rather than looking “through it” to reach a designated site or object. If the map is regarded as neutral and transparent to what it represents, it can be replaced by any other map of the same area, just as a precious coin could in theory be replaced by any other tokens of value, such as banknotes or cowrie shells. By contrast, the appreciation and value of something (including a map) as a work of art involves paying attention to the choices of material, medium, technique and motif, the manipulations and transformations necessary for the fabrication to fulfil its task(s).57 This book treats coins as works of art in that it pays attention to the embodiment of money in disks of precious metal impressed with significant texts and images, rather than regarding them as transparent to their monetary denomination or interchangeable with, say, credit cards or virtual currency, or even with precious coins in other periods or cultures.58 For example, the identification of money with gold and silver in this period involved a sense of value as sacred and absolute and an appreciation of human labour and sacrifice as a component of monetary value, as well as an understanding of money as akin to a commodity, subject to market forces of supply and demand.59 The book notices that, although more “sophisticated” minting technologies, paper and other types of currency and credit were available, Europe and its trading networks between c.1400 and 1750 relied to a surprising degree on precious coins produced by hand in traditional ways by highly privileged elites and authorised by supposedly divinely ordained governing authorities. Our case studies explore how these distinctive and powerful artefacts, as they are presented in and inform works of art and literature, engaged with concepts of trust, credit and the promise to pay current in Christian Europe during a period of global economic and cultural expansion and of profound changes in conceptions of divine, natural and sovereign authority. James Buchan’s definition of money as “frozen desire” characterises money as a mobile abstraction (“desire”) but also implicitly acknowledges that as a social 56 Pettifor, Just Money, 20. 57 Latour, “How to be Iconophilic,” 418-428. 58 Compare Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 168-170. 59 Pettifor, Just Money, 17; Zorach and Philips Jr, Gold, 95-113, and passim. Deng, Money in the Renaissance (electronic resource, n.p. Paragraph 9.7 ff. “Intrinsic and extrinsic theories of value”).

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transaction it is actually inseparable from embodiment (“freezing”) at the point of exchange, even if embodiment has now been reduced to the number displayed on a computer screen and the tiny, transient pulse of electricity that registers a digital transaction. Buchan’s description also recognises human desire as fundamental to the monetary system – as “the other side of the coin” to trust and credit. In Buchan’s view the original basis of the monetary system is not just the promise to pay but also the desire for the “favour” that Pettifor speaks of as the reason that we make the promise in the first place. If the monetary system is rooted in human desire, the crucial and historically and culturally variable question is what do we desire? This book suggests that during our period desire was, unsurprisingly, directed towards the accumulation of “goods” and stable personal power or agency within a belief system in which all desires can be fulfilled, either on earth or in heaven. On a planet which has been despoiled by these desires, we might now recognise that the favour that we all need from each other is its survival.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Sacrament of Language. An Archaeology of the Oath. (Homo Sacer II, 3). Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Balfe, Thomas and Woodall, Joanna. “Introduction: From Living Presence to Lively Likeness – The Lives of ad vivum.” In Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe before 1800, edited by Thomas Balfe, Joanna Woodall, Claus Zittel, 1-43. Leiden: Brill, Intersections 61, 2019. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 219-253. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970 (1935). Buchan, John. Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money. London: Picador, 1997. Bucknill, John. The Coins of the Dutch East Indies: An Introduction to the Study of the Series. London: Spink, 1931. Cooper, Dennis. The Art and Craft of Coinmaking: A History of Minting Technology. London: Spink, 1988. Cunnally, John. Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. De Graaf, Cor. “De Bende van Anthonis van Eembrugge. Een valsemuntersbende aan het eind van de 16de eeuw.” In Van Solidus tot Euro: geld in Nederland in economischhistorisch en politiek perspectief, edited by E.H.P. Cordfunke, Herbert Sarfatij, 111-137. Hilversum: Verloren, 2004.

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De Muzio, Tim and Robbins, Richard. An Anthropology of Money: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. Deng, Stephen, ed. A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 (electronic resource). Deng, Stephen. “Money, Ritual and Religion.” In A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance, edited by Stephen Deng. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 (electronic resource). Felfe, Robert. “Naer het leven: between Image-Generating Techniques and Aesthetic Mediation.” In Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe before 1800, edited by Thomas Balfe, Joanna Woodall, Claus Zittel, 44-88. Leiden: Brill, Intersections 61, 2019. Fisher, John. “Gold in the Search for the Americas.” Gold Bulletin 9 (1976): 58-63. Flynn, Dennis. World Silver and Monetary History in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Aldershot: Variorum: 1996. Flynn, Dennis and Giráldez, Arturo. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” In Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201-221. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gell, Alfred. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Gell, Alfred, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, edited by Eric Hirsch, 159-186. London: Routledge, 1999. Giráldez, Arturo. “Money and its Technologies: Mining, Metallurgy, Minting, and NonMetallic Monetary Forms.” In A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance, edited by Stephen Deng, 15-38. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 (electronic resource). Gorini, Giovanni. “The Coin as Blazon or Talisman: Paramonetary Functions of Money.” Diogenes 26, no. 101-102 (1978): 70-88. Green, Toby. A Fistfull of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. London: Allen Lane, 2019. Hamon, Philippe. “L’avarice en images: mutations d’une répresentation.” Seizième Siècle 4 (2008): 11-34. Honig, Elizabeth. Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Honig, Elizabeth. “Counting out their Money: Money and Representation in the Early Modern Netherlands.” Leidschrift 2 (April 1998): 31-66. Jacobi, Lauren. The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy: Constructing the Spaces of Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Kambaskovic, Danijela and Wolfe, Charles. “The Senses in Philosophy and Science: From the Nobility of Sight to the Materialism of Touch.” In A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, edited by Herman Roodenburg, 107-126. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

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Latour, Bruno. “How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion.” In Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Carrie Jones and Peter Galison, 418-440. London: Routledge, 1998. Parshall, Peter. “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance.” Art History 16, no. 4 (1993): 554–579. Parsons, Jotham. Making Money in 16th Century France: Currency, Culture and the State. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pettifor, Ann. Just Money: How Society can Break the Despotic Power of Finance. Margate: Commonwealth, 2014. Sargent, Thomas and Velde, François. The Big Problem of Small Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London, 1598 (consulted in a later edition). Shell, Marc. The End of Kinship: ‘Measure for measure’, Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Shell, Marc. Art and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money, edited by David Frisby. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Stahl, Alan. “Mint and Medal in the Renaissance.” In Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal, edited by Stephen Scher, 137-147. New York: Garland, 2000. Suprinyak, Carlos Eduardo. “Merchants and Councillors: Intellectual Divergences in Early 17 th Century British Economic Thought.” Nova Economia 21, no. 3 (2011). https://doi. org/10.1590/S0103-63512011000300006  Taylor, John. A Shilling or, The Travailes of Twelve-Pence. London: printed by Edward Allde for Henry Gosson, 1621. Early English Books Online, STC (2nd ed.)/23793. Van de Venne, Adriaen. Tafereel van de Belachende Werelt. The Hague: Gedruckt voor den Autheur, 1635. Van Winter, Pieter. “De Hollandse tuin,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1957): 29–121. Von Glahn, Richard. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Wang, Helen. ”Textiles as Money on the Silk Road?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no.2 (2013): 165-174. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135618631300014X Woodall, Joanna. “‘De Wisselaer’. Quentin Matsys’s Man Weighing Gold Coins and his Wife, 1514.” In Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64, edited by Christine Goettler, Bart Ramakers, Joanna Woodall, 38-75. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Woodall, Joanna, “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album Amicorum.” In Ut Pictura Amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice 1500-1700, edited by Walter Melion, Joanna Woodall and Michael Zell, 649-703. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Zorach, Rebecca and Phillips Jr., Michael. Gold: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion, 2016.

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About the authors Joanna Woodall is Professor of Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in Netherlandish visual culture during the age of global expansion. Her recent publications have focused on love and money, and sometimes the exchange between the two. Natasha Seaman is Professor of Art History at Rhode Island College. She is the author of Hendrick ter Brugghen and the Theology of the Image. Reinventing Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht (Ashgate 2012) and several articles relating to the work of the Utrecht Caravaggisti.

Power and Authority in the Mint

1.

Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594*1 Joanna Woodall

Abstract The weighing scales held by the female figure in Maarten De Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint are attributes of both Justice and Moneta. This chapter expands on the conventional interpretation of the picture as a “justice panel” by comparing it to the precious coins on which the Minters relied. Like a coin, the picture was not only a quasi-sacred entity but also a form of rhetoric designed to achieve specific ends at particular moments of exchange. The image solicited trust in absolute authority but was also evaluated and used by all-too-human subjects. The chapter opens up the interpretative space of an ideal courtroom, in which the picture has previously been sequestered, to the complex politics and ethics of the Mint in 1594, when the new Habsburg governor Ernest of Austria made his Joyous Entry into Antwerp. Keywords: Maarten de Vos, Mint, Joyous Entry, Moneta, Justice, virtue

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

* This article forms a trilogy with Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’” and Woodall, “Love and Money.” Natasha Seaman’s acute and constructive criticism has made the arguments clearer and more concise. I am grateful, too, for the feedback on earlier versions presented to Bart Ramakers’ and Caecilie Weissert’s Biblia Docet symposium in Tübingen in 2017 and at the RSA in 2019.

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_ch01

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1.1  Maarten de Vos, The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, datable to 1594, oil on panel, 142.5 × 187.5 cm. Antwerp, Museum Snijders Rockoxhuis (KBC Bank). Image © Museum Snijders&Rockoxhuis / KBC, Erwin Donvil.

of the painter […].”1 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).2 Its painter, Maarten de Vos (1532-1603), was the city of Antwerp’s leading master.3 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. 4 Founded in 1291 by Duke 1 Wolters van der Wey, “Munters,” Document 1. Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 29, 202, 209, proposes that two later group portraits (1638, 1663) were displayed in the courtroom. 2 Zweite, Marten de Vos no. 83, 251-8, 303-4; Jennes, “Brabantse Munters;” De Ridder, “De Vierschaar;” Wolters van der Wey, “Munters;” Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 31, 198-9 distinguishes between The Tribunal (Vierschaar) and the “Executive Council” of the Serment. On Mints, this volume, Introduction, 18-21, 24-26. 3 Diels, “Blijde Intrede,” 28-29. 4 Boffa, “Liste provisoire,” 110, Document 276; Génard, L’Hôtel des Monnaies, 17, 119; Smolderen, “Waradin,” 94.

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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.5 From about 1480 its headquarters were located in the flourishing city of Antwerp, including its own tribunal or court. The aim of this chapter is to conceptualise De Vos’s picture in relation to the gold and silver coinage upon which this privileged elite depended. While no coins are visible, perhaps because of the sensitivity of explicitly relating justice to cash, it is argued that the painting itself functions like precious coinage, invoking and relying on trust in absolute authority but also evaluated and used by human subjects.6 The work is considered both within the sequestered space of an ideal courtroom and in relation to the complex politics and ethics of the Antwerp Mint during the final decades of the sixteenth century. It is shown that the picture, like a coin, was not only a quasi-sacred entity but also a form of rhetoric designed to achieve specific ends at particular “moments of exchange.” In a period of profound instability and change, belief in the intrinsic value of both precious coins and De Vos’s picture was also accompanied by personal evaluations involving material and moral judgements, conceptualised through the central figure’s balance scales. Finally, the chapter suggests that the picture, like precious coinage, could be handled and controlled by a privileged group to promote their own agenda in the guise of intrinsic worth and general benefit. The picture’s spectacular conjunction of allegory, historical figures, portraiture and texts needs some explanation, and our understanding of its iconography owes much to Juliaan de Ridder’s erudite study of 1984.7 In the centre, a magnificently attired, brightly illuminated woman is recognisable as the Cardinal virtue of Justice, with her familiar attributes of sword and balance scales.8 Naked, crouching beings emerging from behind her skirts are vices identifiable with deceit and force. The seated figures to our left are the Israelite Moses and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (482-565). On the other side Numa Pompilius, second King of Rome after its 5 Génard, L’Hôtel des Monnaies, 14-22; Verachter, Histoire Monétaire, 104, n.3; De Witte, “Monnayeurs Brabançons,” 46-47; Baillion, “Monnaie d’Anvers,” 11-12; Boffa, “Administrations Monétaires;” Smolderen, “Waradin,” 95; Goldstein, Dinner Party, 43. 6 For a justice panel including coins: Jan van Brussel (active 1475), Last Judgement, oil on panel, 211.5 × 158 cm, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum. Mareel, Call for Justice, 170-175. 7 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar.” 8 Resnik and Curtis, Justice, 18-25, 28, 94-5.

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foundation in the eighth century BCE, is in conversation with the nymph Egeria, his divine inspiration. The final figure, on the extreme right, is the legendary Spartan Lycurgis, who was the Roman Numa Pompilius’s Greek comparison in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.9 These paired historical figures are respectively associated with written and customary law. Moses indicates the Biblical Ten Commandments, written in Hebrew, whilst his companion, Emperor Justinian, holds a Latin scroll from The Body of Civil Law, a collection of fundamental texts in jurisprudence in Christian Europe known as “Roman Law.”10 Inscribed on the reverse of Numa Pompilius’s tablet, invisible to him but legible to beholders, are the Latin texts of three of the four so-called Laws of the Kings. Numa wrote down the rules of wise and pious behaviour that he reputedly learned from the nymph Egeria but asked to be buried along with the sacred books because he believed that they were better preserved in the living memory of the state priests.11 His companion Lycurgis holds a stone tablet with a grisaille image depicting an elegant hunting hound eating out of a bowl, whilst a tubby little dog chases after a stag. In his Moralia. Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch tells the story of Lycurgis having two dogs, one of which he trained for hunting, although it was bred as a house dog, whilst the other, bred as a hunting dog, he accustomed to being fed. When put to the test, the dogs behaved true to their training, rather than their breeding. According to Plutarch, none of Lycurgis’s laws were put into writing because he thought that education in the form of habits and training “performs the office of law-giver” better than compulsion in inculcating “the binding principles which conduce to the prosperity and virtue of a city.”12 Grouped behind and between the historical lawgivers are contemporary portraits, often engaging the viewer’s gaze and occasionally pointing. Their expensive black suits and white ruffs set them off against the colourful, slightly larger lawgivers and characterise them as members of the elite corporate body to which the painting belonged. When the picture was removed from the Mint, Van der Straelen recorded a formatted Latin inscription which included the names and offices of the ten depicted officers (fig. 1.2).13 It is possible to distinguish the seven Sacred Jurors (Justitiae S[acrum]) shown slightly smaller in two groups at the back, the two Provosts (Prepositi) to the viewer’s left, and the “viator” to the right. The jurors were drawn from the Serment to try peers accused of breaking 9 Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives, 205-383. De Ridder, “De Vierschaar,” 238-239, n.28 noted Lycurgis as a possibility but preferred Pliny the Elder. Challenged by Heyen, ”Gruppenbild mit Dame.” 10 Wessels, Roman-Dutch Law, 95-111; Van Caenegem, Historical Introduction, 45-46. 11 Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives, 379, 381. 12 Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives, 241, 243. My thanks to Walter Melion for his help here. 13 Wolters van der Wey, “Munters,” Document 1, n. 22 and n. 31.

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1.2  List of the Officers depicted in Maarten de Vos, The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint. Original lost, formatted as transcribed by the antiquarian Jan Baptist van der Straelen (1761–1847). From Beatrijs Wolters van der Wey, “Munters”, Document 1.

the Mint’s rules, while two provosts were elected annually by the Serment to administer complaints and to sit on the judicial bench.14 The viator is more puzzling, since this Latin word literally meaning traveller or messenger does not relate to any known office at the Antwerp Mint. Glosses on the word in Cornelis Kiliaan’s Etymologicum Teutonicae Linguae, published in Antwerp in 1599, suggest that the role may have been honorif ic. Given the importance of ancient Rome to the picture, which will be explained shortly, he was perhaps comparable to the lictors who attended the Roman Consuls, bearing the fasces as a symbol of their authority and executing sentence on offenders.15 The viator occupies an important position pictorially, his portrait indicated by King Numa’s extended and highlighted hand, whilst the position and illumination of his face and direct gaze echo those of Lycurgis. The picture does not show the entire tribunal. The Warden and his Master Minter, who also sat on the judicial bench, are not included. The Warden or Guardian was the Mint’s principal officer and Duke of Brabant’s representative, while the Master of the Mint managed day-to-day operations. In 1594 these positions were occupied respectively by Jacob Jonghelinck (1530-1606), a renowned sculptor at the Habsburg court in Brussels and a member of an Antwerp family of minters, 14 Smolderen, “Waradin,” 89-101. 15 Kiliaan, Etymologicum, 271, 395, 429, 432 and esp. 439. My thanks to Dr. Bert Watteeuw for his invaluable advice.

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1.3  Maarten de Vos, drawing for The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, datable to c. 1594, pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk within brown-ink framing lines, 29.5 × 39.8 cm. Antwerp, Museum Snijders Rockoxhuis (KBC Bank). Image © Museum Snijders&Rockoxhuis / KBC, Erwin Donvil.

and Jan Vits.16 They were “particular officers” specifically responsible for the local Antwerp Mint, as distinct from “general officers” who were associated with the Brabant consortium as a whole.17 The picture’s background has also not yet been satisfactorily explained, and significant alterations were made between a drawing and the finished work (figs. 1.1 and 1.3). The drawing’s cityscape with a gate or triumphal arch and a monument reminiscent of Trajan’s column in Rome is transformed in the painting into an open landscape and a river. Here a Roman triumphal chariot drawn by two galloping horses appears beneath the balance scales.18 The imperial-looking column has been moved to the other side of the central figure, behind the expansive, animated and 16 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar,” 246-248. Smolderen, “Waradin,” 90-92, 106, n. 75, 156-157. 17 Smolderen, “Waradin,” 89-97; Goldstein, Dinner Party, 39-43. 18 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar,” 242-243 proposed the chariot of Numa’s Flamen Dialis (who had the right to a lictor).

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eye-catching figure of Numa Pompilius, King of ancient Rome. “Deceit” has been transformed from a man into a woman, and what look like broken fasces before the kneeling figure of “Force” in the drawing are replaced in the painting by an abandoned sword and a “sort of yoke.”19 Previous interpretations of the painting have emphasised its judicial aspect and recent historical legal iconology has drawn renewed attention to it as an exemplum justitiae or “justice panel,” an image designed to encourage present and future generations of tribunals sitting in judgement to administer the law justly.20 Considering the picture as part of a “monetary imaginary” expands upon and nuances this function and makes it possible to engage with its distinctive and puzzling features.21

1. Sacred presence in coinage and in De Vos’s painting In sixteenth-century Europe, the material, visual and sacred qualities of coins were vital to the trust and power invested in them.22 As artifacts, gold and silver coins are double-sided disks made of materials that were deemed to have an intrinsic worth. This value was considered to be divine in origin and was often described as virtue, whose etymology is related to potency.23 In addition, minters physically impressed the precious disk on both sides with texts and different kinds of image that work together rather like an emblem, to engender knowledge and beliefs in the item’s users.24 A title and usually a portrait on the obverse identify the authority under whom the coin was minted, while the reverse characterises this authority by means of a text and symbolic figure or device, typically a coat of arms. Since the authority over the mint was supposed to derive from God, imprinting the sovereign’s portrait and genealogy into coins claimed the presence of their divinely derived virtue in the artefact itself. As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, this is a form of what the anthropologist Alfred Gell described as “distributed personhood.”25 As embodiments of a revered, God-like power on earth, precious coins thus operated within a regime of presence rather than representation.26 19 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar,” 233-235. 20 Martyn and Huygebaert, “Historical Legal Iconology;” Paumen, “The Exhibition,” 28-33; Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 29, 60-61, 76; Van Binnebeke, “Lady Justice,” 200-203; Mareel, “Mirrors,” 48. 21 Parsons, Making Money, 237-281; Jacobi, The Architecture of Banking, 2. 22 Gorini, “The Coin;” Shell, Art and Money, 2-54. 23 Zorach and Phillips Jr., Gold, 61-113; Woodall, “Virtue,” 7, 17. 24 Compare Ashworth Jr., “Emblematic World View,” Cunnally, Numismatic Presence, 105-122, Woodall, “Love and Money,” 668-78. 25 Gell, Art and Agency, 103. This volume, Introduction, 31. 26 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 134-139.

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1.4 Unknown designer, real of Philip II, Mint of the Duchy of Brabant, Antwerp, 1555–1576. Obverse and reverse, gold, dimensions unknown. Amsterdam, The National Numismatic Collection, managed by De Nederlandsche Bank, Inventory number NM-09654.

For example, in a contemporary gold real (royal) struck by the Brabant Mint, the obverse bears a crowned portrait bust of Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) encircled by a Latin text that reads “Philip by the grace of God King of Spain, Duke of Brabant” (fig. 1.4). The reverse bears Philip’s crowned coat of arms surrounded by the collar and insignia of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, the Latin text “The Lord is my helper,” and a small hand as a mark of production in the Antwerp Mint.27 Yet the sacred aura of the coin does not depend upon understanding specific texts and images. Simply as a gleaming metal disk, impressed with significant imagery and Latin words, a “royal” embodies a superior authority and agency originating in God. Indeed, as Marc Shell amongst others has discussed, numismatic artifacts were at times compared with the Christian incarnation, in which divine authority and virtue were impressed into precious human flesh: God on earth.28 De Vos’s painting can also be described in terms of sacred presence, and its combination of different kinds of images and authoritative texts is broadly comparable to coinage (fig. 1.1). Oil paint shared with precious metal an association with the sacred and the ability to assume different forms.29 Its use on a monumental oak panel and the structure of the composition are reminiscent of an altarpiece before which Christians worshipped and consumed divine virtue in the form of the eucharistic wafer.30 A central figure, crowned with laurel by putti in a heavenly aureole, is 27 The mythical etymology of Antwerpen was Handwerpen (to throw a hand). 28 Shell, Art and Money, 12, and 7-14, 47-51. This volume, Introduction, 17. 29 Baadj, Van Kessel, 164. 30 Shell, Art and Money, 14-19.

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flanked on each side by portrayed figures reminiscent of “donors” and the larger, brightly attired lawgivers resemble patron saints.31 In De Vos’s work, moreover, the suppression of vices by the glowing central “Virtue” invokes absolute values. The value of Justice is expanded into historical time by the four lawgivers, who function in this respect like the named sovereigns’ heads on particular coins. As historical embodiments of the divine virtue of Justice they offer models to both the current members of the Serment, whose own virtue is implied by their portrayal, and to their successors contemplating the picture in the courtroom. Beholders would also have been reminded of divinely authored, absolute rules of behaviour by Moses’s Ten Commandments, even if most could not understand the Hebrew text. These embodiments and invocations of absolute principles explain why scholars have perceived in De Vos’s work stable, “weighty” values to honour, follow and imitate. The picture’s placement in the courtroom removed it from circulation and identified it with the site of the Mint’s legal sovereignty.32 Permanently displayed in this quasi-sacred space before generations of minters, the painting reaches through time and seems to suppress personal interests. In this context, Justice becomes a Cardinal virtue with an absolute worth like that claimed by precious coinage, informing but also separable from the everyday administration of justice and institutional politics and monetary motives within the Antwerp Mint.33 Whether in a painting or precious coinage, the power to embody absolute value or virtue was dependent upon belief in that power. Within the Brabant Mint, this belief and trust in authority was formalised through the Minters’ oath to be “good and true” to their legitimate lord and God’s agent on earth, the duke of Brabant. The Minters’ fulfilment of their sacred bond of loyalty to the duke meant that the coins that they produced would also be “good and true.”34 In late sixteenth-century Antwerp, however, trust in the presence of divine virtue was strained in all manner of ways. The Duke of Brabant, in the person of the Habsburg King Philip of Spain, had since the mid-1560s been the target of a sustained revolt in which the city of Antwerp played a central part. The loyalty of many of his subjects had been broken. In 1566 and 1581 Protestant iconoclasts had destroyed or removed objects of devotion as the “idols” prohibited by the Commandment not to make any “graven images” and bow down before them. This Commandment was included in the Minters’ own painting and may be another reason for the absence of coins from 31 Compare De Vos, Altarpiece of the old Arbalest, 1590, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; Jacopo di Cione, Coronation of the Virgin (altarpiece of the Mint), 1370s, Florence, Accademia (fig. 9.2). 32 Goldstein, Dinner Party, 38. Display in the courtroom has been inferred from the iconography. 33 Mareel, “Mirrors,” 51; Resnik and Curtis, Justice, 8, n. 26. 34 Above, n.4. On the oath as a “sacrament of power” and a “sacrament of language,” Agamben, Oath. Compare this volume, Introduction, 37.

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the scene.35 Unusually, the picture avoids any explicitly Christian iconography, and the historical figures and portraits eschew devout contemplation of the central figure.36 The Fall of Antwerp to Spanish control in 1585 began the restoration of Catholic Habsburg authority over Brabant, but confidence remained fragile, and opinions differed. Furthermore, the next section will show that in 1594, the date of De Vos’s painting, the absence of Philip II in faraway in Spain left the picture without a divinely ordained presence and therefore missing absolute value within or “behind” it, like a coin lacking the gold standard. The Minters’ sacred promise to be “good and true” to the duke of Brabant in fulfilling their duties was also complicated and undermined by worldly, personal interests. Although justified by their solemn oath, the Minters’ privileged, almost noble status and lifestyle were made possible by the wealth derived from their profession. Profits were made from the difference between the cost of the raw materials and labour and the face-value of the coins manufactured. The public sale of excise-free alcohol from the Mint’s well-stocked cellars yielded further income. Freedom from property taxes and, for some, the provision of housing within the Mint complex made the office even more lucrative.37 In addition to these “legitimate” ways of making money there were opportunities during the minting process to stray from faithfulness to virtue and turn to the worship of Mammon. Gold and silver could be stolen because the Mint was responsible for obtaining and safeguarding bullion and precious artefacts, the raw materials for coining. Money could also be made for personal benefit by debasing the precious metal alloy from which coins were made without the permission of the duke. The judicial sovereignty of the Mint meant that less serious breaches of regulations could be concealed or expiated internally by the payment of a fine, rendering unto Caesar what is due to him.38 The benefits of money per se brought the interests of the Minters into tension and conflict with the authority embodied by both the duke of Brabant and the city of Antwerp because the enrichment of the first reduced the income of the second and third. In 1515 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as Duke of Brabant, had curtailed the Minters’ privileges by excluding their additional occupations and businesses from judiciary autonomy and from exemption from taxation. He also insisted that those who took the oath were sufficiently skilled to strike coins. This implies that some were minters in name only – like nobles they did not get their hands dirty. In 1581 the City restricted the Mint’s rights to sell tax-free alcohol, but these privileges were later substantially reinstated.39 The members of the Serment 35 Shell, Art and Money, 10-14. 36 Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 198. 37 Smolderen, “Waradin,” 107-108; Goldstein, Dinner Party, 38. 38 Baillion, “Monnaie d’Anvers,” 29-39. 39 Baillion, “Monnaie d’Anvers,” 11-13; Smolderen, “Waradin;” Jennes, “Griffiekamer,” 139.

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(Oath) were determined to protect their privileges from curtailment, and their customary practices from reform, by the civic authorities and even by their noble overlord and authorising presence, the duke of Brabant, as will be explained further in section four. Like the conception of De Vos’s work as a “justice scene,” the gold and silver coins struck in Mints such as Antwerp’s solicited belief in an absolute, intrinsic, trusted, all-powerful and stable value or virtue within and “behind” them. However, the situation was in practice more complex and uncertain: the recent breakdown of religious and political authority undermined trust in the currency and presence of divine virtue and the Minter’s personal, worldly interests were always in tension with their loyalty to their sacred oath. Moreover, the price of precious metals fluctuated according to supply, and, for economic and political reasons, the duke of Brabant as sovereign authority could himself adjust the precious metal content of his coinage’s alloy whilst maintaining its appearance and “face value.” He could issue coins that looked similar to previous ones but were slightly smaller or thinner. Ultimately, he could simply decree that newly issued coins, which were in all essential ways the same as the previous issue, had a different value. 40

2. Spectacle and rhetoric Although it mines a vocabulary of virtue and authority appropriate to the ideal coin, and to the ultimate courtroom in which heaven and hell are at stake, De Vos’s painting also worked within a politically and ethically complex world at both an institutional and personal level. Like gold coins it relied on the necessary fiction of stable, intrinsic value but its character was in practice not fixed. Like a coin its appearance was subject to manipulation and its value contingent on the motives of those of who controlled its making, and on the personal judgement of its users at particular times. Both precious coins and the painting depended on their capacity to inculcate belief, and on the willingness of users to trust in virtue. The power of both artefacts was in this sense rhetorical. 41 This section will connect the painting with the Joyous Entry staged on 14 June 1594 for the Archduke Ernest (1553-1595), Philip II of Spain’s nephew and the newly appointed governor of the Netherlands, and explore the implications of this connection. 42 The placement of De Vos’s picture in the Mint’s courtroom has limited scholarly understanding of it to an exemplary “justice scene,” but, as will be described 40 Davies and Connors, History of Money, Chapter 5, Paragraph 12.57. 41 Lewis, “Persuasion.” Compare this volume, Seaman, 236, note 31. 42 Raband, “Festival Books,” 22-24.

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1.5 Pieter Paul Rubens, sketch for The Arch of the Mint (front with Moneta), datable to c. 1635, oil on panel, 104 × 71 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. . Photo: Rik Klein Gotink.

shortly, its date of 1594, iconography and visual effects also link it with the Entry. As such, it entered circulation as a rhetorical performance addressed to a wider public, including the Habsburg government and the city. 43 The record of the portrayed figures’ names and offices ends by stating that the picture was paid for by public money, hinting at a wider constituency than just the Minters (fig. 1.2). 44 A document recording that the mysterious viator’s brother and fellow minter Pieter Everwijn was 43 For previous links to the visual arts: Goldstein, Dinner Party, 44-60. 44 Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 156, n.134.

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in 1587 an official in the schepenbank, the bank of the city council, is evidence of a close connection between the Mint and the city authorities. 45 Indirect support for some sort of connection between De Vos’s painting and the city’s Joyous Entry also comes from the Mint’s contribution of a splendid arch to Philip of Spain’s Entry of 1549 and Van der Straelen’s later record that “two sketches of Triumphal Arches very beautifully painted by Pieter Paul Rubens” had decorated the Mint courtroom. 46 These were the designs for the monumental Arch that the Mint commissioned for the Joyous Entry into Antwerp of the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1635 (fig. 1.5). Joyous Entries were civic ceremonies and festivities that marked through rhetoric, performance and spectacle the recognition of a new ruler. They were the means whereby he was welcomed to a loyal city and ceremonially confirmed its rights and privileges. Cities could also use Joyous Entries to make a specific, immediate political case to their sovereign and to negotiate the changing, often fraught political relationships between the city and its noble overlord and within the city itself. 47 Ernest was the first royal governor since the Fall of Antwerp in 1585. His Entry was thus a step in the restoration of Catholic, Habsburg authority following almost a decade of open revolt. 48 Like De Vos’s picture, Joyous Entries drew on the language and personae of the authoritative, timeless realms of virtue, ancient and biblical history and antique mythology. They enhanced the power of their message with gorgeous theatrical effects, images, and tableaux-vivants that were, quite literally, alive and present, and acknowledged a contemporary audience. Festival books published to commemorate and publicise each Entry described and illustrated these ephemeral events. De Vos was one of the two artistic advisors to the 1594 Entry and, besides its resemblance to a Catholic altarpiece, Tribunal of the Brabant Mint evokes the colourful tableaux-vivants of Joyous Entries, in which people donned the costumes and acted the parts of historical, allegorical and sacred exemplars on street stages. 49 Although the function of The Tribunal in relation to the Entry is uncertain, its structure and iconography is directly comparable to Public Stage in the Market Place, as described and illustrated in the Festival book published in 1595 by Joannes Bochius

45 Antwerp, Felix Archief, Antwerpen, tresoriers en rentmeester Everwijn, Pieter. 01/01/1587 ‒ 31/12/1587. Inventaris Nr. 7#679. 46 Scribonius Grapheus, Le Triumphe, n.p. Wolters van der Wey, “Munters,” Document 1. 47 Soly, “Openbare Feesten;” Soly, “Plechtige Intochten;” Thøfner, Common Art, 37-46, esp. 38-40. Arnade, Political Culture, 12-49 48 Mielke, Ceremonial Entry. Diels, “Blijde Intrede,” 26. 49 Diels, “Blijde Intrede;” Herrin, Maarten de Vos, 140-144; Doutrepont, “l’Entrée triomphale,” 134-141, 188. Bussels, “Tableaux Vivants,” 236-243; Bussels, “Powerful Performances,” 71-73, 87-89.

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1.6 Pieter van der Borcht, Public Stage on the Market Place, 1594–1595, etching, 32.5 × 20.4 cm, from Joannes Bochius, Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis, Spectaculorum et Ludorum, in Adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae, Antwerp: Ex Officina Plantiniana, 1595. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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(1555-1609) (fig. 1.6).50 Like the picture, the dramatis personae of the Stage include a figure of Justice in the centre (here accompanied by Religion) and putti in a heavenly aureole above. The three figures sitting on their right hand are Lex (Written Law) with two large volumes, Consuetudine (Customary Practice) displaying a book in which the aldermen have noted important laws of the city and, between them, Cod. Aequitate (Fairness, Impartiality, Equity) with the proper rod or the “rule of silver.” To their left are Annona (Goddess of the annual harvest and income to Rome) with bread in a wicker basket, Politeia (Civitas, the aspect of public administration concerned with the consistency of numbers, weights and measures), and between them, Moneta (Money/Minting), distinguished by her tools of mallet and pincers, and a coin just visible in her left hand.51 Besides these iconographic connections, Bochius’s description of the actors on The Stage as adorned with radiant gold and silver and arrayed in costumes of various colours creates similar effects to De Vos’s splendid painting. Moreover, if one compares the drawing with the finished work, changes to the physiognomies and hairstyles bring the personifications and lawgivers closer to contemporary figures, as if they are parts being played in a tableau-vivant before an audience. Compare, for example, the head of Numa Pompilius in the drawing and the painting, or the transformation of the generic, masculine physiognomy of “Deceit” into a contemporary feminine profile (figs. 1.1, 1.3). The relationship between The Tribunal and Public Stage in the Market Place is intriguing because Public Stage was situated close to the Mint premises on the Kloosterstraat and on a highly charged site in the political heart of the city. In the immediately previous Joyous Entry of 1582, the Market Place was where François of Anjou (1555-1584), the sovereign figurehead of the Protestant insurgents, was invested as Duke of Brabant in place of Philip II and swore his oath to the rebel city.52 By contrast, Public Stage in the Market Place asserted Habsburg authority. According to Bochius’s Festival book, the stage was crowned with a Habsburg double-headed eagle and a tympanum inscribed with a Latin text that makes claims comparable to the text ratifying a coin: “[F]rom God authority / from Philip [II] interpretation of divine will / from Ernest defence of rights.” The dedication of the Public Stage “To God most Great and Good” explained that “The city government and people of Antwerp have given this altar (aram) as a gift.” This was, the dedication claimed, “Because Ernest of Austria will, through divine inspiration, maintain the Netherlands as obedient and prosperous, loyal to the royal majesty, in the Catholic 50 Bochius, Descriptio, 111. 51 Diels, “Blijde Intrede,” 32-34. Bochius, Descriptio, 110. 52 Peters, “Printing Ritual,” 370, 374-6, 409; Thøfner, Common Art, 125-141, esp.138. Diels “Blijde Intrede,” 30-31.

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faith, in incorruptible justice, in the laws of the country and the institutions of the forefathers.”53 Elevated rhetoric was used to flatter, reassure and persuade people of the absolute worth and divine origin of Habsburg sovereignty. It was addressed to the new Habsburg governor and to the citizens who are depicted responding to Public Stage in different ways (fig. 1.6). Bochius’s Festival book was entitled “A description of the public celebrations, spectacles and games for the arrival of the most Serene Prince Ernest, Archduke of Austria.” The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint may equally have provided pleasurable entertainment to commemorate the arrival of the new Habsburg governor. However, it seems possible that, like the decorations for a Joyous Entry, the exemplary “justice panel” also had a more immediate political purpose, particularly at an important moment of transition. This may be related to the corporation’s prized and vigorously defended privileges, agreed with previous dukes of Brabant and with the civic authorities. Documents guaranteeing these privileges were kept in a double-locked chest in the courtroom and preserved for centuries by the corporation with the utmost care, like sacred relics in an altar.54 As mentioned, the Joyous Entry was normally the occasion for reconfirming such rights and freedoms. In 1594, however, the situation was complicated because, although Ernest made his Joyous Entry into Antwerp as Philip’s governor, he was not invested with the title of Duke of Brabant, which remained with the King in Madrid.55 Ernest was therefore not the divinely ordained authority to whom the Minters swore their oath and he did not swear the oath on the Joyous Entry charter confirming historic rights and privileges. The absence of the actual Duke of Brabant meant that the restoration of established Catholic and Habsburg authority in the Joyous Entry was to some degree empty of “divine presence” and replaced by a representative or “representation.” In these circumstances, perhaps the Serment of the Mint asserted their position by means of a monumental oil painting. The political situation in 1594 may explain The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint’s allusions to ancient Rome, whose Triumphal Entries were the inspiration for Joyous Entries. The prominence given to Numa Pompilius in the painting is notable because educated citizens could have drawn parallels between Numa’s Rome and the city of Antwerp.56 Both had recently emerged from civil war and revolt. According to Livy’s History of Rome, once he had obtained the kingship, the virtuous Numa gave his “city, recently founded by force of arms, a new foundation in law, statutes, and observances.” Anxious that “a populace which was ignorant and in those early days uncivilized” would lapse 53 Bochius, Descriptio, 110. 54 Jennes, “Griffiekamer,” 137-138, 143. 55 Raband, “Festival Books,” 20. 56 De Ridder, “Vierschaar,” 248-249 identifies Numa with Philip II.

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into idleness and extravagance when released from military discipline and fear of their enemies, Numa also prioritised instilling awe and reverence for the Gods by means of priests, religion and temples. Section one of this chapter described how De Vos’s painting elicits just such a devout response. To calm his warring citizens Numa provided a bronze statue of Janus for a small temple whose doors were closed in times of peace.57 In The Tribunal double heads of Janus, God of beginnings and transitions, decorate the plinth supporting the glittering central figure. Educated viewers might also have discerned that on Justinian’s scroll there was an Imperial edict from The Body of Civil Law that proclaimed to the Senate and all the people laws that would be valid for all time and acquire their financial power from the two elected Consuls, who might be compared to the two elected Provosts of the Mint’s Serment. Yet the absence of sovereign authority meant that in monetary terms, this proclamation of enduring value was a promissory note rather than a sacred gold coin. Seen in relation to the events of 1594 rather than eternity, the picture becomes a rhetorical device that evokes intrinsic, absolute value, rather than actually embodying it.

3. Weighing things up: Justice and Money In exploring the comparison between De Vos’s painting and precious coinage, this section turns to the role of beholders in discerning or producing value. It assumes an audience with an interest in money as well as justice and considers the ways in which people with monetary expertise determined the value of individual coins in specific circumstances. The balance scales held by the central figure are key to this process.58 Balance scales are not only attributes of Justice but also of the Roman goddess Juno Moneta, whose ancient temple on the Capitoline Hill was attached to the Roman silver Mint and used to store the records of the annually elected Roman Consuls.59 Educated viewers with numismatic interests would have been familiar with Moneta. She was regularly depicted on the reverse of Roman imperial coins, holding scales and a cornucopia of goods, and the phrase “Moneta Nova” appeared on coins minted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including those produced in Brabant.60 The goddess also participated in the festive iconography of the Mint: she appeared in the Arch of the Mint for the 1549 Joyous Entry of Philip of Spain and 57 Foster, Livy, 67, 69. Compare De Ridder, “Vierschaar,” 240-242. 58 Woodall, “‘De Wisselaer’,” 49-51, 62-67. 59 Aicher, Rome, 66-68; Littlewood, Fasti, 51, 56-58. 60 Stewart, “Moneta,” 29-30.

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1.7 Ioan Wouters, apprentice proof of competence. Obverse: Saint John the Baptist, reverse: moneyer’s balance, April 1614, silver, 25 mm diameter. Antwerp, Museum aan de Stroom. Photo: Tom van Ghent.

presides with scales, a caduceus and a cornucopia in Rubens’ design of the front of the Arch of the Mint for the Joyous Entry of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1635 that was subsequently kept in the Mint’s courtroom (fig. 1.5).61 The balance scales held by the central figure in De Vos’s painting thus produced an intimate alliance between the personifications of Justice and Moneta.62 For anyone seriously interested in money, especially members of the Brabant Mint, balance scales were not just symbolic attributes but essential to the practice of minting coins and judging their worth. Proof coins made by apprentices within the Antwerp Mint to qualify as masters survive from the early seventeenth century bearing level money scales on the reverse, the site of the emblems of authority imprinted into the backs of real coins (fig. 1.7).63 Scales were indispensable to the Assayers, the officers responsible for assessing the value of the bullion and artefacts that entered the Mint for smelting and for guaranteeing the worth of coins issued under the authority of the duke.64 In the wider community, scales were also the principal instrument of moneychangers, who undertook the task of discerning the “true value” of a bewildering array of coins of different denominations, issues and condition for their clients. As connoisseurs of specie, they had to make fine judgements about the worth of particular coins within a disorderly monetary system, and choices between honesty and corruption. These everyday decisions 61 Scribonius Grapheus, Le triumphe, n.p. 62 Compare Pierre de Ronsard (1524-2585), Hymn to Justice and Hymn to Gold, 1555, discussed in Parsons, Making Money, 251-252. 63 De Beer, “Jetons.” 64 Smolderen, “Waradin,” 93.

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did not necessarily conform with the absolute, intrinsic value or virtue believed or claimed to derive from and be authorised by God and his anointed sovereigns. Indeed, Assayers were frequently accused of deceit, and paintings of often corrupt moneychangers manipulating their scales were common in sixteenth-century Antwerp.65 The value accredited by balance scales was always relative – to standard weights, to other coins and to the concrete human circumstances in which the transaction took place. Rather than coinage’s official or nominal value, balance scales determined a particular coin’s exchange value or purchasing power in actual situations. The association between Justice and balance scales is likewise complex because the absolute, Final Judgement of moral worth in eschatological time differs from relative judgements affected by quotidian, worldly concerns. In their magisterial study of representations of Justice, Resnik and Curtis trace the association of balance scales with the fate of individuals in the afterlife from very ancient times to the Christian Archangel Michael, responsible for the weighing of souls on the last day. In the everyday exercise of judgement and administration of justice, by comparison, balance scales had always been closely associated with commerce, credit and money.66 The fair exchange of commodities, judicial sentencing, the setting of compensation and restorative justice can all be understood as a balancing of accounts. Resnik and Curtis suggest that “[o]ne might thus understand the practice of justice not only as commercially useful but as a kind of commercial exchange itself. Judgement fixed the price of a wrong, and scales aptly captured this form of weighing while also measuring how to set a fee for items of trade.”67 The close relationship between commerce and justice is evident in a monumental broadside designed by Jost Amman (1535-1591) and published in 1585, that presents an encyclopaedic view of Antwerp as a locus and exemplar of trade (fig. 1.8). In the top centre of the woodcut, Mercury, God of commerce and communication, emerges energetically from the heavens like an archangel, wielding his caduceus like a sword and holding a pair of scales in perfect balance.68 One side is labelled “debtor,” the other “creditor.” The human subject making the judgements here is not faithfully bound by an oath to divinely produced, eternal value, or a member of an audience open to rhetorical persuasion but rather a shrewd operator in the here and now, carefully balancing potential profit and loss.

65 For e.g., Smolderen, Jonghelinck, 40; Silver, “Massys,” 24-31. 66 Resnik and Curtis, Justice, 18-25, 290. 67 Resnik and Curtis, Justice, 19; Davies and Connors, History of Money, Chapter 1, Paragraph 8.62, “Primitive Money: Definitions and Early Development.” 68 Compare the Archangel Michael in Frans Floris, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1554, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

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1.8 Detail from Joost Amman (designer), Michael Manger (printmaker), Aigentliche Abbildung deß Gantzen Gewerbs der Löblichen Kauffmanschafft und Fürnehmsten Handelstadt (Allegory of Commerce, the Glory of Antwerp), 1585, woodcut and letterpress, 108.5 × 88.2 cm (complete print). London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Some beholders of De Vos’s painting would have been this kind of person, and some had expertise in the careful examination and weighing-up of coins and other precious metal artefacts. They are likely to have not only recognised the ideal alliance forged through the balance scales between the virtue of Justice and the goddess Moneta, but also to have experienced the connection between relativising, at times murky and corrupt, practices involving the law and money. This kind of beholder would have been sensitive to what could be described as “numismatic” aspects of the picture, which include its hybrid iconography, combination of word and image and insistent double-sidedness.69 The picture is pervaded by iconographic doubles: the two pairs of historical lawgivers and the coupling of Numa Pompilius with Egeria, the two pairs of angelic putti, the two vices, including double-faced “Deceit,” and the Janus heads adorning the stone plinth in the foreground. Moreover, the composition is organised symmetrically around the implicitly double figure of Justice/Moneta, which functions like the pillar of a balance scale. The beholder is invited to examine everything carefully and ponder the relative value of both sides in coming to a judgement of value or meaning. For example, beholders who recognised the historical lawgivers could both appreciate their “intrinsic” authority as individual names and consider their relative pictorial weight on each side of the central pillar as paired advocates of written and customary law, as explained earlier. The balance between these two systems of law was a live issue in the Netherlands, and Europe generally, during this period. Justinian (or Roman) civil law administered by professional, university-trained jurists, often in the sovereign’s service, was developing alongside, and putting pressure on, the local, customary decision makers, laymen drawn from guilds and corporations such as the Mint.70 Some of those familiar with De Vos’s picture would have noticed the expansiveness, more colourful clothing and greater engagement with viewers of the two advocates of customary law on the right, particularly Numa Pompilius (fig. 1.1). The Mint’s determination to defend its ongoing privileges and judicial autonomy against external authorities, whilst carefully preserving its founding documents in a locked chest, bears comparison with Numa’s position, holding the tablet inscribed with the Laws of the Kings which will be buried alongside him and be perpetuated through living memory.71 Those present in the Mint’s courtroom might also have been sensitive to the different value accorded “Deceit” and “Force” within the Mint’s claimed space of jurisdiction, which encompassed all non-violent crimes. Feminine Deceit, beneath the scales, looks up towards presiding Justice/Moneta, whilst abject, enchained Force is directly beneath the sword. 69 Cunnally, Numismatic Presence, 15-16. 70 Lesaffer, “Legal history,” 33-43; Van Caenegem, Historical Introduction, 45-58, 67-83, esp. 82. Van Caenegem, Law History, 126-133. 71 Van Caenegem, Law History, 36-38, 131-133.

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In addition, those familiar with the judicial bench of the Mint would have been aware of the absence of the Warden and Master from the scene and noticed the weight given to the officers of the Serment on each side. Whilst the overall numerical balance is even, the single viator is placed opposite to, and visually worth at least as much as, the two Provosts on the other side. Who was this important figure, who apparently held an office comparable to the ancient Roman lictors who attended the consuls and judges, bearing the fasces as a symbol of their authority and executing sentence on offenders? We know that Theodor (Dierick) Everwijn (d.1599), the incumbent viator in 1594, belonged to an elite Antwerp family with connections with the city council. Both he and his brother Pieter, who matriculated in the Mint in 1570, occupied one of the “ten places” in the Serment which had been added to the original college of eighty. These were personal rather than hereditary and apparently conferred by the city audit office (rekenkamer), ultimately in the name of the duke of Brabant.72 The final section of this chapter will relate the weight given to the viator and the absence of the Warden and Master to factional politics in the upper echelons of the Mint. However, the aim is not to reveal specific solutions to questions raised by the work’s “balance” but rather to suggest what factors were at stake for contemporary viewers whose response to the picture extended beyond “awe and reverence” to relative judgements conditioned by historical circumstances. Like assayers or moneychangers, their evaluation of the image would have been influenced by their specific knowledge, expertise and their ethics and motives. Individual judgements would have varied, in part because they were founded on the unstable alloy of Justice and Moneta. For some, a principled association between these two personifications could be justified because Juno Moneta, as the ancient Roman protectress of the Mint and Consuls’ archive, would defend the institution’s prized judicial authority and autonomy and thus, ultimately, its claim to virtue. Money was also claimed to be in principle compatible with divine virtue and the practice of justice. For example, Moneta, together with natural benefits and civic order, is presented as a maidservant of Justice and Religion in Public Stage in the Market Place for Ernest’s Entry of 1594 (fig. 1.6).73 This beneficial alliance was all very well in the ideal courtroom or the rhetorical space of the Joyous Entry. However, within the day-to-day world in which judgements were made and coins were manufactured, handled and circulated, there was no such stable, easy balance between divine virtue that ultimately registers in eschatological time and the desire and power embodied by precious coins to acquire benefits in the here and now. The ongoing, tricky negotiation between money and justice, present 72 Above, n. 45; Erfmuntboek transcribed in Verachter, Histoire Monétaire, n.p. The help of Steven van Impe, Keeper of Early Printed Books and Manuscripts, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Antwerp, was indispensable in locating and interpreting these references. 73 Parsons, Making Money, 3-4. See also The Arch of the Mint in Scribonius, Le Triumph d’Anvers, n.p.

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1.9 Guillaum de Neve, boxed coin weights and hand balance for weighing silver coins, c. 1644, various media, dimensions unknown. Amsterdam, The National Numismatic Collection, managed by De Nederlandsche Bank.

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desires and ultimate rewards, earth and heaven, is evident in a print on the lid of a moneychanger’s box of scales and weights for assessing silver coins assembled in the 1640s (fig. 1.9). Each time the moneychanger opened the box he would have seen a feminine figure entitled Conscientia in the centre, holding a flaming sword, level scales and a feather, accompanied by Death holding an hourglass.74 To the right of this central group are scenes of earthly fecundity in both mythological time and the present. However, Conscientia looks in the direction of the figure of Justice bearing her own scales and sword, who resembles the Archangel Michael about to separate the saved from the damned on the Last Day. Conscientia’s ultimate fate at the hands of Justice is left to the owner of the balance scales, who had to make sensitive daily judgements about the value of particular coins within the unruly monetary system, as well as choices between immediate and ultimate rewards.

4. A Question of Power Given the importance of balance scales to the establishment of value in both absolute and relative terms, one might expect Justice/Moneta’s scales in The Tribunal to be either clearly level or favouring one side over the other, as in the weighing of souls. However, it is impossible to tell the exact position of the scales because they are painted at an oblique angle, immediately above the figure of Deceit. An adjustment to the position of the scales between the drawing and the painting suggests that this ambiguity was deliberate (fig. 1.1, 1.3). This section suggests that, besides the generally recognised presence or rhetoric of exemplary virtue, The Tribunal also enacted, pictorially and perhaps covertly, the power of a particular interest group associated with the Mint’s Serment. As well as containing or articulating the distributed personhood of divine sovereign authority, the picture can thus be compared to a coin that, placed in personal hands, embodies the power of its owner to achieve ephemeral ends at a given moment.75 The argument distinguishes between the resources and expertise available to a privileged interest-group and those who did not possess the same power. As has been indicated, the Mint of Brabant in Antwerp was not in actuality the obedient community, “loyal to royal majesty, in the Catholic faith, in incorruptible justice, in the laws of the country and the institutions of the forefathers” asserted by the dedication of Public Stage in the Market Place. Luc Smolderen has revealed its labyrinthine and at times violent internal politics during Jacob Jonghelinck’s long tenure as warden. Whilst the city of Antwerp openly rebelled against Philip II, Duke of 74 Conscientia connotes conscience, consciousness. The feather is an attribute of Maat. 75 Parsons, Making Money, 13.

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Brabant, the Warden, as the duke’s official, waged war on the Serment, as represented by the elected Provosts. In 1580 Jonghelinck, his Master of the Mint Gertrude Sangers and assayer Corneille de Lettre were accused of fraud by other officers in the Serment, including the provosts, and removed from office. Their faction regained control after the restoration of Habsburg authority in 1585, but the political infighting continued.76 According to Smolderen, tension between the traditional corporatism of the Serment’s elected provosts and the monarchical centralisation represented by Warden Jonghelinck pervaded the Mint. The struggle was played out in the administration of justice, an instance of the wider tensions between written and customary law described in section three. While the Master of the Mint and the Warden sat on the judicial bench as representatives of the Duke of Brabant, the Provosts, elected by the Serment, received most of the day-to-day complaints of the corporate body. The conflict between the two sides is evident in the handling of fines. The Provosts unbalanced the procedure by failing to instruct business or by monopolising the litigation, while Jonghelinck repeatedly complained to the Brabant authorities about lack of respect for his position.77 The absence of portraits of the Warden and the Master from De Vos’s painting suggests that the commission was controlled or influenced by the incumbent Provosts as the elected representatives of the Serment and, perhaps, by the viator Theodor Everwijn. It is notable that his portrait was not yet included in the preparatory drawing (fig. 1.3).78 Other differences between the drawing and the finished painting, such as the alterations and additions to the background, Numa’s greater bulk and more contemporary face, Deceit’s change of gender and Force’s different attributes suggest that the design was adapted at quite an advanced stage in response to specific circumstances and motives. In the drawing, moreover, Lycurgis’s fable of the dogs is depicted on the tablet held by the figure recognisable by the presence of Egeria as Numa Pompilius, leaving the figure at the extreme right unspecified. In the final painting, as De Ridder noted, the three Laws of the Kings inscribed on Numa’s tablet were attributed to him by Sextus Pompeius Festus, a little-known Latinist from the second century AD. Carefully selected by erudite men, these laws read in translation: “Whenever anyone knowingly and with premeditation kills a free man, he must be judged a patricide,” “A concubine must not touch the altar of Juno. If she does, she must slaughter a lamb for Juno with her hair hanging loose,” and “Whenever lightning kills a man, you shall not raise him above the knee. Whenever a man is killed by lightning, it is not fitting to mourn him.”79

76 Smolderen, Jonghelinck, 37-45, esp. 38-39; Smolderen, “Waradin,” 150-157. 77 Smolderen, “Waradin,” 106-107, 180-237. 78 Compare Wolters van der Wey, Corporate Splendour, 57. 79 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar,” 234-235.

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The circumstances surrounding and motives for the changes between the drawing and the painting and for the selection of the cryptic Laws may be irretrievably lost, particularly since anything subversive needed to be inaccessible to a broader public or capable of an innocent explanation. It was suggested earlier that some of the alterations relate to the Joyous Entry of the Archduke Ernest, but this does not seem a sufficient explanation. Humour may even have played a part. Given the factionalism within the Mint, it may be speculated that the choice of a two-faced woman with contemporary features to personify Deceit was partly prompted by the Provosts’ hostility to women’s participation in the activities of the Mint.80 This misogyny was directed in particular towards Gertrude Sangers, who was, quite exceptionally, Master of the Mint between 1579 and 1587 and a continuing ally of Jacob Jonghelinck in the internecine politics within the corporation.81 Sangers was subject to misogynist criticism and it may have pleased the Provosts and their allies to quote, for those who could read and appreciate it, the Law of the Kings that “a concubine should not touch Juno [Moneta’s] altar.” The point, however, is not to provide a “correct” interpretation of this complicated and mysterious picture but to show that, while the work invoked and depended upon belief in absolute, eternal value(s), it could at the same time be a means whereby a particular interest group served and justified its immediate, political ends.

Conclusion By considering Maarten De Vos’s The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint in relation to different ways of thinking about value in precious coinage, this chapter has shown that the painting was not simply a “justice scene” that embodied absolute virtue and authority, out of circulation in an ideal courtroom. Its apparent connection with the Archduke Ernest’s Joyous Entry to Antwerp in 1594 suggests that it may also have been deployed to articulate and advance the interests of the Mint at a moment of political transition. Catholic Habsburg authority was being restored after a period during which the authority of the sovereign had been defied by rebels and the intrinsic value of images had been challenged by Protestant iconoclasts. In these circumstances such a picture, like a coin, can act as a form of rhetoric that appeals to absolute authority, seeking to instil confidence despite consciousness of a lack of “real presence” or intrinsic virtue within or behind it. The chapter further suggested that, as well as inviting “awe and reverence,” the iconography and compositional structure of De Vos’s picture is open to informed 80 Smolderen, Jonghelinck, 39. 81 Smolderen, Jonghelinck, 41-49; Smolderen, “Waradin,” 122-157.

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personal evaluations involving material and moral judgements in the here and now. Conceptualised through the balance scales, these judgements were based on a potentially unholy alliance between Moneta and Justice, money and law, and entailed delicate negotiations between worldly interests and eternal values. Finally, the chapter suggests that the picture, like precious coinage, could have been “handled” by those in control of it to express their current power in the guise of learning, intrinsic worth and universal benefit. Thus, even though precious coins are not physically represented in De Vos’ extraordinary picture, they are a condition of its existence. We are in the dark about many aspects of this painting but an exploration of its participation in a “monetary imaginary” can illuminate its complexity and instability as an embodiment of value. It can reveal the painting’s relation to historically pressing questions of presence and representation related to the breakdown and restoration of established political and religious authority and demonstrate the involvement of beholders in the recognition and construction of relative value. In monetary terms, the image was an exemplar embodying and invoking absolute value whilst simultaneously serving particular interests in the hands of a few knowledgeable users, like a precious coin.

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Mareel, Samuel ed. Call for Justice: Art and Law in the Low Countries 1450-1650. Antwerp and Mechelen: Hannibal, 2018. Mareel, Samuel. “Mirrors of Justice.” In Call for Justice: Art and Law in the Low Countries 1450-1650, edited by Samuel Mareel, 43-62. Antwerp and Mechelen: Hannibal, 2018. Martyn, Georges, and Huygebaert, Stefan. “Twenty New Contributions to the Upcoming Research Field of Historical Legal Iconology.” In The Art of Law, edited by Stefan Huygebaert et al., 3-23. Cham: Springer, 2018. Mielke, Hans. The Ceremonial Entry of Ernst, Archduke of Austria into Antwerp: An Introduction. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970. Parsons, Jotham. Making Money in 16th Century France: Currency, Culture and the State. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. Paumen, Vanessa. “The Exhibition The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted.” In The Art of Law, edited by Stefan Huygebaert et al., 25-41. Cham: Springer, 2018. Perrin, Bernadotte trans. Plutarch Lives, Vol. 1. London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Peters, Emily. “Printing Ritual: The Performance of Community in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys … d’Anjou.” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (summer 2008): 370-413. Raband, Ivo. “Printed Narrative: The Festival Books for Archduke Ernest of Austria from Brussels and Antwerp 1594.” In Aspects of Narrative in Art History, edited by Kayo Hirakawa, 17-32. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014. Resnik, Judith and Curtis, Dennis Edward. Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City States and Democratic Courtrooms. Yale: Yale University Press, 2011. Ryner, Bradley. “Money and its Ideas: Justice, Sovereignty and the Idea of Money as Commodity.” In A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance, edited by Stephen Deng. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 (electronic resource). Scribonius Grapheus, Cornelius. Le triumphe d’Anvers, faict en la susception du Prince Philips, Prince d’Espaign[e]. Antwerp, 1550. Shell, Marc. Art and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Silver, Larry. “Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered.” Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 7:2 (summer 2015), 1-20. DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.2 Smolderen, Luc. “Jacques Jonghelinck, Waradin de la Monnaie d’Anvers de 1572 à 1606.” Revue Belge de Numismatique et de Sigillographie CVI (1969): 83-247. Smolderen, Luc. Jacques Jonghelinck. Sculpteur, médailleur et graveur de sceaux (1530-1606). Louvain-la-Neuve: Numismatica Lovaniensia 15, 1996. Soly, Hugo. “Openbare Feesten in Brabantse en Vlaamse Steden, 16de–18de Eeuw.” In Het Openbaar Initiatief van de Gemeenten in België: Historische Grondslagen (Ancien Régime). 11de Internationaal Colloquium Spa, 1–4 Sept. 1982. Handelingen, 605–31. Brussels: Credit communal de Belgique, 1984.

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Soly, Hugo. “Plechtige Intochten in de Steden van de Zuidelijke Nederlanden Tijdens de Overgang van Middeleeuwen naar Nieuwe Tijd: Communicatie, Propaganda, Spektakel.” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 97, no. 3 (1984): 341– 61. Stewart, Bernard, “Moneta and Mot on Anglo Saxon Coins.” The British Numismatic Journal 31 (1962), 27-42. Thøfner, Margit. A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt. Zwolle: Waanders, 2007. Van Binnebeke, Emile. “Group Portrait with Lady Justice.” In Call for Justice. Art and Law in the Low Countries 1450-1650, edited by Samuel Mareel, 200-203. Antwerp and Mechelen: Hannibal, 2018. Van Caenegem, Raoul. An Historical Introduction to Private Law Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Van Caenegem, Raoul. Law History, the Low Countries and Europe. London: Hambledon Press,1994. Verachter, Frédéric. Documens pour servir à l’Histoire Monétaire des Pays-Bas. Antwerp: De Braey, 1840-42. Wessels, Johannes. Johannes. History of the Roman-Dutch Law. Grahamstown: The Lawbook Exchange, 1908. Wolters van der Wey, Beatrijs. “A 8, 1594, Antwerpen, Munters.” In Groepsvertoon. Publieke groepsportretten in Brabant 1585-1800: studie vanuit maatschappelijk, typologisch en iconografisch oogpunt en kritische catalogus, doctoraal proefschrift, 3 (Kritische catalogus) (Louvain: KU Leuven, 2012): 365-381 http://balat.kikirpa.be/doc/pdf/A8-43827.pdf Wolters Van der Wey, Beatrijs. Corporate Splendour: Civic Group Portraits in Brabant 1585-1800: A Social, Typological and Iconographic Approach. Pictura Nova vol. 18. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Wolters van der Wey, Beatrijs. “Civic Bodies and their Identification with Justice and Law in Early Modern Flemish Portraiture.” In The Art of Law, edited by Stefan Huygebaert et al., 167-179. Cham: Springer, 2018. Woodall, Joanna. “In Pursuit of Virtue.” In Virtue, Virtuoso, Virtuosity. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 54, edited by Jan de Jong et al., 7-25. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Woodall, Joanna. “‘De Wisselaer’: Quentin Matsys’s Man Weighing Gold Coins and His Wife, 1514.” In Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64, edited by Christine Goettler, Bart Ramakers, Joanna Woodall, 38-75. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Woodall, Joanna. “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album Amicorum.” In Ut Pictura Amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, edited by Walter Melion, Joanna Woodall, Michael Zell, 647-703. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Zorach, Rebecca and Phillips Jr., Michael. Gold: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion, 2016. Zweite, Armin. Marten de Vos als Maler: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Antwerpener Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Mann, 1980.

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Joanna Woodall

About the author Joanna Woodall is Professor of Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in Netherlandish visual culture during the age of global expansion. Her recent publications have focused on love and money, and sometimes the exchange between the two.

2.

Scaling the World: Allegory of Coinage and Monetary Governance in the Dutch Republic Sebastian Felten and Jessica Stevenson Stewart Abstract Attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe, Allegory of Coinage envisions the global horizons of Dutch monetary governance. The central female personif ication, Moneta of Holland, receives tributaries from Africa, America, and Asia. Bearing sacks of silver and gold, these male laborers appear within a hybrid landscape that visually relates the technologies for mining and refining precious metals to the crafts of minting and assaying specie. Likely made to decorate the offices of the Masters-General of the Mints, who supervised mints in the Dutch Republic, Allegory of Coinage encouraged these officials to perceive how their governance of the material production of coins was embedded in a global division of labour for sourcing and distributing precious metals. Keywords: money, Romeyn de Hooghe, Netherlands, labour, global history

In a document dating to 1785, Marcellus Emants, the assayer-general of the Dutch Republic, reports a payment made to the painter Aert Schouman (1710-1792), then headmaster of the Dordrecht Guild of St. Luke, “for repairing a chimney piece which hangs in the muntkamer, depicting all activities related to the making of coins.”1 Emants’s statement may describe a painting, now known as the Allegory of Coinage, which the Royal Mint in Utrecht gave to the Rijksmuseum in 1884 (fig. 2.1).2 1 “Voor het reparareeren van een schoorsteenstuk, hangende in de Muntkamer, afbeeldende alle de activitijten van het muntweesen aan de schilder Schouman bet[aalt],” Nationaal Archief, The Hague (henceforth NL-HaNA), 1.01.44, no. 59, edited in Scheffers, Om de Kwaliteit, 2:297 and discussed in ibid., 1:139. 2 Inventory card of the Rijksmuseum, written by Remmet van Luttervelt and kindly shared with us by Caroline Wittop Koning and Lieke van Deinsen. Albert Scheffers reports that Allegory was kept in storage

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_ch02

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2.1 Romeyn de Hooghe (attributed), Allegory of Coinage, after 1681, oil on canvas, 135 × 178 × 8.3 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Object No. SK-A-833.

Tentatively attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708), this large painting situates an abstruse allegory within a synoptic view of mining, ref ining, and minting precious metal. Although little is known about the production context of this painting, Emants’s remarks suggest that Allegory of Coinage was made for the Councillors and Masters-General of the Mints of the Dutch Republic (Raden en at the Geldmuseum in Utrecht, so it was perhaps returned to the Rijksmuseum when that museum was closed in 2013. Scheffers, Om de kwaliteit, 1:139n450. The 1884 transfer to the Rijksmuseum is mentioned in the minutes of the Coinage Board (which oversaw the Royal Mint) and in their correspondence with the Ministry of Finance and with the director of the Rijksmuseum. The idea of the transfer originated in the Ministry, which argued that there was a “scarcity of works by this master.” The Rijksmuseum requested information after the painting’s arrival in the collection, in particular “by whom and with what aim the painting was commissioned, and what the costs were.” The Coinage Board replied that their research in the archive of the Royal Mint and in the National Archive yielded no information. NL-HaNA 2.08.94, no. 798, Coinage Board to Rijksmuseum, January 13, 1885; no. 1693, August 1, 15, and 23, as well as December 19, 1884; 1694, January 13, 1885. The Mint’s papers provide no further evidence.

SCALING THE WORLD: ALLEGORY OF COINAGE AND MONETARY GOVERNANCE IN THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

Generaalmeesters van de Munten der Vereenigde Nederlanden) and that it hung above the fireplace in their offices, the muntkamer, in The Hague, close to other key governmental bodies of the Dutch Republic.3 (To distinguish between the room and the governmental body who used it, we henceforth use ‘mint council’ to designate the officials and ‘muntkamer’ for their headquarters.) Allegory of Coinage presents a visual discourse on Dutch monetary governance. It portrays the Maiden of Holland as Moneta, the goddess of money. Signifying the mint council’s oversight, this figure presides over various tributaries, who signify the global flow of bullion. The painting thus imagines the world-system as a continental allegory, in which male labourers supplant the female personifications more typically used to symbolize the natural fecundity of the New World, Africa, and Asia. Set before a landscape where ores are mined and refined, these tributaries supply bullion to Europe, where the metals are transformed into currency under the watchful eye of Moneta, as suggested by subsidiary scenes that depict the processes of assaying and minting it into coins. This pictorial rhetoric, which centres governance in the production of coinage, appealed to the mint council’s intellectual culture and administrative expertise.4 Together, this group of officials supervised, until the Republic’s demise in 1795, nine to fourteen provincial and urban mints, each run by its own mint master. Allegory of Coinage’s synthetic view of monetary production registered the international dynamics of the bullion trade at the end of the seventeenth century. Central European silver production, predominant earlier in the sixteenth century, was subsequently surpassed by the output of Mexican and Andean mines.5 Throughout this period, Europeans also sourced gold in West Africa and Central Europe, as they had since the Middle Ages, but additional supplies were increasingly sought in South America, especially Brazil. To produce bullion for markets in East Asia and Europe, Spanish mining entrepreneurs in the New World used a combination of wage, forced and enslaved labour. Some of this bullion was imported to the Netherlands, via Spain and Portugal, where it was further refined and sold as coined specie to moneychangers, trading companies, bankers, and magistrates. Because this specie was reexported to buy profitable foreign commodities, Dutch coins circulated within and beyond Dutch colonies and trading posts overseas.6 The mint council thus supervised the local production of a globally sourced and distributed currency. Allegory of Coinage, this essay argues, scaled the global scope of Dutch monetary governance to local practices by visually evoking three dimensions of the council’s 3 Thiel, de Bruyn Kops, and van Schendel, Paintings of the Rijksmuseum, 289; Van Nierop, Life of Romeyn de Hooghe, 374-375. For clerical work in The Hague, see Knevel, Haagse Bureau. 4 For the administrative structure, see Scheffers, Om de Kwaliteit; and Polak, Historiografie. 5 Scott, “Economic Landscapes,” 1-32. 3f.f. 6 Soetbeer, Edelmetall-Produktion; Bakewell, Miners; Braudel, Civilization, 194-204.

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work.7 First, the painting depicts processes of commensuration that harmonized scales of value within a politically fragmented Europe. Because many currencies circulated in the Dutch Republic, the mint council determined exchange rates through the techniques of weighing and assaying – processes that are represented in the painting.8 Second, the painting’s iconography drew on ancient numismatics to visualize modern Dutch imperialism, rhetorically scaling the present to an exemplary past. The two sides of Ancient Roman coins associated sovereignty with good governance and wealth generation, juxtaposing imperial portraits or state symbols on one side with diverse personifications on the other.9 Allegory of Coinage exploits the duality of this associative language, presenting the Maiden of Holland as the Roman goddess Moneta. Within the painting, coins function as metapictorial scaling devices, images within the image that evoke the historical circulation of money as a public good.10 Third, as an object made for an audience of officials, Allegory of Coinage pictured the Dutch world-economy within the confines of a canvas, rendering foreign lands and peoples visible in the meeting room of the mint council. It pictorially scaled the microcosm of domestic monetary production – the minting of coins and the regulation of the monetary supply – to the macrocosm of the Dutch imperial policy – the sourcing of precious metal overseas, the exploitation of forced and enslaved labour, and the management of the international bullion trade. In sum, then, Allegory of Coinage helped the mint council understand how their governance of the material production of coins was, first, dependent on the minute regulation of technical processes in the mints; second, authorized by ancient republican traditions; and third, embedded in a global division of labour for sourcing and processing precious metals. Although the attribution of the painting to Romeyn De Hooghe remains problematic, there are reasons to believe he may have been involved in the commission.11 Trained as an etcher, De Hooghe established a design school in Haarlem and was 7 We draw here on Deborah Coen’s concept of “scaling,” which she defines as “the process of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal and informal, designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world, in order to arrive at a common standard of proportionality. […] [Scaling] can also be a way of situating the known world in relation to times or places that are distant or otherwise inaccessible to direct experience. Scaling makes it possible to weigh the consequences of human actions at multiple removes and to coordinate action at multiple levels of governance.” Coen, Climate, 16. 8 Polak, Historiografie. 9 Stoic philosophers described coined money as a social good, a means of exchange that simultaneously established equivalence between unlike things and mediated social relationships. Seneca, On Benefits, 25. Cicero, On Duties, 19. Heal, The Power of Gifts, 17–18. 10 Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 103-126. 11 Wilson, “The Art of Romeyn de Hooghe,” 299, follows Hofstede De Groot, “Kritische Opmerkingen,” 115, who rejects the painting as too dissimilar to the paintings in the townhall of Enkhuizen whose authorship is confirmed by archival sources.

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renowned for his erudite allegorical prints. He also ran in elite political circles and actively sought the patronage of mint masters. In 1674, he dedicated an illustrated folio, Theater of Changes in the Netherlands (Schouburgh der Nederlandse Veranderingen), to Cornelis van Beveren, General-Master of the Mints between 1661 and 1689.12 Although documentary evidence is lacking, it is possible that De Hooghe’s flattery of Van Beveren resulted in a commission to design this ambitious painting for the mint council.

Visualizing constancy in monetary governance The female personification, Moneta of Holland, anchors the surrounding activities. Turned at an angle, she gazes outward, drawing the viewer to the canvas. Her fair skin distinguishes her from the adjacent figures. Though seated, she is slightly larger than the other figures. Her lap is draped in blue-and-gold damask; a bejeweled girdle carries her open blouse. A Lion of Holland, the armorial of the Dutch Republic, decorates the back of her giltwood throne. This state symbol emblazoned many Dutch coins, implying her identity as the Maiden of Holland (Nederlandse Maagd), a figuration that also appeared on Netherlandish currency (fig. 2.2).13 Marine imagery, evident in both the throne’s shell motif and in the pearls ornamenting her sartorial accessories, suggests the naval prowess of Dutch merchants. Between her left knee and right hand, she balances a volute cornucopia that has been fashioned as a Münzpokal. A symbol of prosperity, cornucopias represented Abundance and frequently appeared on ancient Roman coins, signifying both Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, and Moneta, whose other attribute was the scales; they were historically associated with sovereign displays of public munificence, like giving grain and coins to the people.14 The exterior decoration of this vessel shows coins in a hierarchical arrangement, transforming the cornucopia into an objectified numismatic collection, a three-dimensional coin tariff. Copper coins, lowest in value, form the bottom row and include an oord and a duit – Dutch coins of small change. Silver coins, sorted progressively in size from small to large, 12 Van Nierop, Life of Romeyn de Hooghe, 61; 94-97; 126-128; 174-187. 13 Van Gelder, Nederlandse Munten, passim. 14 Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), translated into Dutch in 1644, was based partly on the study of ancient Roman coins. On Moneta, see Joanna Woodall’s contribution in this volume. Romeyn de Hooghe also produced illustrations of ancient coins, including variations with Moneta, which had been on view in Utrecht. See Chevalier, Schoonebeek and De Hooghe, Recherche Curieuse d’Antiquités, 131. Romans associated the concept of liberality with liberal behaviors (liberalis), including congiarium – a public donation, typically of money, public offerings (munera), and the distribution of corn to the people (donatio; largitio; divisio). See Guerzoni, Apollo & Vulcan, 30cf.

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2.2 Unknown designer, duit, c. 1590–1596. Reverse, copper, 24 mm diameter. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Object No. NG-NM-7747-3.

appear staggered in six horizontal registers. Among these a ducat, florijn, ducaton, patagon, lion dollar, and stiver can be distinguished. The coins’ circumscriptions are, however, not visible; they appear unusually round and thick, which may visually assimilate them with ancient specimens.15 Visible in the top row is a large guilder depicting Pallas Athena, which provides the painting with a terminus post quem of 1680 (fig. 2.3).16 The golden specie overflowing the cornucopia registers a hierarchy of metals in which gold reigned supreme. This profusion of coins evoked not only the bounties of subterranean harvests but also the idea, prevalent at the time, that an abundant coin stock was crucial to Dutch economic success.17 The cornucopia, reimagined as a konstcamer object crafted from modern coins, implies various significances: the hierarchies of value, the fecundity of mints, the imperial politics of monetary regulation, and the importance of ample currency for Dutch commerce. In the lower left foreground, Hermathena approaches Moneta of Holland. Identifiable by a winged headdress and caduceus, the figure represents the fusion of Hermes, the god of trade, and Athena, the goddess of artisanal skill and science – two forms of knowledge conjoined in the creation and regulation of coins.18 15 We are grateful to Benedikt Prokisch (Universität Wien) for this observation; he also helped identify the coins on the cornucopia. 16 Van Gelder, Nederlandse Munten, 155. 17 Indise Raven, Remonstrantie; Knuttel, “Indise-Raven (Christopher)”; Laspeyres, Geschichte, 290. 18 Popularized by Peter Paul Rubens, the image of Hermathena may have originated in a medal created for the Roman emperor Hadrian. See McGrath, “Rubens’s Musathena,” 238 cf. Romeyn de Hooghe depicted

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2.3 Unknown designer, guilder of the Dutch Republic, Mint of Holland, Dordrecht, 1682. Obverse, silver, 33 mm diameter. Object No. KOG-MP-1-1561B.

Recalling Athena’s image on the guilder (fig. 2.3), Hermathena guides two male tributaries to Moneta of Holland’s feet, where ingots and bars denote measures of refined copper and silver. A black man, representing Africa, carries leather sacks, suggesting the gold trade in Guinea; his metal collar signifies chattel slavery.19 Beside him is another dark-complexioned individual with a feathered headdress, a visual trope for representing indigenous peoples of the New World.20 A vast mountainous landscape, where labourers work superficial metal deposits, stretches beneath a darkening sky. Figures can be seen climbing ladders, heaving axes at the rock surface, carrying boulders and pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with ore. A winch, used to access subterranean shafts, is visible on the mountainside. The organization of labour expands upon representations of New World mining operations presented in Theodore de Bry’s America (fig. 2.4), which showed indigenous people working open-shaft mines in Potosí. However, two different types of furnaces, placed side-by-side in the mountain’s flatland anterior, refer to the processing of ore – metallurgical technologies not portrayed by De Bry. The Hermathena in the frontispiece of Historie der Kerken en Ketteren (1701). 19 For an overview of the representation of Africans in European art in the seventeenth century, see Bindman, Dalton, and Gates, The Image of the Black in Western Art. Volume III; Kolf in, et al, Black in Rembrandt’s Time. 20 Jan Mostaert’s earlier painting West Indies Landscape was in Haarlem during Romeyn de Hooghe’s residency there. Mason, Infelicities, 26 cf. On De Bry’s America, see Gaudio, Engraving the Savage; Tun, “Colonial Cruelty.”

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2.4 Theodor de Bry, “Nigritae in Scrutandis Venis Metallicis/ ab Hispanis in Insulas” (Blacks Examining Metallic Veins/ from Spaniards on the Islands), Part 5 of Americae, Frankfurt am Main, 1595, engraving, image 15.9 × 19.5 cm (overall 34.5 × 23.5 cm). Courtesy of The Wellcome Collection, London.

rectilinear and conical form of these furnaces may derive from Alvaro Alonso Barba’s Arte de los metales (1640), which describes various types of metallurgical technologies in use in the New World.21 Although developed from Continental technologies, these methods evolved differently in the Americas and registered particular, localized production contexts.22 The coupling of African and American tributaries before Moneta of Holland presents a racialized view of a colonial mercantilist system – a scopic regime that 21 See images of the Horno Castellano Quadrado and Horno Castellano Redondo in Barba, De los Metales, chap. 6. 22 Bigelow, Mining Language.

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recodes these labourers as fungible bodies.23 Set before a backdrop of toiling workers, these figures imply both the human scale of bullion production and the value of labour.24 Although communities of free Africans and people of Afro-Atlantic decent existed in Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands, the men represented in the Allegory of Coinage are removed from metropolitan life.25 Aligned with the transformation of nature, they represent both labourers and territories of extraction, signalling Dutch involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade, which had peaked in the mid-seventeenth century.26 The writings of Dutch colonial officers explicitly equated territories in Africa and America with the extraction of precious metals and enslaved bodies. Willem de la Palma, Director-General in Elmina in southern Ghana, suggests the fungibility of enslaved humans and gold, reporting in 1705 that the Gold Coast had been “completely changed into a slave coast, and that the natives nowadays no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves.”27 The Americas, in turn, were imagined by Dutch merchants as open veins from which silver could be drawn like blood.28 In these characterizations, trading territories, enslaved bodies, and precious metals become mutually substitutable assets. Visible just beyond Hermathena, a kneeling man formally links the mining scene to Moneta’s throne. Like the African and American figures, he is bare-chested and carries sacks of money. Within the framework of continental allegory, his headcloth would appear to signal his identity as Asia, or the Orient, broadly conceived. The diagonal axis of these bullion-bearing labourers implies the flow of precious metals to Moneta of Holland, a surrogate for Europe. Contemporary descriptive geographic texts published in the Netherlands reinforced this Eurocentric worldview, and Romeyn de Hooghe is sometimes credited for reinventing continental allegories for pan-European audiences.29 Similar imagery featured prominently in the civic architecture of the Netherlands, most famously Artus Quellinus’s tympanum for the Amsterdam town hall. This well-worn trope broadcast the imperial ambitions of the Dutch Republic. Moneta’s cornucopia overlays a peculiar obelisk, which roughly aligns with the kneeling tributary. Surmounted by a bust, the needle of the stele is inscribed 23 King “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly),” 1028. 24 Indigeneity and miscegenation are rendered ambiguous. Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh, 74. 25 Ponte, “‘Al de Swarten die Hier ter Stede Comen,” 35-36. 26 Perbi, “Merchants, Middlemen and Monarchs: Dutch and Ghanaians in the Atlantic Slave trade,” in Ineke van Kessel, ed., Merchants, Missionaries and Migrants. 27 Quoted in Perbi, ibid., 33. 28 Indise Raven, Remonstrantie, 12. 29 Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 9. The opening emblem of De Hooghe’s Theater of Changes in the Netherlands, a folio inspired by the “disaster year” of 1672, includes a continental allegory (Figure 9).

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2.5 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Vastgestelde Geloof” (Established Faith), Chapter 36 of his Hieroglyphica oft Merkbeelden der Oude Volkeren, Amsterdam, 1735, etching, overall 26 × 19.2 cm. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

with Hebraic script.30 Its base is decorated with a low-relief carving, portraying a group of turbaned men gathered around a coffer covered with coins. A clue to the significance of this object is provided by one of the painting’s closest precedents – Maerten de Vos’s 1594 Tribunal of the Brabant Mint, which portrays mint officials together with four ancient lawgivers, including Moses as bearer of the Ten Commandments.31 While the Hebraic inscription and tablet-shaped obelisk in Allegory of Coinage would seem to typologically refer to the Old Dispensation, the unusual form of the stele appears to derive from an illustration of “Established Belief” 30 The phrase “he descended” can be deciphered, along with the words “father,” “Avram,” and “Reuman.” We are grateful to Dr Kathrin Wittler (Freie Universität Berlin) for this translation. 31 De Ridder, “De Vierschaar.” See Woodall, this volume.

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2.6 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Van de Joodsche Stand by Christus Tyden” (On the Position of the Jews at the Time of Christ), Chapter 30 of his Hieroglyphica oft Merkbeelden der Oude Volkeren, Amsterdam, 1735, etching, overall 26 × 19.2 cm. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

in Romeyn de Hooghe’s Hieroglyphica (fig. 2.5), a book that purported to offer a visual compendium of religious symbology.32 In an earlier chapter, devoted to “The Jewish State in the Time of Christ,” De Hooghe describes the figure’s costumes as Chaldean, Babylonian, Persian, Palestinian, Syrian, and Turkish (fig. 2.6), but the garments actually represented resemble contemporary Near Eastern fashions.33 32 Hieroglyphica claimed to chart the evolution of world religions and the corruption of religious truth since Antiquity. Trudelien van ’t Hof has argued that “around 1700 the notions of true religion were complex, ambiguous, contradictory, and to some extent undecided” and that De Hooghe’s views were neither orthodox nor an expression of Enlightenment religious skepticism. Van ’t Hof, “Romeyn de Hooghe’s Hieroglyphica.” 33 Hieroglyphica, Ii2. De Hooghe’s illustrations in Alle de Voornaamste Historien des Ouden en Nieuwen Testaments (1703) and Historie der Kerken en Ketteren represent historical figures in Ottoman garb. European paintings often represented ancient peoples wearing Ottoman fashions, which had been spurred by the

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These Orientalizing references may imply the diaspora of Sephardic Jews and their connection to lands then controlled by the Ottoman Empire.34 Though ambiguous, the relief at the base of the obelisk appears to represent a scene of money lending. Within the context of the stele, the depiction recalls the role Jewish merchants served, both historically and in the modern Dutch Republic, as money changers. In Amsterdam, the principal entrepot of Holland, Jewish traders were heavily involved in trafficking precious metal. Gold thread-makers, silver and goldsmiths, and mint masters were all obliged to buy their raw material from either licensed traders or the Bank of Amsterdam.35 Bullion and specie traders, among them Jewish merchants, had designated places on the Exchange of Amsterdam, near the exit to the Dam, so that their dealings could be monitored.36 However, in 1684 the city council complained about “Jews and others who are brazen enough to stand near the Exchange or on other marketplaces […] to buy up, sell, or change specie.”37 Evidence suggests that Jewish bullion traders wore clothes similar to other merchants: they “dressed in the ordinary way, in black, with camlet coats.”38 The subordination of the Hebraic obelisk behind Moneta’s cornucopia in the painting may therefore suggest contemporary efforts to bring Jewish traders – marked here with Orientalizing dress – under the regulatory authority of the mint council. The diminution of the Asian tributary may allude to how American silver and African gold flowed through the Dutch Republic on an eastward journey. In a 1683 memorandum to the States-General, the mint council described Holland as the trading floor of the entire world, where merchants bought and sold a hundred different goods.39 All in all, they estimated, bullion worth 15 to 18 million guilders arrived in Amsterdam from the Americas each year, of which 10 to 15 million were reexported, mostly to Asia. Merchants and companies bought silver and gold which they had assayed, refined, and minted according to the guilder standard of the Dutch Republic; they then exported this much-coveted commodity elsewhere. 40 Whereas the foregrounding of Africa and America in Allegory tacitly acknowledges turquerie vogue of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, for example, described the fashions of Ottoman Turks as keeping alive the styles of Antiquity. See Montague Wortley, Turkish Embassy Letters, 110. 34 Edward Said characterized this as the “timelessness” of the Orient in the Western imaginary. Said, Orientalism, 16. 35 For the material economy of gold and silver, see, for example, Van Dillen, Bronnen, nos. 281, 282, and 284, 29 November 1683–8 April 1684, 216-227. For the Amsterdam silver market in relationship to the mints, see Polak, Historiografie, 1:190-240. 36 Le Moine L’Espine and Le Long, Koophandel, 9. For a floor plan, see Van Nieuwkerk, Bank, 79. 37 Van Dillen, Bronnen, 228. Some of the trading locales around the Bourse building are described in Le Moine L’Espine and Le Long, Koophandel, 13-14. 38 Dehing, Geld in Amsterdam, 136. 39 Van Dillen, Bronnen, 216-24. 40 De Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia;” De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, 81-91.

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2.7  Jan Luyken, “De Munter” (The Coiner), from Casper Luyken and Jan Luyken, Spiegel van het Menselyk Bedryf, Amsterdam, 1704, etching, 14.3 ×  8.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Object No. RP-P-OB-44.532.

these “suppliers” of Europe’s gold and silver, the marginalization and obfuscation of Asia deemphasizes the well-known trade imbalance, wherein China and India absorbed most of the silver in circulation in the early modern world. Moneta of Holland, the fulcrum upon which all movements turn, mediates multiple zones of labour. To her right are the mining landscape and ore refineries; to her left are a mint and an alchemical laboratory. Within the mint, the ribbed vaults and clerestory windows were common feature in civic and religious architecture,

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including the Middelburg mint and the chapel of the mint workers in Dordrecht. Visible in that interior space, at least six fully clothed workers perform different duties. Two men wield hammers to stamp coins, recalling earlier representations of the minter’s labour in Casper and Jan Luyken’s Book of Trades (fig. 2.7). 41 One man grasps a large spoon, used to stir and ladle molten alloys. Furthest to the right, a man seated before a cupel is fully absorbed in the task of assaying. 42 In the background, adjacent to the scaffolding at the far right, are the handlebars of a screw press, which was introduced in some Dutch mints after 1670. 43 Below the mint, two men tend an alchemical furnace. The glass vessel set above the fire may represent a separation flask (schykolf ). Described in contemporary texts, this instrument was used to remove impurities from precious metals by cooking thinly rolled pieces of metals in acid. 44 The small furnace, designed for assaying metals, resembled types that were made in the later sixteenth century and continued in use through the eighteenth century. The two men are likely counterfeiters. A grey-haired man displays the stamp of a silver ducat, identifiable by its distinctive man-in-armour design, which he seems to have carved with the tools placed on top of the furnace. His younger, bare-chested companion glances ominously at the stamp. A bar of copper is visible in his right hand. In his left, he holds pincers, apparently angling for a purse at Moneta’s feet. Various glyphs embroidered on the golden trim of Hermathena’s silver gown further signify alchemical knowledge. The signs for fire, water, aqua regia, salt, and aqua fortis appear on the collar. On the belt are symbols for planetary metals, including the Moon/silver, Mars/iron, Mercury/quicksilver, Jupiter/tin, Saturn/lead, Venus/copper, and the Sun/gold. 45 The prominence of alchemical motifs, together with the cornucopia’s hierarchy of metals, imply transmutation by both trade and chemistry. 46 Other objects near Moneta of Holland are more specific to monetary regulation. A touchstone, the black object close to her hand, represents mastery of the “toets,” or test.47 This assaying method required comparative visual and material analysis. When rubbed against a dark stone, alloys with different ratios of gold, silver, and 41 Luyken and Luyken, Spiegel, 76. 42 Compare the title page of Jansz., Uytgerekende Tafelen. Sieuwert Jansz. was an assayer employed by the Bank of Amsterdam. Dehing, Geld, 73. 43 Van Gelder, Nederlandse Munten, 147-9; Spooner, “On the Road.” 44 The gold and silversmith Willem van Laer writes that the process puts the acid to “work” (“dat men arbeiden nennt”), which fills the flask filled with yellow smoke. Van Laer, Weg-Wyzer, 58-64. 45 Compare British Library, Sloane MS 3772 f. 44v & MS 732, f. 174, reproduced in Roberts, Mirror of Alchemy, 21. 46 Wennerlind, Casualities of Credit, chap. 2. 47 Like the English word, it derives from the old French toucher. See “toets.”

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copper leave streaks of different colours; these marks were then compared to those of standardized needles. 48 On the table is an encased balance, a glass box containing equally weighted scales. The scales, one of the principal attributes of both Justice and Moneta, signifies the Cardinal virtue of fairness and equity, but also points to the technical skills needed for high-precision testing. Balances such as these were used in the fire assay, a process that connects a number of objects in the right side of the painting. This method entailed drilling or cutting a small sample from a metallic object and placing it on a balance, often suspended in a glass box, to shield it from drafts that might affect the reading. The weight of the sample was written down, a form of record-keeping signalled by the white quill lying next to the balance. When the sample had been purified in the furnace, the ratio between the weight of the original sample and the weight of the precious metal content could be determined by placing it on the balance again. To the left of this, Moneta of Holland rests her fingers on what appears to be either a bound coin-tariff book or an encased coin balance, resembling the types used by merchants and moneychangers.49 When the Northern Provinces defected from the Spanish Empire in 1579 and instituted a republican constitution, they agreed to form a monetary union by ensuring their respective coins “adhere[d] to the same valuation.”50 The tariffs detailed what this meant in practice. Early modern governments had the right to define the relationship between a coin’s material value, expressed in fineness and weight – the quality and quantity of precious metal content – and its value, expressed in accounting units. For example, a duit coin, identified by its Maiden-of-Holland design, was stated to be worth one duit, or one eighth of a stiver, the accounting unit in which the value of all other coins was expressed (fig. 2.2).51 Like other European governments, the Dutch related the value of circulating coins to a shared standard unit of account.52 Coin tariffs and coin balances helped merchants and money-changers determine whether the coins at hand were up to the standard or not – whether they had to be accepted at a discount or withdrawn from circulation. Surrounded by tools used for assuring the purity of metals, Moneta of Holland thus signifies the authority that brings wealth and stability to the nation. Vanquished underfoot are Fraud and Avarice, signified by the mask and coin purse respectively.53 A serpent slithers around the mask, implying the continuing dangers of monetary corruption and forgery. The implied actions of the counterfeiter’s 48 The process is described in Agricola, De Re Metallica, bk. 7. 49 Placcaet ende Ordonnantie (1606). 50 Rowen, Low Countries, 73. 51 Beeldenaer ofte Figuer-boeck (1626), unpaginated section on “Deuyten.” 52 Wolters, “Heavy and Light Money,” 39. 53 See “Fraude” and “Avaritia” in Ripa, Iconologia, 29, 169.

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pincers extend into this perilous zone. Collectively, these motifs addressed the mint council’s responsibility for defending the Republic’s currency against the threats of fraudulence and debasement. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, when Allegory of Coinage was painted, the regulatory authority of the mint council had been repeatedly challenged by the trading towns to the east of Nijmegen, Deventer, Kampen, and Zwolle. Asserting their privileges as mints of the Holy Roman Empire, an identity conferred at the foundation of the Republic, these towns resented the encroachments of centralized government. Although these towns had called for greater autonomy, particularly after the “disaster year” of 1672, their demands clashed with renewed attempts by the Holland States, the States-General, and the mint council to enact more stringent regulations.54 This resulted in the unilateral adoption of the guilder as the new standard coin in 1680. The fact that this coin, emblazoned with the image of Pallas Athena, is so prominently featured among the currencies featured on Moneta’s cornucopia suggests the continuing significance of this legislation in the eyes of the mint council. Indeed, responding to the influx of substandard coins, the mint council forced the closure of the Imperial mints by 1692, and in 1694 they established a new guilder coin, pioneered by Holland, as a standard coin to be produced in all provincial mints.55 In Allegory of Coinage, Moneta of Holland’s steadfast comportment manifests the order prescribed by the mint council, enacted in small, distributed acts of making and testing. The increasing coordination and the continual publication of official tariffs created a situation in which some coins were, in principle, mutually substitutable. Foreign tariffs often did not differentiate between coins struck in the different provinces, indicating that, at least to outsiders, these currencies were similar enough to be used interchangeably.56 As a centralizing regulatory mechanism, the mint council harmonized the dispersed production of regional mints, providing a robust and stable form of monetary governance. To safeguard the link between minted metal and the unit of account, the mint council oversaw coin-testing ceremonies, known as the muntbusopening, or opening of the sample box, that were conducted every two to five years.57 During the muntbusopening, a delegation from the mint council, led by the assayer-general, visited the different mints and verified the quality of their samples. Elevated above the other human actors, Moneta of Holland is at once integral to and yet separate from the surrounding action: she represents the impartial 54 Panhuysen, Rampjaar 1672; Haak, “Rijksmunten.” 55 Van Gelder, Nederlandse Munten, 158; and Polak, Historiografie, 1: chap. 4. 56 Van Gelder, Nederlandse Munten, 125 57 Polak, Historiografie; and Scheffers, Om de Kwaliteit. Compare Schaffer, “Ceremonies,” and Cook, Assessing the Truth.

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2.8 Romeyn de Hooghe, “Peace before the Invasion of France,” Schouwburg der Nederlandse Verandering, Amsterdam, 1674, etching, 23.2 × 35 cm. Courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum, London, Inv. No. Y,1.80 

governance that regulates the labour of coining without engaging in it. Her attributes confirm this interpretation, aligning her with the moral qualities and knowledge forms most pertinent to Dutch monetary governance. Cradled in her left arm is a mirrored staff, an attribute of Prudence, the virtue of wise, self-reflective, and timely action.58 Within republican moral philosophy, Prudence, like Justice, was both a virtue that strengthened the commonwealth.59 In On Constancy (De constantia), translated into Dutch by 1674, Justus Lipsius describes prudence as integral to constancy, which he defines as “the upright and immovable mental strength, which is neither lifted up nor depressed by external or accidental circumstances.”60 These concepts assumed renewed salience during the economic crisis that followed in the wake of the “disaster year” of 1672.61 In his Schouburgh, the illustrated folio dedicated to Cornelis van Beveren, De Hooghe addresses how political volatility had negatively impacted the prosperity of the Dutch Republic.62 Among the figurations 58 See “Prudenza” in Ripa, Iconologia, 622. 59 Cicero explicitly connected generosity with social justice, a man’s caste obligations. Cicero, On Duties, 19. 60 Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, 530-1, I4. On the importance of Neostoic philosophy within the Dutch Republic, see Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World, 39ff. 61 Israel, Dutch Republic, 769-806; Panhuysen, Rampjaar 1672. 62 Van Nierop, Life of Romeyn de Hooghe, 110.

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that encircle the first emblem’s continental allegory are Prudence and Justice, who appear in the background next to a globe (fig. 2.8). This signifies, according to De Hooghe, that wise government “follows on the heels of prudence, [and] considers the balance of Justice.”63 These messages of inward vigilance affirmed the leadership of officials like Van Beveren, who were responsible for overseeing the regulation of Dutch currency in the decades following the disaster year.

Allegory as a scaling device That Allegory of Coinage was displayed in the muntkamer is integral to the painting’s emphasis on the international labour system underlying the production, circulation, and regulation of currency. Scaling the past to the present and the periphery to the centre, the painting put “the world within hand’s reach” of metropolitan elites, analogous in some respects to exotic objects in curiosity cabinets, travelogues in scholarly libraries, and reports in trading companies’ archives.64 An important comparative example is the East India House in Amsterdam, where the seventeen directors of the Dutch East India company governed territories overseas from a room decorated with paintings of the Dutch naval fleet and the merchant colony of Batavia (fig. 2.9). This decorative program made visually manifest their maritime empire, which they ruled through written orders and reports issued from that room.65 Allegory of Coinage similarly envisaged the global significance of Dutch monetary governance, exemplifying what Arndt Brendecke has described as an “epistemic setting.”66 The painting helped constitute a working environment in which metallurgical and mercantile information were accumulated and manipulated. Effected through both the emblematic and material languages of coins, the painting made palpable the international scope of the means of production – the maritime empire which the mint council sought to regulate.67 As an object that visualized diverse forms of knowledge, Allegory of Coinage provided a focal point for the deliberations of the mint council, encouraging a self-reflective understanding of its role within global markets and its intellectual, rather than manual, regulatory acts.68 In collocating 63 “De wijse Staetsreede, die de Voorsichtigheydt steets op de hielen volght, overweeght, in de Balance der rechtvaerdigheyt.” De Hooghe, Schouburgh, 9. 64 Bergvelt and Aikema, Wereld binnen Handbereik. 65 See Friedrich, “Caveat from the Archive.” 66 Brendecke, Empirical Empire, chap. 3. 67 Deborah Coen considers how painting allowed off icials to see unity in the diverse ethnicities, languages, and natural environments. Coen, Climate, chaps. 1 and 5. 68 Historians of capitalism have argued that national or even global markets emerged when merchants and clerks interacted with office technology. Rockman, “Introduction;” Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism.

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2.9 Simon Fokke, Willem V Neemt Zitting als Bewindhebber bij de VOC (Willem V Sits as Director of the VOC), 1768, etching, 29.7 × 40.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Object No. RP-P-OB-84.691.

foreign and domestic forms of labour, Allegory of Coinage reified the pursuit of global hegemony through the representation of real technologies. As part of the mint council’s epistemic setting, the painting visually extended forms of inquiry facilitated by other resources at the muntkamer, which included assaying tools and furnaces, a library where they kept books, a collection of the coinage-related edicts, and an archive of their own papers. All of this was housed in their Binnenhof headquarters, close to other governing bodies and to the gold and silversmiths’ guild’s assaying house.69 Putting Dutch monetary governance within a global frame, the painting induced visual deliberation and perhaps verbal discussion about the impacts of decision making in The Hague. Even as it naturalized the subjection and fungibility of foreign labourers and territories of extraction, Allegory exhorted the mint council to act with prudence and good judgement. It underscored the need for centralized supervision of the destabilizing forces, both foreign and domestic, that threatened the mint council’s sovereignty. Drawing its formal vocabulary from ancient and modern numismatics, the painting embraced coins as a medium ideally suited for a discourse on monetary governance. It also 69 Scheffers, Om de Kwaliteit, 1:138.

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attended to the matter of money, the metallic composition of coins, as a source of value and expertise. Rendering material resources, labour, and technologies subordinate to Moneta of Holland, the painting privileges governance in the production of coinage. This vision of good governance was expounded in the coin tariff of 1606, which had been drafted by the coin council and became legally binding across the Netherlands after being passed by the States General.70 The tariff described a state of disorder (ongheregeltheyt) wherein people sold coins for more than their intrinsic value warranted, destabilizing a “good and strong” currency through the incursion of forged, “weak and foreign” coins. Together, the tariff proclaimed, such monetary corruptions greatly damaged the Republic.71 Seeking to countermand this wrongdoing by codifying standards for coins and codes of conduct, the tariff established a work ethic for masters and wardens of the mint, assayers, stamp-cutters and other workers. Responsibility for the standard was extended to all who dealt with coins – moneychangers, weight masters, treasurers, office clerks, tax collectors, craftsmen working in metal, mint masters, assayers and many others. “Across all of these [actors],” the tariff authors argued, “is the state of coinage (staet van munte) spread out and distributed.”72 Allegory of Coinage thus mediated between the global scope of Dutch monetary governance and the small-scale regulatory acts through which this governance was materially enacted. The painting envisages the mint council’s governance on many different scales across the “state of coinage.” Performed in the technical regulation of alloys and weights, the coordination of mint outputs, and the controlled movement of metals between continents, this regulatory authority assumed greater significance when set within a global stage.

Bibliography Unpublished sources NL-HaNA 2.08.94, no. 798, Coinage Board to Rijksmuseum, January 13, 1885; no. 1693, August 1, 15, and 23, as well as December 19, 1884; no. 1694, January 13, 1885.

70 This ordinance was foundational for the currency system of the Republic. Most members of the “coinage state” were given detailed instructions and required to swear an oath. Scheffers, Om de Kwaliteit, vol. 2, passim. For a detailed analysis of how standards were kept (or not) among gold- and silversmiths, see Peter Schoen, Tussen Hamer en Aambeeld. 71 Placcaet ende Ordonnantie (1606), preamble. 72 Ibid.

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Laer, Willem van. Weg-wyzer voor Aankoomende Goud en Zilversmeeden. Amsterdam: Fredrik Helm, 1721. Laspeyres, Etienne. Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederländer und Ihrer Litteratur zur Zeit der Republik. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1863. Le Moine L’Espine, Jacques, and Isaac Le Long. Den Koophandel van Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Andries van Damme and Joannes Ratelband, 1714. Lipsius, Justus. On Constancy. Translated by John Stradling. Edited by John Sellers. Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006. Luyken, Caspar and Luyken, Jan, Spiegel van ’t Menschelyk Bedryf. Amsterdam: Nicolaus Visscher, 1694. Mason, Peter. Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Meadows, Andrew and Jonathan Williams, “Moneta and the Monuments: Coinage and Politics in Republican Rome.” The Journal of Roman Studies 91 (2001): 27-49. McGrath, Elizabeth. “Rubens’s Musathena,” Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 50, (Aug. 1987): 233-245. Nierop, Henk F. K. van. The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645-1708: Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press B.V., 2018. Nieuwkerk, Marius van, ed. The Bank of Amsterdam: On the Origins of Central Banking. Amsterdam: Sonsbeek, 2009. Panhuysen, Luc. Rampjaar 1672: Hoe de Republiek aan de Ondergang Ontsnapte. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2009. Perbi, Akosoua. “Merchants, Middlemen and Monarchs: Dutch and Ghanaians in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” In Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants: 300 Years of Dutch Ghanaian Relations, edited by W.M.J Van Kessel, 33-40. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002. Placcaet ende Ordonnantie van Mijn Heeren die Staten Generael der Vereenichde Nederlanden, Soo opten Cours van’t Gelt, als opte Politie ende Discipline, Betreffende d’Exercitie vande Munte, ende Muntslach. The Hague: Hillebrandt Iacobsz., 1606. Polak, Menno Sander. Historiografie en Economie van de ‘Muntchaos’: De Muntproductie van de Republiek (1606-1795). 2 vols. Amsterdam: NEHA, 1998. Ponte, Mark. “‘Al de Swarten die Hier ter Stede Comen:’ Een Afro-Atlantische Gemeenschap in Zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam.” TSEG 15, no. 4 (2019): 35-36. Ridder, Juliaan de. “De Vierschaar van de Brabantse Munt te Antwerpen, een Gerechtigheidstafereel door Maarten de Vos.” Jaarboek van Het Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1984): 219-251. Rifkin, Mark. Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

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Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia, of Uytbeeldingen des Verstands […] met […] de Uytnemende Verbeteringe van G. Zaratino Castellini. […] Uyt het Italiaens Vertaelt door D. P. Pers. Amsterdam: D. P. Dirck Pietersz, 1644. Roberts, Gareth. The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Rockman, Seth. “Introduction to Forum: The Paper Technologies of Capitalism.” Technology and Culture 58, no. 2 (2017): 487–505. Rowen, Herbert Harvey C., ed. The Low Countries in Early Modern Times: A Documentary History. New York: Walker, 1972. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Schaffer, Simon. “Ceremonies of Measurement: Rethinking the World History of Science.” Annales (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 335–60. Scheffers, Albert. Om de Kwaliteit van het Geld: Het Toezicht op de Muntproductie in de Republiek en de Voorziening van Kleingeld in Holland en West-Friesland in de Achttiende Eeuw. 2 vols. Voorburg: Clinkaert, 2013. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2015. Schoen, Peter. Tussen Hamer en Aambeeld. Edelsmeden in Friesland tijdens de Gouden Eeuw. Hilversum: Verloren, 2016. Scott, Tom. “Economic Landscapes.” In Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Volume 1: 1450-1630, eds. Bob Scribner and Sheila Ogilvie, 1-32. London: Arnold, 1996. Seneca, L. Annaeus. On Benefits, Translated by Aubrey Stewart. London: George Bell and Sons, 1887. Spooner, Frank C. “On the Road to Industrial Precision: The Case of Coinage in the Netherlands (1672-1791).” Economisch- En Sociaal-Historisch Jaarboek 43 (1980): 1–18. Smith, Woodruff D. ‘The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century’. The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 4 (1984): 985–1005. Soetbeer, Adolf. Edelmetall-Produktion und Werthverhältnis zwischen Gold und Silber seit der Entdeckung Amerika’s bis zur Gegenwart. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1879. Stoichiță, Victor Ieronim. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thiel, Pieter J. J. van, Cornelius Joannes de Bruyn Kops, and Arthur François Emile van Schendel. All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: A Completely Illustrated Catalogue. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976. “toets.” Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, online edition, 2007, https://gtb.ivdnt.org/ iWDB/search?actie=article&wdb=WNT&id=M068971&lemmodern=toets&domein=0 &conc=true [accessed December 18th 2021].

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Tun, Molly. “Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in Theodor de Bry’s America.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 95, no. 2 (Feb. 2018): 145–162. Vries, Jan de. “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-Route Trade, 1497-1795.” In Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470-1800, edited by Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard Von Glahn, 35–106. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Vries, Jan de, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Wennerlind, Carl. Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Weststeijn, Thijs. The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Wolters, Willem G. “Heavy and Light Money in the Netherlands Indies and the Dutch Republic: Dilemmas of Monetary Management with Unit of Account Systems.” Financial History Review 15, no. 1 (2008): 37–53. Wilson, William Harry. “The Art of Romeyn de Hooghe: An Atlas of European Late Baroque Culture.” PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1974. Wortley, Lady Mary Montague. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Edited by Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn. Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2013. Zakim, Michael. Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018.

About the authors Sebastian Felten (PhD, King’s College London) is a historian of finance, science, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. His current focus is on money as a social technology and knowledge work in early modern mining. Jessica Stewart (PhD, UC Berkeley) works on the history of collecting and the intellectual cultures of reception. Her research focuses primarily on the visual cultures of international trade in the early modern world. She serves as the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships at UC Berkeley.

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Market Stall in Batavia: Money, Value, and Uncertainty in the Age of Global Trade Angela Ho

Abstract This chapter explores how A Market Stall in Batavia, recently attributed to Andries Beeckman, constructs an image of the Dutch East India Company’s colony for an audience of Dutch burghers. The painting draws on the market setting, familiar from Netherlandish artistic traditions, to convey associations of prof itable exchange in its depiction of the town in Indonesia. Focusing on the figure of the Chinese man and the coins in his hands, the chapter argues that these motifs carried multiple connotations, disrupting attempts at a single, positive reading. The use of these multivalent elements results in an ambivalent image that, I contend, offered an apt analogy of the fraught relationship between the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch economy at large. Keywords: Batavia (Indonesia), money, markets, Dutch East India Company, trade, Asia

A Market Stall in Batavia, now in the Rijksmuseum and newly attributed to Andries Beeckman, presents an elaborate compilation of exotic objects and people from Southeast Asia (fig. 3.1).1 Dominating the foreground of the sizeable canvas (106 × 174.5 cm) is an array of tropical fruit, with carefully described pineapples, * I would like to thank Diana Bullen Presciutti, Kirsten Olds, and Heather Vinson for their feedback on drafts of this chapter, and to Natasha Seaman and Joanna Woodall for the opportunity to contribute to this volume. 1 Art historians have long questioned the traditional attribution of the painting to Albert Eckhout. For the recent identification of Beeckman as the artist, see Erlend de Groot’s essay on the picture in Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Volume 2: Artists Born between 1601 and 1620. Yale: Yale University Press (forthcoming). I would like to thank Dr. Jonathan Bikker for sharing the entry with me. For information on Beeckman, see the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History’s artists database (https://rkd.nl/explore/artists/5590); Bok, “European Artists,” 192.

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_ch03

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3.1  Andries Beeckman (attributed), A Market Stall in Batavia, c. 1650s–1660s, oil on canvas, 106 × 174.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

coconut, mangoes, melons and more offering a colourful feast for the viewer’s delectation. Behind this still life arrangement are figures clearly marked as nonEuropean, including a man portrayed with stereotypical Chinese features, and two women and a youth identifiable as Southeast Asian through their darker skin tone and Indonesian dress. The woman standing next to the male figure holds a lacquer box, from which she lifts areca nuts wrapped in betel leaves – an Indonesian and Malay specialty.2 The picture thus presents a tableau populated by enticing objects of curiosity, located specifically in the East Indies. Despite the emphasis on the exoticism of the individual elements, Dutch viewers versed in Netherlandish artistic traditions would have recognized the coin-counting figure, who appears in multiple contexts in Dutch art, and the use of a market scene as a narrative frame. On one level, the familiar visual language may have helped beholders to make sense of the foreign scene, but on another, the inherent multivalence of the tropes – especially the figure who is handling money – complicates attempts at a definitive interpretation. Dated to the 1650s or 1660s, Market Stall was created in a period when the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) had wrested control of the Southeast Asian spice trade from Portugal. The painting has been plausibly matched to Jan Vos’s poem about a picture in the art collection of Joan 2

Zandvliet and Blussé, Dutch Encounter, 183; Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 131.

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Huydecoper, burgomaster and a director in the VOC’s Amsterdam chamber.3 A scene staged in the East Indies would have held special significance for Huydecoper, who had a direct stake in the VOC’s fortunes. Whether or not it hung in Huydecoper’s collection, however, a canvas of the size and complexity of Market Stall would have belonged to a well-off burgher. Individuals in this social and economic stratum would have understood the VOC’s influence on Dutch economy and society. 4 Of particular relevance to this painting, they would also have been aware of the importance of Batavia as the centre of VOC operations in Asia. Dutch burghers were not only looking to profit from the Asia trade; they were also developing an interest in the curious cultures on that vast continent. The publishing industry played an important role in cultivating the Dutch fascination with exotic lands. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario was published in 1595, with later editions issued in the first half of the seventeenth century. There was also a market for views of cities in Asia, such as this engraving after Vinckboons’ View of Batavia (fig. 3.2). Johan Nieuhof’s Gezandtschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, an account of the VOC’s first embassy to Beijing, was published in 1665, and his description of Batavia was included in the 1682 publication, Zee- en Lant-Reise door verscheide Gewesten van Oostindien. Nieuhof’s texts and images would be adapted and recycled by later authors and publishers well into the eighteenth century.5 Starting in the early seventeenth century, shops opened in Amsterdam to meet the growing demand for goods from the East, such as porcelain, lacquerware and fabrics.6 There was thus a thirst for information and artifacts traded in Batavia by the time Market Stall was created. Market Stall brings Dutch commercial and cultural interests in Asia together in one picture. The painting offers the shapes and colours of the curious fruit not available in Europe, creating an impression of natural abundance and exoticism. At the same time, it associates Batavia with economic exchange. The Chinese man who is shown handling money, this chapter argues, is central to this dual focus in the painting. Yet even as the motif forges a visual link to the idea of commerce, I argue that the way the artist renders the figure and the coins creates uncertainty in the act of assessing the value of the goods on display. While it purports to provide information by describing Batavia’s native people and products, Market Stall is not a literal eye-witness account of the city’s market. 3 Zandvliet and Blussé, Dutch Encounter, 183–84; Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 131. Zandvliet and Blussé and Mostert and Van Campen accept that A Market Stall in Batavia is the painting described in Vos’ poem. E. de Groot, however, states that there is no concrete evidence to support the identification. See De Groot in Dutch Paintings. 4 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 36; Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 16–18. 5 On the replication of motifs of the exotic in print and the decorative arts, see Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 277–323. 6 Van der Veen, “East Indies Shops in Amsterdam,” 134–41.

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Instead, it is a contrived image designed to satisfy the contemporary European viewer’s curiosity about the exotic.7 While existing studies of Market Stall have focused on identifying individual objects and connecting the figures to diverse ethnic groups living in Batavia, here I ask a different question: how did a midseventeenth-century Dutch painting represent a place that the intended viewers might never visit, a town that was both far from and yet connected to the economy and material culture of the Republic? To address this question, I look closely at how affluent Dutch citizens might have understood the foreign figures and curious objects framed in a schema from their own artistic tradition. My argument draws on the view of visual forms as – in Keith Moxey’s words – “value-laden references” for rendering the world.8 These visual forms constitute the vocabulary and rules of a pictorial language that historically situated agents draw on to comprehend images. This chapter thus analyses Market Stall as a collection of signs, chief among them coins and the market setting, that conveyed specific ideas to its intended viewers. As we shall see, the compositional template of the Netherlandish market scene and the specific act of handling coins invite beholders to associate the concepts of value and economic exchanges with Batavia. Yet as Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson point out, a borrowed sign comes with meanings acquired in its previous contexts whether or not the artist intended to transpose that meaning into his/ her own image.9 I therefore also probe how the polysemous nature of the signs adds a layer of ambiguity to the painting. Money, in conjunction with the market format, signified the value of maritime trade to the Dutch Republic and the sound judgment of its merchants. At the same time, it carried meanings of avarice and deceit from its presence in established Netherlandish tropes, such as the gold weigher. Moreover, seventeenth-century viewers would also have brought to the image the contemporary views of money, as well as their own practical experiences in commercial exchanges. Decentralized minting and the circulation of coins across sovereign boundaries created uncertainty in assessing the purchasing power of coins. The very nature of precious metal money, whose worth depended on both its acceptance as currency and its materiality, problematized the status of money as a measure of value. The combination of signifiers in Market Stall thus results in an image with multiple meanings, which, perhaps inadvertently, mirrors the fraught relationship between the VOC and Dutch society at large.

7 Market Stall is related to a picture in a series that once hung in the Schwedt Castle in Germany, which was destroyed in the Second World War. The Schwedt painting embodied a more generalized exoticism, as it included figures recycled from paintings in the series that supposedly depicted other locations. On the Schwedt series, see Thomsen and Johnsson, Albert Eckhout, ein Niederlandischer Maler, 110–25. 8 Moxey, The Practice of Theory, 102–3. 9 Bal and Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” 207.

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The visual language of commerce Market Stall belongs to a body of visual materials that presented Batavia to the seventeenth-century Dutch viewers. Paintings, illustrations in travel literature and maps describe the people, landscape, and naturalia of Batavia, but they also emphasize the lively and orderly commerce conducted in the town. The focus on economic exchange and good governance is not surprising, given that the colony was the nerve centre of the VOC’s vast trading network within and beyond Asia. The States-General hoped that the creation of the VOC in 1602 would eliminate competition among Dutch merchants and concentrate public and private resources to compete with other European powers in the spice trade.10 To that end, the VOC was granted monopoly over Dutch trade in the area that stretched east from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, and vested with military, diplomatic, and administrative powers in the regions under its jurisdiction.11 Trade and financial returns, as much as cultural curiosity, were therefore central to the image of the “East Indies” in the Dutch imagination. Artists, even those who travelled to Asia, did not simply transcribe commercial transactions that took place in Batavia. Instead, they drew on Netherlandish visual strategies to represent the unfamiliar site in terms that viewers in the Dutch homeland could understand. Johannes Vinckboons, for example, uses the city profile, a format borrowed from embellishments on Dutch maps and seascapes (fig. 3.2).12 The presentation of the town across a body of water emphasizes the harbour that made Batavia an advantageous site for the VOC’s trading headquarters. The visual formula, common in representations of Dutch towns, would have communicated ideas of trade and prosperity, while the prominently featured Batavia Castle in Vinckboons’ print symbolizes Dutch dominion over the territory. Nieuhof’s Gedenkwaerdige zee en lantreizen, likewise follows the conventions of city descriptions in European publications. His illustrations depict civic buildings that would have been landmarks in a Dutch town, such as the town hall, church, hospital and fish market, all set along spotless streets and canals. Batavia is thus depicted as a well-run town under 10 Independent merchant syndicates had f inanced expeditions to the region in the 1590s, but in 1602 the States-General of the Dutch Republic compelled them to merge into one joint-stock company. Recent historical studies situate Dutch entry into the lucrative Asian trade as part of the broader war of independence against the Habsburg Empire. Scholars argue that the VOC focused Dutch resources to undercut Iberian commercial interests, and thereby damage Habsburg military capacity. See Blussé, Visible Cities, 18; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 33. 11 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 15–23; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 32–34; Kaufmann and North, “Introduction: Mediating Cultures,” 12. 12 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 119–26.

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3.2  Julius Milheuser after Johannes Vinckboons, View of Batavia, 1619 – 1680, etching, 42.7 cm × 95.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. 

VOC governance, with the addition of palm trees and figures in foreign dress to signal the exotic location. Market Stall and Andries Beeckman’s Castle of Batavia (fig. 3.3) also underscore the themes of order and commerce, but they do so in a different way. Instead of a panoramic view of the harbour or focused depictions of specific buildings, the two paintings take the guise of a scene of daily life inside the town. Despite their lifelike qualities, these pictures adapted the vocabulary of another Netherlandish trope, the market scene, to describe Batavia. The produce market emerged as an independent pictorial theme in sixteenth-century Netherlands. There are two main types: (1) a view of the market in a town square seen from a distance; (2) a close-up depiction of a single market stall. Flemish and Dutch artists, as Elizabeth Honig demonstrates, approached the genre with different goals and emphases.13 In Market Stall, Dutch viewers in the mid-seventeenth century would have perceived a combination of elements from both traditions. In its basic compositional components, Market Stall resembles market images produced by other Dutch artists in the mid-seventeenth century,14 in which a single stall dominates the picture, with figures of the merchant and customers positioned behind or next to the goods. Compared to contemporary Dutch pictures, such as The Fish Market by Jacob Cuyp (1627; Doredrechtmuseum) and Gabriel Metsu’s series of market images from the 1650s (fig. 3.4), however, Market Stall is different in giving 13 Honig, Painting and the Market. 14 The street market first emerged as a pictorial subject in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century. The early examples by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer contain religious or historical scenes within contemporary market settings. The depictions of markets began later, in the early seventeenth century, in the Northern Netherlands. For the history of the genre, see Falkenburg, “Iconographical Connections,” 114–26; Honig, Painting and the Market; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 87–102.

MARKET STALL IN BATAVIA: MONEY, VALUE, AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL TR ADE 

3.3  Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, 1661, oil on canvas, 108 × 151.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. 

at least equal weight to the objects for sale.15 Instead, the detailed rendering of the goods on display in Market Stall recalls Flemish market scenes, such as those by Joachim Beuckelaer in the sixteenth century (fig. 3.5) and by Frans Snyders in the seventeenth. Unlike the flamboyant piles of foodstuff in the Flemish precedents, however, the fruits in Market Stall are laid out in a more orderly manner with limited overlapping. The fruits and vegetables in Beuckelaer’s Vegetable Seller overflow from precariously tilted baskets in a composition that encourages the viewer to admire the complex design and the expertly rendered organic forms.16 The fruits in Market Stall, by contrast, are lined up in rows. The larger melons, coconuts and pineapples are displayed in pairs, while the smaller items are grouped in clusters. Some of the items are cut open to reveal the interiors. The artist’s objective seems less to impress viewers with an ingenious composition or virtuosic brushwork than to describe the unfamiliar objects for their inspection. 15 As Elizabeth Honig has argued, Dutch artists, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century, emphasize human behavior in the market; the goods themselves play a subordinate role. See Honig, “Desire and Domestic Economy,” 302. 16 For Beuckelaer’s iconography, see for example Brandenburg, “Market Scenes as Viewed by a Plant Biologist,” 58–72; Honig, Painting and the Market; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 94–100.

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3.4 Gabriel Metsu, A Woman Selling Poultry and Fish, 1656–1658, oil on canvas, 40.8 x 35.3 cm. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Bpk Bildagentur/ Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel/Art Resource, NY. 

3.5  Joachim Beuckelaer, Vegetable Seller, 1563, oil on panel, 112.2 × 163.5 cm. Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

MARKET STALL IN BATAVIA: MONEY, VALUE, AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL TR ADE 

3.6 Gabriel Metsu, Vegetable Market in Amsterdam, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 97 × 83 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The association of the image with a specific contemporary place through the objects and figures distinguishes Market Stall from the Flemish models and aligns it more closely with the Dutch tradition. Honig has observed that Flemish market scenes operated as a metaphor for concepts of justice and exchange, and as such they often served as elaborate but generic stages for religious or allegorical narratives.17 The Dutch market scenes, by contrast, developed out of topographical and chorographical descriptions, which emphasize a market as the source and symbol of a town’s prosperity.18 Dutch renditions of markets from the first half of the seventeenth century tend to be distant views with recognizable structures in the background. Hendrik Sorgh’s View of the Grote Markt with Vegetable Stall (1654; Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen), for instance, depicts a corner of the Rotterdam market, while Metsu’s view of a vegetable 17 Honig, “Desire and Domestic Economy,” 300–302. 18 Honig, “Desire and Domestic Economy,” 302.

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market is located in Amsterdam (fig. 3.6).19 This is the strategy adopted by Beeckman in his Castle of Batavia, which features a bustling market in the foreground with the imposing fort looming in the back. While Market Stall has a plain background with no landmarks, the fruits and the cast of characters situate the scene in Indonesia. The women wear sarong and kebaya, a costume typical for the Javanese region, while the salmon-created cockatoo is a bird native to the island.20 Such details enhance the exoticism of the image, but they also tie the tableau to Batavia – a focal point of the VOC’s scheme to monopolize Eurasian trade.21 Market Stall thus appropriates elements from Dutch and Flemish market scenes and modifies them to describe the East Indies in all its curious appeal and to designate it as a place of commercial promise.

From natural riches to commodities Given that Market Stall was possibly made for Huydecoper and Batavia Castle hung in the assembly room of the Oost-Indisch Huis – the VOC chamber’s head office – in Amsterdam,22 the pictures played a part in projecting a positive identity for the VOC colony to the Dutch public. Yet Market Stall’s framing of the unfamiliar world of the East Indies with the conventional market template may have needed further elucidation. The cartellino in the lower right corner provides a numbered list of the names of the fruits in Dutch and Malay. The lettering is now only partially legible, but it is possible to recognize mentions of starfruit, pomelo, durian, mango, pineapple, mangosteen, and banana.23 The Rijksmuseum has found that this list, as well as the corresponding numbers inscribed on each fruit, was painted on the dried surface (which also explains the poor condition of this area of the painting). Could the list have been added to aid viewers in deciphering the compilation of strange objects?24 Although they could label the objects with the help of the list, 19 For an attempt to determine the location of Metsu’s view, see Stone-Ferrier, “Market Scenes as Viewed by an Art Historian,” 49–52. 20 De Groot, Dutch Paintings. 21 The Indonesian Archipelago was the center of spice production in the seventeenth century. See Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 45–50; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 35–38. 22 Mostert and Campen, Silk Thread, 129. 23 The inscription on the cartellino reads as follows: “Namen van Dese Vrŭchte[n] / En Malaijse en[…] geno / 1. Rambouta[n] / 2. Blimbing […] / 3. La[…]bes / 4. Pompelmo[es] / 5. Doŭrion / 6. Bor[…]Mer[…] / 7. Manga / 8. Annanassis / 9. Gacquis / 10. Mangi […] stan / 11. Ba […] / 12. C […] / 13. C […] 14. […].” This area of the painting is, unfortunately, badly damaged. The Dutch words are only partially legible, and the Malay inscriptions are no longer visible. For the condition of the painting, see De Groot in Dutch Paintings. 24 The Rijksmuseum notes that it was unclear when exactly the cartellino was painted onto the finished painting. See De Groot, Dutch Paintings.

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viewers still lacked direct access to the fruits. I argue that Market Stall offers an alternative way to understand the natural abundance in Batavia, namely, to quantify the value of the objects in monetary terms. The figures, especially the Chinese man who is shown inspecting coins, are key elements in conveying the themes of exchange and judgment. Dressed in a simple black costume and standing in a crowded area of the composition, the Chinese figure could have been rather inconspicuous but for the fact that the artist draws attention to him – and his hands – in several ways. The two female figures, one in profile on the left and the other near the centre of the painting, both turn toward him. The youth plucking a banana from the stand watches him furtively, his face turned at the same angle as the adjacent female figure, thereby doubling the directional pull of attention to the merchant. Even the brilliant white cockatoo seems to be staring at him. The man’s dark clothing, while keeping his body in the shadows, also thrusts his face and hands into relief. This effect highlights his ethnicity and his action. His pointed moustache, goatee, and narrow eyes conform to the stereotypical illustrations of Chinese figures in seventeenth-century Dutch publications.25 Meanwhile, his stooped posture mirrors the cockatoo’s forward tilt, forming two arcs that draw the viewer’s eye to his hands. With his long, curving fingernails, his hands act as a circular frame around the coins as he fingers them and feels their weight in his palm. This figure is remarkable because he is an unusual presence in Netherlandish market scenes. As Honig observes, money rarely makes an appearance in paintings of markets made in the Southern Netherlands.26 Market Stall, however, differs even from the Dutch market images that do feature coins. In the works by Cuyp and Metsu mentioned above, the customers are either handing the coins to the vendors or have just done so, whereas here the money is firmly in the man’s hand and being inspected. He does not look at the other characters but instead gazes down at the coins, thereby directing the viewer’s attention to the money in his hands. If the careful arrangement of fruits and the numbered list encourage viewers to inventory the objects, the Chinese man’s action issues a related invitation: to translate the value of what they see into monetary terms. 25 For example, the figure bears a resemblance to the Chinese figures illustrated in Johan Nieuhof’s Het Gezantschap der Neerlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie (1665) and Olfert Dapper’s Gedenkwaerdig Bedryf der Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Maetschappye (1670). While these sources were published slightly later than the date of Market Stall, we can infer that the publications reflect Dutch impressions of Chinese appearance that circulated prior to 1670. 26 Honig contends that, by omitting money from market imagery, Antwerp artists maintain the illusion of the upper class having a natural right to the goods and services rendered by the working class. In the Dutch Republic, a less hierarchical society, monetary exchanges feature more frequently in market paintings. Honig, Painting and the Market, 167–69.

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The coins imply commercial exchange and turn the fruits of nature into commodities, but the relationships among the figures are uncertain. For a Dutch audience, pictorial conventions would suggest that the Chinese figure is the vendor.27 The depiction of the bamboo structure – a nod to the Southeast Asian location – suggests that he is placed closer to the interior of the stall. Dutch cultural norms also assigned the duty of shopping for provisions to the housewife.28 Regardless of the exact roles of the figures, however, it is significant that money, a symbol of exchange value, is in the Chinese figure’s hands. This key detail offers a visual analogy to the hierarchy among ethnic groups in Batavia’s economic structure.

“Industrious and obliging,” “clever and cunning:” the Chinese in Batavia Chinese immigrants were vital to life in Batavia from the founding of the colony. After the VOC’s seizure of the town of Jayakarta the majority of the inhabitants followed the defeated ruler to Banten, but in time people from the region were drawn to the business and employment opportunities offered by the colonial government. Batavia again became home to various groups from the Indonesian archipelago – including a sizeable slave population 29 – and Chinese traders. The Company came to rely on the Chinese diaspora to build and sustain Batavia when it failed to attract sufficient Dutch free citizens to the colony.30 Chinese businesspeople were keen to take on construction and agricultural projects, and they in turn recruited working-class compatriots as laborers. Unable to conduct direct trade in China in the seventeenth century, the VOC depended on Chinese merchants to supply luxury goods – such as porcelain and textiles – to their colonial capital.31 Meanwhile, the 27 Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 131; De Groot in Dutch Paintings. 28 Franits, Paragons of Virtue, 92–95; Honig, “The Space of Gender,” 197–199. 29 Records show that slaves and debtors-slaves made up more than half the population. Part of the Chinese population in Batavia included individuals kidnapped by the VOC along the Fujian coast and forced to migrate to Indonesia. For discussions of this population group, see De Haan, Oud Batavia, vol. 1, 349–362; Niemeijer, Batavia, 50–64. 30 Blussé, Strange Company, 78–88. The Company saw the Chinese as a viable alternative to Dutch settlers for several reasons. They saw Chinese entrepreneurs as vital in building the local economy of Batavia. They also valued Chinese merchants as facilitators of the junk trade that brought goods from China. There were periodic conflicts, however, which culminated in the “Chinese massacre” in 1741. See Blussé, Strange Company, 90–96; Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 113–14; Mostert and Campen, Silk Thread, 134–37. 31 Governor-General Jan Pietersz. Coen chose the site of Batavia partly because it was located on the Chinese junk ship routes, making it an ideal hub for intra-Asia and intercontinental trade. See Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 40; Blussé, “The Batavia Connection,” 97–107; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 36–37.

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Chinese community in Batavia helped the merchants from Fujian forge connections with the VOC, thus strengthening the Chinese regional commercial network.32 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts acknowledge the importance of the Chinese community to Batavia. As early as 1625, Justus Heurnius, a Dutch missionary, remarked that the Chinese were “an industrious people […] on whom the well-being of Batavia completely depends, because without them no markets would be held, neither houses nor defense works would be made.”33 Francois Valentijn, who spent more than a decade in Asia as a minister, opined at the beginning of the eighteenth century that the Chinese “are an extraordinarily astute, cultivated, industrious and obliging people, who are of great service to this city.” Valentijn concludes that “[t]here is no enterprise one can think of in which they do not engage and that they do not practice. […] Were it not for the Chinese living here, Batavia would be a dead place, lacking many necessary things.”34 Governor-General Hendrick Brouwer noted in 1635 that enterprising Chinese residents took on diff icult public projects in which the Dutch burghers were unwilling to participate.35 The privileges granted the Chinese vis-à-vis indigenous Indonesians reveal the productive interdependence between the VOC and the Chinese in Batavia.36 The Chinese lived among Dutch free citizens in the town while other groups had to settle in segregated villages outside the city walls. Prominent individuals in the community could have stakes in businesses as diverse as lumbering, construction, tax farming, sugar cultivation, and the trade in curiosities and luxury objects. Nevertheless, the Dutch remained wary of the Chinese. When Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier recommended Jan Con, a prominent Chinese resident, to his subordinate, he added: “[A]lways follow the maxim that the Company’s capital never should be put in Chinese hands, even if it should appear advisable to do so.”37 32 Blussé, Strange Company, 74. 33 Blussé, Strange Company, 74; Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 129. The Chinese population paid a poll tax in return for exemption from serving in the militia, and in the early 1630s this tax accounted for half of the VOC’s revenue in Batavia. This serves as another indication of the importance of the Chinese community to the economic health of the colony. See VOC 1085: Res GG and C 28-7-1625; De Haan, Oud Batavia, vol. 1, 61. 34 “Het is een ongemeen schrander, beleefd, naarstig, en gedienstig volk, dat groote diensten aan deze stad doet […] Daar is niets, dat men bedeken jan, dat zy niet ondernemen, en waar in zy zich niet oeffenen […] Indien’er geen Chineezen hier waren, zou Batavia zeer doods, en van veel noodige dingen ontryst zyn.” Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indië, vol. 4, 249. Translation from Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 129. 35 De Jonge, ed., De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indie, vol. 5, 218–219; Blussé, Strange Company, 62–63. 36 De Haan, Oud Batavia, vol. 1, 323ff; Van Chijs, ed., Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, vol. 1, 446; Blussé, Strange Company, 49–72; Niemeijer, Batavia, 107–37. 37 VOC 852, quoted and translated in Blussé, Strange Company, 50.

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3.7  Marinus van Reymerswaele, Moneychanger and his Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 79 × 107 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado. © Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY.

The portrayal of the Chinese man in Market Stall may point to the VOC’s equivocal attitude towards Chinese entrepreneurs, whom they saw as rash risk-takers.38 The presentation of this character, who bends over his hands and looks at the coins, has visual ties with other Netherlandish types that are associated with money. One of these, the moneychanger, is an ambivalent figure. Traditional interpretations see it as a pictorial warning against avarice.39 In Marinus van Reymerswaele’s Moneychanger (1538; fig. 3.7), for example, the woman’s claw-like hand on an account book and the man’s anachronistic costume and outlandish headdress clearly convey the negative judgement of their characters. Rembrandt’s Moneychanger (1627; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) is an example of the treatment of the subject from the seventeenth century. 38 Blussé, Strange Company, 70. 39 For example, James Snyder’s Northern Renaissance Art, a standard textbook, stresses this moralizing interpretation. Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, 442-443, 476. Museums such as the Louvre and the Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen likewise provide didactic readings.

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Rembrandt’s inclusion of conventional elements of moneybags, scales, coins is enough to prompt some art historians to interpret the well-dressed, bespectacled old man as a negative figure. 40 Arguing that the scene is “presented chiefly with a negative cast,” Larry Silver points to the pseudo-Hebrew writing on the depicted documents as a further piece of evidence. He suggests that the lettering may identify the figure as a Jew, an ethnic stereotype associated with greed in early modern Europe. 41 Interestingly, European observers in Batavia described the Chinese as skilled businesspeople motivated by the love of money, a characteristic also commonly attributed to Jews in the period. Christophorus Frikius, a surgeon who served the VOC in Batavia, directly compared the two ethnic groups, writing that the Chinese were “much more clever and cunning than the Jews when it comes to buying and selling.” Friskius’ account was published a few decades after the creation of Market Stall, but it seems to reflect a view of the Chinese approach to business that prevailed in Batavia since the early seventeenth century. 42 A visual connection with the moneychanger did not necessarily convey only negative connotations to Dutch viewers, however. More recent studies, in particular studies of Quentin Metsys’ Moneychanger and his Wife (1514; fig. 3.8), acknowledge a wider spectrum of meanings associated with the figure in Netherlandish art. Scholars observe the sombre dispositions of Metsys’ figures, which contrast with the later portrayals by Van Reymerswaele. Silver, for example, argues that the painting constitutes a meditation on the tensions between the worldly and the spiritual in a rapidly expanding economy in sixteenth-century Antwerp. 43 While Silver still regards Metsys’ theme to be avarice, Honig and Joanna Woodall emphasize instead the issue of judgment. 44 Honig points to an inscription on the original frame, “Let the balance be just and the weights be equal,” to argue that Metsys’ merchant is following the verse from Leviticus 19 to weigh a coin with care and honesty. 45 As Honig and Woodall maintain, the moneychanger’s expertise in determining the value of coins was essential to the functioning of an economy that lacked a stable monetary system. 46 In this reading, Metsys’ merchant is therefore not the avatar of greed, but an exemplar of the honest exercise of judgment in the market. 40 See for example Brown, Kelch, and Van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop, 128-129. 41 Silver, “Massys and Money.” Other art historians, contending that the pseudo-Hebrew lettering places the scene in a Biblical context, identify the painting as a representation of the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12: 13-21). 42 Frikius, Hesse, and Schweitzer, Drie Seer Aenmercklijcke Reysen, 26. Translation quoted in Mostert and Van Campen, Silk Thread, 131. 43 Silver, “Massys and Money.” 44 Honig, “Counting Out Their Money,” 38–40; Woodall, “De Wisselaer,” 49–50. 45 Honig, “Counting Out Their Money,” 39. 46 Despite the difference in emphasis, both Honig and Woodall argue that the religious elements in the painting function not as a contrast to the man’s action, but as a guiding principle behind it.

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3.8  Quentin Metsys, Money Changer and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 74 × 68 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

The Chinese merchant in Market Stall hovers between the two poles of interpretive possibilities. On the one hand, he inspects the coins carefully as Metsys’ moneychanger does, watched by witnesses who could verify his work. On the other hand, his stereotypical features and hunched posture, while not approaching the level of caricature in Van Reymerswaele’s painting, underscore his foreignness. The image of money in the man’s hands signals his ethnic group’s importance in Batavia, but his visual affinity with the moneychanger triggers both positive and negative associations of the trope. The seventeenth-century viewer in Amsterdam could thus have perceived several ideas simultaneously in the merchant figure: the role of the Chinese in the Batavian economy; a mixed view of the ethnic group as diligent at business but avaricious; and the desire to quantify the value of the riches of in the East Indies.

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Money and uncertainty in early modern Europe The Chinese man’s action of inspecting coins parallels what viewers of the painting are prompted to perform, namely, the identif ication and assessment of the fruits on display. In a sense, he acts as a stand-in for Dutch viewers, who could not smell, taste or touch the perishable food and therefore had to evaluate the resources of the distant colony in another way. The coins in the merchant’s hands suggest a conversion of the desirability of the fruits into monetary value. The expression of a commodity’s value in monetary units, however, could be fraught with uncertainty. While their knowledge of artistic conventions would have led them to recognize the coins in Market Stall as a signifier of commerce and profits, intended viewers in Amsterdam would also have brought their everyday experience of handling money in Europe to interpreting the motif. Although Dutch authorities attempted to systematize minting and currency, the production of coins in the Republic remained decentralized and the value of individual coins unpredictable until late in the century. 47 In the marketplace, the prices of goods were listed in the local monetary unit of account, the guilder. Transactions were, however, conducted with coins that were not stamped with a numerical value expressed in that unit.48 Moreover, a variety of coins minted in different jurisdictions circulated in major Dutch commercial centres, meaning that buyers and sellers had to evaluate the relative values of the different currencies in use. 49 Determining the volume of goods a specific coin could purchase was therefore not a straightforward matter. In the painting, coins acted as an easily understood shorthand for trade and commerce. The dominant position of the Dutch in both regional and intercontinental trade resulted in a higher supply of coin in the Republic than the rest of Europe.50 With the volume and velocity of coin circulation expanding, money had thus become a ubiquitous feature of Dutch life by the time Market Stall was made. Coins could, however, also arouse scepticism about money’s validity as a measure of value. This is due not just to the conflict between the push for profit and Christian ethics or 47 Laws established in 1622 and 1659, for example, fixed the relative metal content between domestic and heavy trade coins, and the mints in Dordrecht and Utrecht introduced precision mechanized minting. The Wisselbank was established in 1609 to reduce confusion associated with exchange rates. See De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 83–89; Wolters, “Heavy and Light Money,” 40. For more detailed discussions of minting and coin circulation in early modern Europe, see the chapters by Felten and Stewart and Woodall in this volume. 48 Spufford, Money and Its Uses, 411; Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, 17–19; Woodall, “De Wisselaer,” 50. 49 Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, 17–19; Desan, Making Money, 8-9; 30-31. 50 The money supply in the Dutch Republic was twice that in England and three times that in France by the end of the seventeenth century. De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 89.

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the practical problems of contemporary coin production, but also because of the inherent contradictions in the concept of metal money. As characteristics we now associate with capitalism came to dominate economic interactions in Europe, medieval and early modern jurists and theologians felt the need to address the meaning of money.51 The scholastics, following Aristotle, saw money as both a measure of value and a tool of exchange.52 For money to serve these purposes, people must be able to use a small physical volume of it to purchase a relatively large quantity of goods (or objects of high exchange value).53 The logical material for the manufacturing of money was therefore precious metal, such as silver or gold. Europeans did not, however, simply use metal bullion as currency as the Chinese did. Instead, they minted metal into coins with the sovereign’s stamp. The materiality of coins was clearly important, but the metal, if not fashioned into coins, would not be accepted for conducting transactions.54 These two aspects of coins – their metal content and the issuer’s authority represented by the stamp – raised questions about what exactly gave money its value in late medieval and early modern Europe. Precious metal currency is a form of commodity money, which derives its value from both its material and its acceptance as a medium of exchange.55 Coins with the same face value and issued by the same mint should have identical purchasing power and can therefore be used interchangeably. In practice, however, coins could lose metal content through wear and tear, clipping and debasement. The value of a coin could also change as the market value of silver or gold fluctuated.56 In short, commodity money embodied an uneasy mix of the material and the symbolic, rendering its status as a measure of value ambiguous. Market Stall unwittingly underscores this apprehension about money. The artist has provided some indications of the materiality of coins. By painting a thin arc of highlight along the edge of the two curved forms, he describes the reflection off the metallic surfaces. This articulation of the profile of the metal pieces also gives a sense of their thickness. Indeed, the repetition of the shape of foreshortened discs nearby – the sliced citrus (labelled “16”)57 in the lacquer box held by the female 51 For sources and historiographic overview, see for example Sewall, The Theory of Value before Adam Smith; De Roover, “Scholastic Economics;” Langholm, Price and Value. 52 For the scholastic view of the functions and properties of money, see Langholm, Wealth and Money, 67–88. 53 Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, 16; Langholm, Wealth and Money, 79. 54 Desan, Making Money, 111. 55 In medieval England, Christine Desan explains, individuals brought bullion to the mint and would give up a percentage of the metal in the minting process. The difference represented a price for rendering metal into the form accepted as currency. Desan, Making Money, 8–9. 56 Langholm, Wealth and Money, 89–90; Desan, Making Money, 9, 30–31. 57 De Groot identifies this object as a lime native to the region. See his essay in Dutch Paintings.

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figure and the opened coconut just below the merchant’s left elbow – further direct the viewer’s attention to the coins framed by the merchant’s hands. Yet, in contrast to the carefully differentiated coins in front of Metsys’ moneychanger, those in Market Stall contain no legible details. The artist suggests stamped patterns on the faces of the coins through tonal modulation but does not offer identifiable images or inscriptions. The painting thus ultimately frustrates viewers’ efforts to read the very objects that are supposed to help them grasp the value of the VOC’s venture. The confusion surrounding the properties and value of money was part of a broader set of questions raised by the rapidly expanding market economy, which became the dominant organizational mode of Dutch society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The increasing frequency, size, and complexity of transactions necessitated innovations in finance, resulting in more common and sophisticated forms of credit. To control currency circulation and long chains of assignments of bills of exchange (the principal credit instrument in early modern Europe), the Dutch adapted institutional forms and practices developed in the Italian communes and Antwerp in the previous three centuries.58 Nevertheless, like the rest of early modern Europe, the Republic had no macroeconomic policies to stabilize the economy while maintaining growth. Money and credit might have become facts of life in urban centres, but most citizens had little comprehension of economic cycles or price fluctuations.59 The merchant and his coins in Market Stall could indeed have signalled the positive associations of thriving trade and honest exchange but they could also have brought to mind the unpredictable nature of market forces, regardless of the artist’s or patron’s intentions.

Conclusion: elusiveness of value In Market Stall, the presence of coins renders the East Indies not simply an exotic locale with abundant natural resources but a marketplace where those resources would be converted to profit. Because the perishable fruits could not be transported to Europe in the seventeenth century, what the viewer would really be considering was not so much the worth of mangoes and pineapples, but the value of the VOC’s enterprise itself. In this instance, as in the Dutch market scenes of the seventeenth

58 Amsterdam established the Wisselbank, a municipal deposit and clearing bank that took deposits from merchants, made transfers between member accounts and accepted bills of exchange. There were also private bankers (kassiers) who handled the assignments and discounting of bills of exchange. De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 129; De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 226–30. 59 Price, The Dutch Republic, 60.

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century, the quotidian transaction at a market stall acts as a metaphor for the abstract concepts of commercial activity and prosperity. Market Stall glosses over the dark side of the VOC’s enterprise in emphasizing orderly exchange of commodities under Company governance. In its mission to monopolize the spice trade in Southeast Asia, the Company resorted to the use of military force, including the destruction of towns and massacre of local inhabitants.60 Governor-General Jan Pietersz. Coen, in his determination to build his headquarters at the site of Batavia, drove out the local ruler and population from the existing town of Jayakarta, which VOC forces then destroyed. The picture also omits references to the serious challenges facing the VOC in maintaining its operations in Asia. The Company had to contend with the enormous financial costs involved in sustaining the town, external threats from Indonesian states and internal strife among population groups in Batavia.61 Yet the visual language used to convey notions of trade and wealth – the market format, the Chinese trader and the coins – also resists that single positive reading and instead introduces uncertainty into the painting. The sense of ambivalence parallels the complex relationship between the VOC and Dutch society. The optimistic depiction of economic life under VOC stewardship in Market Stall belies the tensions between the Company’s directors and investors. Despite its success in gaining control of the spice trade, the VOC was constantly in debt in the seventeenth century, as the revenue from imports failed to cover the high costs of waging war against the Portuguese in Asia.62 The shares in the Company were quickly subscribed and became an object for speculation on the stock market,63 but the investors had to tolerate delayed dividend payments and decisions that affected their returns. The directors, for example, defied the provision in the original charter and refused to liquidate the assets and distribute the capital after ten years, which shareholders protested to no avail.64 On the other hand, the Company sustained multiple industries, including shipbuilding and warehousing, in the Dutch towns that housed its regional chambers.65 The VOC, with its checkered financial history, was firmly embedded in the Dutch economy at large by the mid-seventeenth century. 60 The conquest of Banda under Coen is the most notorious example of the atrocities committed by the VOC in the region. When the Bandanese resisted the VOC’s attempt to force an exclusive contract for nutmeg upon them, the Company’s forces killed thousands and captured many as slaves. See Ricklefs, History of Modern Indonesia, 32; Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 46; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 35–36. 61 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 41–45; Blussé, Strange Company, 89–96; Onnekink and Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World, 81–82. 62 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 24ff. 63 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 28–29; Kaufmann and North, “Introduction: Mediating Cultures,” 12. 64 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 36. 65 Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, 23; Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 17–18.

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The VOC was thus simultaneously an outsize player in the Dutch economy and an entity often in financial troubles; a coveted investment opportunity and a company that often did not yield the expected rewards. Metal money, itself a conflicted mix of the real and the illusory, portrayed in a manner that eludes close inspection in Market Stall, turns out to be an apt reference to an enormous operation that had become an essential and problematic ingredient in Dutch prosperity.

Bibliography Unpublished sources Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Volume 2: Artists Born between 1601 and 1620. Yale: Yale University Press (forthcoming).

Published sources Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983. Bal, Mieke, and Norman Bryson. “Semiotics and Art History.” Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 174–208. Blussé, Leonard. Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia. Dordrecht: Foris publications, 1986. –––. “The Batavia Connection: The Chinese Junks and Their Merchants.” In Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch Golden Age, edited by Jan van Campen and Titus M. Eliëns, 97–107. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2014. –––. Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bok, Marten Jan. “European Artists in the Service of the Dutch East India Company.” In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, 177–204. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Brandenburg, Willem A. “Market Scenes as Viewed by a Plant Biologist.” In Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, 58–72. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1991. Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. Brown, Christopher, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel. Rembrandt: The Master and his Workshop. London: National Gallery Publications, 1991. Chijs, J. A. van, ed. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602-1811. 17 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1885.

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Coolhaas, W. Ph., ed. Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960. Desan, Christine. Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Falkenburg, Reindert. “Iconographical Connections between Antwerp Landscapes, Market Scenes, and Kitchen Pieces.” Oud Holland 102 (1988): 114–26. Franits, Wayne, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Frikius, Christophorus, Elias Hesse, and Christophorus Schweitzer. Drie Seer Aenmercklijcke Reysen nae en door Veelerley Gewesten in Oost-Indien. Translated by Simon de Vries. Utrecht: Willem van Water, 1694. Gaastra, Femme S. The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003. Haan, Frederik de. Oud Batavia. 2nd ed. Bandoeng: Nix, 1935. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “The Space of Gender in Seventeenth-century Dutch Painting.” In Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, edited by Wayne Franits, 187–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. –––. “Counting Out Their Money: Money and Representation in the Early Modern Netherlands.” Leidschrift 13 (1998): 31–66. –––. “Desire and Domestic Economy.” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 294–315. –––. Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Howell, Martha C. Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Jonge, J.K.J. de, ed. De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indie. ’s Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1875. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, and Michael North. “Introduction: Mediating Cultures.” In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, 9–23. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Langholm, Odd. Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979. –––. Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1983. Mostert, Tristan, and Jan van Campen. Silk Thread: China and the Netherlands from 1600. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2015. Moxey, Keith. The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Niemeijer, Hendrik E. Batavia. Een Koloniale Samenleving in de 17de Eeuw. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2005. Nieuhof, Johan. Het Gezantschap der Neerlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie. Amsterdam: J. van Meurs, 1665.

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Onnekink, David, and Gijs Rommelse. The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Price, J. L. The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Ricklefs, M. C. A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200. Fourth edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Roover, Raymond de. “Scholastic Economics: Survival and Lasting Influence from the Sixteenth Century to Adam Smith.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 69 (1955): 161–90. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Sewall, Hannah Robie. The Theory of Value before Adam Smith. New York: Publications of the American Economic Association, 1901. Silver, Larry. “Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7:2 (Summer 2015): 1-20. DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.2 –––. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575, revised by Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2005. Spufford, Peter. Money and Its Uses in Medieval Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Stone-Ferrier, Linda. “Market Scenes as Viewed by an Art Historian.” In Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, 29-57. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1991. Thomsen, Thomas, and Lina Johnsson. Albert Eckhout, ein Niederlandischer Maler, und sein Goner, Moritz der Brasilianer. Ein Kulturbild aus dem 17 Jahrhundert. Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaard, Ejnar Munksgaard, 1938. Valentijn, Francois. Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indië, Vervattende een Naauwkeurige en Uitvoerige Verhandelinge van Nederlands Mogentheyd in die Gewesten … Dordrecht: Johannes van Braam, 1724. Veen, Jaap van der. “East Indies Shops in Amsterdam.” In Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, edited by Karina Corrigan, Jan van Campen, Janet C. Blyberg, and Femke Diercks, 134–41. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2015. Vries, Jan de. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750. Reprint. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Vries, Jan de, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Wolters, Willem G. “Heavy and Light Money in the Netherlands Indies and the Dutch Republic: Dilemmas of Monetary Management with Unit of Account Systems.” Financial History Review 15 (2008): 38–53.

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Woodall, Joanna. “De Wisselaer: Quentin Matsys’ Man Weighing Gold Coins and His Wife.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64 (2014): 38–75. Zandvliet, Kees, and Leonard Blussé. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002.

About the author Angela Ho is Associate Professor at George Mason University and the author of Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention (2017). Her current research focuses on the economic and artistic exchanges between the Dutch East India Company and various Chinese groups in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

4. Beyond the Mint: Picturing Gold on the Rijksmuseum’s Box of the Dutch West India Company Carrie Anderson Abstract In 1749 the Dutch West India Company (GWC) presented an extraordinary document box – finely crafted in gold and tortoiseshell and lined with velvet – to Stadholder Willem IV (1711-1751). Pictured on the lid, shaped in gold, are the three prized commodities exported from Africa at the time of the box’s making: gold, ivory, and enslaved people. But while the value and material properties of gold are celebrated in this lavish gift, its dazzling richness obscures the anxieties that accompanied the circulation of un-minted gold in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As I argue, the box responds to these anxieties by mimicking the stamped impressions and double-sidedness common to European coinage, “numismatic strategies” that simultaneously sanction its value and exploit gold’s material properties. Keywords: Dutch West India Company, Gulf of Guinea, gold, coins, trade, mint

In 1749 the Dutch West India Company (GWC) presented an extraordinary box – finely crafted in gold and tortoiseshell and lined with velvet – to Stadholder Willem IV (1711-1751) (figs. 4.1-4.5). Inside this finely wrought box was a document asking Willem IV to assume command of the GWC, a formality that was no doubt intended to garner support for the struggling trading company. On the lid of the box sits a large nugget of unrefined gold ore, around which are arranged three figures: an African man holding an elephant tusk; an African woman panning for gold; and Mercury, the god of trade, who supports a cartouche containing the insignia of the Company (fig. 4.2). Together, these figures picture the three prized commodities exported from Africa at the time of the box’s making: gold, ivory, and enslaved people. But while each of these exports motivated the Company’s continued presence on what Europeans referred to as the Gulf of Guinea in the

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_ch04

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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was gold that established the standard value around which the other commodities were priced. This perhaps explains the precious metal’s prominence in the design of the box where it is unabashedly the dominant material agent as well as the narrative focus. The nugget is joined by hammered reliefs that picture gold’s extraction from the earth (on the right), and its subsequent circulation as a commodity (on the left). Pictured on the sides of the box are the Dutch forts through which countless commodities circulated (figs. 4.3-4.4). These included not only gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but also a staggering range of imported goods intended for sale on the African coast, such as textiles from around the globe, metal basins, glass beads, cowrie shells, knives, and weapons. On the base of the box is a map of the African Coast, inlaid with gold, a cartographic transmediation that again signals the primacy of this precious metal for African trade (fig. 4.5). While the imagery on this box celebrates the value and material properties of gold, it also obscures the anxieties that accompanied its procurement and circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Gulf of Guinea, Dutch merchants had little control over the gold trade and were entirely dependent on the mediation of African traders, who brought gold to the coast from interior locations unknown to the Dutch. For Dutch traders, this power dynamic was not ideal, prompting fears that the gold had been “falsified.” These suspicions were likely fuelled by similar practices of devaluation in Europe, where coinage was debased with some frequency.1 These pervasive fears of gold’s debasement reveal ideas about money that – while less tangible – were nonetheless reflective of Eurocentric conceptions of value. In the early modern period, currency derived its authority from the impression it received at the mint, without which its value became the subject of suspicion. Pieter de Marees, for example, the former employee of the GWC and author of the 1602 account, Beschryvinghe ende Historische verhael van het Gout Koninkrijk van Gunea anders de Gout-cust de Mina genaemt […] (Description and historical account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, otherwise known as the Gold Coast of Mina […]), makes clear his discomfort with the unminted gold circulating on the African Coast. He writes: [E]very King has his Mine-hills, in which he lets his people search for Gold and sell that Gold to other Traders, and that in that way the Gold passes from hand * I am grateful to Gijs van der Ham, who kindly met with me in the beginning stages of this project and to Natasha Seaman and Joanna Woodall for their insightful suggestions and careful editing. I also benefitted enormously from the feedback I received during a College Art Association Conference panel in Chicago in 2020, co-chaired by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein and Sarah Mallory. Research for this essay was completed during a Fulbright U.S. Scholars Grant in 2019/2020. 1 J.H. Munro, 174-184.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

to hand till it reaches the Dutch ships and thus ultimately our Dutch Mints, where it is minted to the Profit of the Merchants and the convenience of the Communities; for in exchange for this yellow earth which is brought from Guinea one can obtain good bread and Butter and other Goods to meet a Man’s needs, and everyone likes it and it is known everywhere. Yet, I think that if someone were to go with the Gold just as it comes from the Mina to some Peasants or other people, he would not obtain any Butter or Cheese for it.2

De Marees’s unfavourable comparison of the “yellow earth which is brought from Guinea” to minted coins that “everyone likes” and are “known everywhere” distinguishes two systems of valuation for African gold: one based on intrinsic value and the other based on symbolic value. For De Marees, the guarantee provided by the mint was fundamental for the production of value in Europe, whereas the un-minted gold circulating in Guinea embodied pecuniary values that existed independently of the mint’s authority, leading De Marees to question its value. The box that is the subject of this essay must be examined in the context of these two pecuniary anxieties: one that prioritized the iconographic symbolism of the minted coin as a guarantor of value; and the other that feared the debasement of the precious metals from which such coins were made. These were not inconsequential or abstract concerns for the recipient of the box, Willem IV, who was being asked to endorse a Company that was struggling to turn a profit and who would have much to gain from its financial success himself. As I argue, this box responds to these dual anxieties by mimicking the stamped impression common to European coinage, a “numismatic strategy” that sanctions its value at the same time that it exploits gold’s material properties and thus demonstrates its purity.3 I will also argue that the GWC box’s conspicuous “double-sidedness” – an unusual feature in small, finely crafted boxes at the time – draws from the tradition of two-sided imagery found on contemporary coinage in order to activate visually the path of gold’s mobilization, a critical component of its value production for European audiences.

Box of the Dutch West India Company and the circulation of gold on the African coast The Dutch West India Company presented the Rijksmuseum box as a gift to Prince Willem IV in 1749 as a container for a document that invited him to assume “supreme 2 De Marees, Description, 189. 3 Both the notion of “numismatic strategy” and “double-sidedness” build on concepts introduced by Joanna Woodall in “For Love and Money.”

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4.1  Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company, 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

command” of the GWC.4 The presentation of gold document boxes to the stadholder was a symbolically important practice in which the Companies and the provinces affirmed the authority of the stadholder, who was an elected official. A 1759 inventory indicates that Willem also possessed a gold-mounted agate “suitcase” presented to him by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and other boxes featuring the coats of arms of the provinces, which contained deeds of stadholdership.5 Based on the inventory descriptions, the gold boxes from the provinces seem to have been less elaborate than the ones presented by the GWC and the VOC. The gold box in the Rijksmuseum is the only one from Willem IV’s collection that survives.6 The Rijksmuseum’s box was made by the Amsterdam goldsmith Jean Saint (c. 1698-1769) and his son-in-law, François Thuret (c. 1716-1751).7 Saint and Thuret were part of a close circle of French-Huguenot goldsmiths working in Amsterdam who 4 Although Willem IV was given this position in 1747, he did not in fact receive the gift until 1749. On the box, see especially Gijs van der Ham, Tarnished Gold; Baarsen et al., Rococo in Nederland; de Lorm, Amsterdams Goud, 368-371. 5 Baarsen, et al., Rococo in Nederland, 94. In the 1759 inventory of Willem V, the VOC gold box is described as “Een oriëntaelsich agate koffertje.” See Drossaers and Scheurleer, Inventarissen, 712. 6 Baarsen, et al., Rococo in Nederland, 94. 7 The following biographical information is based on Baarsen’s account in Rococo in Nederland, especially 93-94 and 103-111.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

4.2  Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, lid), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

played a significant role in popularizing the “style rocaille,” now known as the Rococo, in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century.8 The box itself was made by Saint, whereas the decorative chasing seems to have been completed by Thuret, an assumption based on the presence of Thuret’s signature on the lid of the box (centre-right, under the gold ore) and Saint’s maker’s mark on the front of the top edge, under the lid (not pictured).9 Although not much is known about Thuret or his training, the varied techniques exhibited on the lid of the gold box indicate a highly skilled artist able to present a richly diverse array of textures on a rather small surface.10 That every facet of this diminutive box – which is less than six centimetres tall and only eighteen centimetres on its longest side – was decorated suggests it was meant to be handled and admired from all sides, although it was undoubtedly

8 Both artists likely nourished their French connections, but they were also closely connected to another circle of French-Huguenot artists in London: Thuret was living in London before he married Saint’s daughter and Saint’s son also lived in London. 9 For the makers’ marks and signatures, see de Lorm, Amsterdams Goud, 368-371. 10 Baarsen suggests that this box sparked Willem IV’s subsequent interest in collecting and commissioning rococo works. Baarsen, et al., Rococo in Nederland, 94. On Willem IV as a patron of the Rococo, see Baarsen, et al., Rococo in Nederland, 85-101.

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4.3  Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, “Curaçao”), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

4.4  Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, “St. George Delmina”), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

also a showpiece intended for static display.11 In order to appreciate the box in its entirety, the viewer must turn it over to see the base, which is inlaid with thin channels of hammered gold that demarcate the region known by its European name, the Gulf of Guinea – roughly from modern-day Senegal to Angola (fig. 4.5).12 Rivers, also inlaid in gold, extend from the coast, meandering between the letters in the word AFRICA, which is spelled out in gold granules. On the sides of the box are four Dutch forts, which are labelled Nassau (Nasso), Curaçao, St. George Delmina, and Cormantine (Cormantijn) (f ig. 4.3-4.4). Of the four forts, the one on the island of Curaçao in the southern Caribbean is the only one not in present-day Ghana, although it played a pivotal role in the slave trade as the location to which many enslaved people were sent before being shipped elsewhere in the Americas. In general, these forts were only nominally used for defence but were put to more practical use as warehouses for commodities and places of trade. 11 On the tactile properties of this box, see Anderson, “Optic and Haptic,” 127-143. 12 For a full description of the box, see van der Ham, Tarnished Gold, 15-17 and passim; de Lorm, Amsterdams Goud, 368-371; Baarsen, et al., Rococo in Nederland, 94.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

4.5  Jean Saint and François Thuret, box of the Dutch West India Company (detail, base), 1749, gold, tortoiseshell, velvet, 5.8 × 18 × 11.9 cm (h/l/w). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

The images on the lid of the box picture the trade activity for which the forts on the sides of the box would have served as a backdrop (fig. 4.2). The centre of the box features a large nugget of unrefined gold ore, which retains the small white pebbles common in alluvial deposits. Around this are three figures: on the left, a man wearing only a loin cloth holds an ivory elephant tusk; on the right, a woman dressed in a loose, cloth skirt wears a beaded necklace and appears to lean her elbow on the golden nugget as she holds a tray under a flowing stream; ensconced on the gold ore is Mercury, next to whom stands a cartouche containing the insignia of the Company, GWC.13 The gold nugget, which has not been worked by the goldsmith, is an integral part of the compositional illusion, as it provides a rocky support for the three primary figures even while it is simultaneously an example of the commodity that is the central theme of the box. In the background to the right of the woman, 13 The man and woman who frame the gold ore both belong to a pervasive iconographical tradition in which the four known continents are represented allegorically by figures holding attributes or commodities that embodied their geographical origins. Whether reclining or sitting, allegorical images of Africa were often comprised of necklace-wearing women, nude from the waist up. The ivory tusk held on the shoulders of Thuret’s kneeling male figure is also a common attribute of the African continent and can be found in a number of allegorical images. For a fuller discussion of these traditions, see Anderson, “Optic and Haptic,” 132-133.

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similarly clad figures dig in the earth, presumably extracting the gold that the woman in the foreground washes in her tray. In the background to the left of the kneeling man, a European merchant holds a small bag containing gold, which he uses to negotiate the purchase of enslaved people with a sub-Saharan trader, who gestures towards three figures further in the background. Above the central group of figures is the coat of arms of Willem IV, the recipient of this extravagant gift, which is framed by elegant volutes and s-curves in the style of the French Rococo, as will be discussed in greater detail below.14 The GWC likely provided Jean Saint and François Thuret with a number of visual and textual documents to assist them in preparing the designs for the box. Two of the most important would have undoubtedly been Pieter de Marees’s 1602 account, quoted above, and Willem Bosman’s 1703 Nauwkeurige beschrijving van de Goud- Tand- en Slavekust (“An accurate description of the Guinean Gold, Ivory and Slave Coast”).15 Both books were enormously popular and both books were translated into French shortly after their initial publication (De Marees’s in 1605 and Bosman’s in 1705), making them likely sources for Saint and Thuret.16 Given gold’s high potential for profit, it is not surprising that stories of its acquisition and trade played a central role in the travel literature of the period. De Marees’ and Bosman’s texts both give extended accounts of where gold could be found and in what forms it existed. De Marees, whom Bosman later echoes, writes the following: The gold is found in diverse forms, one piece being bigger than another; some lumps are the size of big Beans, others that of a Thumb or of a Pea; some gold is more like gravel, or as fine as Copper Filings. The pieces are very uneven, just like broken Quarry-stone, chopped and forked with some little stones and pebbles caught in the middle. Other pieces are sometimes covered with the Chalk and earth in which they were found. The small Gold is purged [sic] out of sand with the water of running Springs, but [some] gravel and sand is always left with the Gold.17 14 Underneath the coat of arms is the motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame be to him who thinks ill of it”). Van der Ham, Tarnished Gold, 15. 15 This essay relies on the following English translations: De Marees, Description; and Bosman, A New and Accurate Description. Although not much is known about De Marees, it is generally believed that he was a surgeon in the service of the GWC. As for Bosman, he was also a GWC employee, working his way up to the position of Chief Factor by 1698. For more biographical information on De Marees, see De Marees, Description, xiii-xix. See also, Sutton, Prints of Africa, especially chapter 3 (on De Marees) and chapter 7 (on Bosman and other authors who borrowed from De Marees). 16 Dapper’s 1668 Naukerige Beschrivinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten was also popular and widely available, but based largely on other, earlier sources including De Marees, Description. Unlike De Marees and Bosman, Dapper had never spent time in Africa (he was a physician living in Amsterdam). On Dapper, see Jones, “Decompiling Dapper,” 171-209; Sutton, Prints of Africa, 224-229. 17 De Marees, Description, 190.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

The large nugget of gold that rests on top of the box is likely from an alluvial deposit, adhering to the kind described by De Marees as having “little stones and pebbles caught in the middle.” Despite its likely alluvial origins, the nugget’s precise geographic origin cannot be determined with certainly.18 The imagery on the GWC box celebrates the profit resulting from the West India Company’s occupation of the west coast of Africa, where the Dutch had been trading since the late sixteenth century.19 Historically, it was the promise of gold that brought the Dutch to Africa in the first place, and it was likewise gold that continued to dominate Dutch trade, even in the second quarter of the seventeenth century when the GWC was actively involved in the slave trade.20 In fact, during the period between 1675 and the 1730s, gold accounted for 75% of GWC trade, while the trade in enslaved people and ivory constituted 13% and 8%, respectively.21 The principlal source of gold during this period was the region aptly named by Europeans as the Gold Coast, which extended approximately from Axim in the west to the River Volta in the east.22 The United Provinces had long relied on gold from this region for its coinage, since it was considered the most pure.23 So essential was the importation of gold from this region for minting at this time that the States-General enacted laws to regulate its distribution among the provincial mints and also to keep it from leaving the country.24 Nevertheless, since gold was in high demand all over Europe it proved impossible to curb its illegal circulation outside of the Netherlands, and even stabilizing gold prices within the Provinces presented challenges. On more than one occasion the mint master of Amsterdam complained to the States-General that they needed to crack down on both inflated prices and the unauthorized circulation of un-minted gold.25 In short, the gold trade in Europe was a hard-to-regulate but incredibly lucrative business for those with connections.26 In light of the laws put in place to protect the quantities of gold 18 Many thanks to Gijs van der Ham, who inquired with metal conservator Joosje van Bennekom about the possibility of the identification of the gold’s precise geographic origins. Unfortunately, there are not currently enough reference materials to make an accurate identification. 19 For more on Dutch trade in Africa, see Postma and Enthoven, eds. Riches; den Heijer, Goud, Ivoor, en Slaven; Alpern, “What Africans got for their Slaves,” 5-43; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa. 20 For more on the Dutch participation in the slave trade, see especially Postma, Dutch Slave Trade. 21 Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de GWC. After the 1730s the GWC had largely given up its dominant role in the slave trade, although it certainly continued to play a role through the collection of taxes on slaves purchased in Dutch occupied areas and other similar income-producing measures. 22 Daaku, Trade and Politics, 21. 23 On the purity of Africa’s gold, see Jacobi, “World-system,” 145-149. 24 On the laws enacted to regulate its circulation, see Daaku, Trade and Politics, 22. 25 Ibid. 26 For more on the circulation of gold and other metals in the early modern period, see Kellenbenz, ed., Trade and Politics, especially 79-87; 307-316.

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that entered the Netherlands from the Guinea Coast, the GWC’s extraordinary golden gift to the Stadholder offers a stunning example of how these rules could be circumvented. On the Gold Coast, gold mediated a wide range of trade relationships, both between and within different kingdoms and villages and between these communities and the European traders who occupied the Coast. These trade relationships, however, were based on the trade of commodities – minted currency was not used. Gold was an important commodity that played an outsized role in this system, but it also established a standard value against which to measure other commodities.27 Traders, both European and African, used weights as a measure of price and the archives of the Dutch West India Company are replete with examples of pricelists that inventory commodities popular on the African Coast – such as various textiles, glass beads, or metal basins, for instance – next to their corresponding weight in gold.28 For example, when Governor-General Joan van Sevenhuysen sent David van Nyendael (1667-1702) into Asante territory to create an alliance with Asante King Osei Kofi Tutu in 1701, Nyendael and his envoy were sent with gifts, “extensive instructions on how to behave,” and a pricelist to facilitate the terms of future trade. Items were priced according to their weight in gold: “16 printed bedsheets,” for example, were priced at one benda (equivalent to two ounces of gold), as were “40 stamped knives.”29 Although gold was an essential raw material for the production of coinage in the Netherlands, it was also a critical bartering commodity on the African continent. Despite Dutch efforts to export as much gold as possible for minting in the Netherlands, gold flowed in both directions, stimulating the trade economy on the Guinea Coast but also securing trading rights or other privileges for the GWC, or in some cases calming internal conflicts. In one instance, for example, the GWC director-general loaned the King of Komenda (called Commany by the Dutch) 10 marks, 2 ounces and 8 engels of gold in order to pay back some traders from whom the Komenda king had stolen merchandise. This was a calculated move, of course, intended to thwart an impending war and prevent the Company from “suffer[ing] ten times as much damage on merchandise which may spoil.”30 The GWC, along 27 Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 4. According to Dantzig, the standard of value was based on the Mark (1/5 pound, which by 1700 was worth about 300 guilders). 28 For an example of a price list, see the 1713 list in appendix 7 of Den Heijer, Goud, Ivoor, en Slaven, 423-424. 29 On this mission, see den Heijer, “David van Nyendael,” 41-49; Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, especially 74-80. Van Nyendael was the first of thirteen Dutch envoys to visit the Asantehene court, who also sent their own envoys to the fort at Elmina. Doormont, “Dutch Relations,” 20. For the pricelist, see Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 77. 30 Dantzig, Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 55-56.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

with other European Companies, also paid a regular annual “rent” of two ounces of gold – referred to as kostgeld – in order to retain the use of the land on which they built their forts and to maintain continued trade with the ruling local leader.31 Beginning in 1744 – just a few years before the commission of the Rijksmuseum’s gold box – kostgeld was paid for the first time to the Asantehene Opoku Ware (r. 1720-1750) after his 1742 defeat of Akyem forces, which had previously controlled Accra, the site of many European forts. Of the inception of kostgeld to the Asante, a Danish merchant on the African coast writes “All the European nations […] agreed [to transfer the stipends to Asante] upon giving Oppoccu to understand that it was because of the trade that we paid rent; and if he sent up good trade he would get it; otherwise not.”32

Golden narratives: picturing, regulating, and sanctioning trade Given the importance of the West African gold trade to the financial stability of the Dutch West India Company, it would have been critical to demonstrate the viability and stability of the trade to Willem IV, who was being asked to endorse, even if only symbolically, the Company’s position overseas. The gift that the GWC presented to the stadholder does exactly that: on the one hand, the stunning quantity of gold – both sculpted and natural – is compelling evidence of the Company’s success. But in the context of competition among and between European and African polities, this abundance of wealth also needed to be well-regulated. The material properties of gold had to be counterbalanced with a narrative that showed the GWC’s control over this valuable commodity. One of the primary concerns of the Dutch West India Company was that the source of gold – the richest deposits of which lay in the forested region between the Tano and Volta rivers – was unknown to them, as it was strictly regulated by regional rulers who employed merchants to transport the gold to the coast to be traded.33 Although there were attempts to locate and control this resource, all resulted in failure.34 According to De Marees, “mines are kept well-hidden and secret by the owners,” while Bosman asserts that informants “esteem them sacred, and consequently take all possible care to keep us from them.”35 Nevertheless, while 31 For the most complete discussion of the kostgeld paid to the Asante, see Yarak, Asante and the Dutch, 133-169. 32 Ibid., 155-156. 33 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 12. 34 Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 148-154. 35 De Marees, Description, 189. See, however, De Marees, Description, 189, fn. 5. Bosman similarly notes that local inhabitants “cannot give any certain account of them, nor do our People go so far,” Bosman, A

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they may not have known their precise locations, both De Marees and Bosman describe the source of inland gold as coming from either deep pits dug amongst the hills, or streams, brooks, and waterfalls that carried and deposited gold with their currents, and it is presumably from these descriptions that Thuret designed the vignette that shows figures digging in order to extract gold from the earth.36 On the methods for extraction, the authors were again in the dark, but they do supply some information – likely repeated from informants. Bosman, for example, writes that gold mining is a task often assigned to women, who are “naked, except a cloth wrapped about them to hide what Modesty obligeth.” He continues: Each of these women is furnished with large and small troughs or trays, which they first fill full of earth and sand, which they wash with repeated fresh water, till they have cleansed it from all its earth; [an] operation [that] generally holds them till noon.37

Although Thuret seems to have departed from the all-female assembly-line production described by Bosman, the main elements of the story remain: scantily clad figures dig in streams and make pits in order to extract earth to be washed in trays in search of gold nuggets. These figures are captive within the stylistic assumptions of the European tradition – in which figures arranged in a landscape diminish in scale in order to accommodate the expectations of an eye trained in perspectivally-based spatial recession. Their confinement is further emphasized by the rocky enclave that surrounds them, neither sky nor sea providing the possibility of movement. Here, the pictured landscape serves a dual function: on the one hand it acts as a form of control, “Europeanizing” a foreign terrain by overlaying it with the visual conventions of an outside order; on the other hand, by visualizing a landscape that pictures the source of African gold – a commodity over which the Dutch had little control and no direct access – it fabricates a narrative in which the extraction of gold is carefully monitored. The vignette on the left pictures an African trader negotiating the sale of three enslaved people to a European merchant who holds a pouch of gold – likely pebbles or powdered gold – at his right hip. The three figures are not only framed by a rocky outcrop, as on the right, but also stand adjacent to a carefully hammered representation of the ocean. This suggests the transatlantic journey that awaits them, the seascape here acting as much as an imprisonment as the rocks. Beyond picturing the inhumane brokering of human life that brought wealth to the Company, this New and Accurate Description, 80. See also, Kea, Settlements, especially 36-37 and 74-94. 36 De Marees, Description, 189. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 80. 37 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 80-81.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

scene is noteworthy for establishing the GWC as the trusted overseers of trade, rather than direct participants in the trade itself. By 1734, the GWC’s trade monopoly on the Gold Coast had been overturned, opening the area up to private traders. From this point forward, GWC officers served a largely administrative role from the forts, profiting not from the trade itself, but from the facilitation of trade between private traders and the African contacts they had worked to nurture over the many decades of the Company’s presence on the African Coast. As compensation for facilitating trade, private Dutch traders, in turn, were forced to pay the GWC a tax based on the amount of the commodities acquired, the most well-known being the “capitation fee,” a tax paid per enslaved person.38 The access to the forts and the land on which they were built was guaranteed, it will be recalled, by the payment of kostgeld, which at this point was collected by the Asante. Picturing the exchange of gold between European and African traders, therefore, not only confirms the importance of gold as a bartering commodity in the appallingly lucrative slave trade, but it also suggests that the Dutch were the rightful overseers of this trade, thereby justifying to the stadholder their annual payment of kostgeld and, by extension, their continued presence on the African coast. The entire scene presented on the box’s lid – the excavation of gold from alluvial deposits by West African laborers and the circulation of gold between traders – culminates in the central three figures who frame the gold nugget. The African man and woman, who are simultaneously allegories of the African continent and bearers of the wealth that could be found there, pay tribute to Mercury, kneeling and reclining in supplication before him. Mercury, the god of trade and commerce, sanctions this well-regulated vision of trade on the African coast by supporting a cartouche containing the Company’s insignia. The image of Mercury had long been used in allegorical images of trade but gained currency in the eighteenth century, often accompanying personifications of the Dutch East and West India Companies where he signals abundance and wealth.39 Such a representation certainly would have resonated with the Stadholder, who, during his short term in the office, would have wanted to ensure the continued wealth of the Republic.

38 Van der Ham, Tarnished Gold, 107. This “capitation fee” was twenty guilders for each slave sold. 39 See, for example, Jan Punt’s 1739 title page, Allegory of the VOC in De Marre, Batavia and Bernard Picart’s 1730 print, Allegorie op de macht van de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden als zeemogenheid. That these prints were published in the 1730s and 1740s suggests that such iconography had particular resonance at this time.

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Creating an impression: debasement, shaping, and minting Although the narratives presented on the box’s lid suggest that the GWC oversaw a well-regulated and lucrative trade on the African Coast, it is the gold of which the box is comprised that is the most convincing testament to the trade’s potential for prof itability. But the material iconography of gold carried with it other, more complex meanings in the context of African commerce. Because the prices of trade items on the Guinea Coast were calculated according to relative commodity values, European standards of payment – coinage – were not used. Instead – as discussed above – prices were frequently calculated according to their weight in gold, often in the form of gold powder or small gold pebbles, or other commodities. For example, a handwritten document from 1700 by Willem Bosman outlines the guidelines for the slave trade in Ouidah, in which he indicates that four slaves could be purchased for f ive pieces of graaties (a textile), or seven for eight pieces of servetten (a textile) or eight for ten pieces of platillios (a textile). Bosman adds that, “[f]or a woman one generally pays one piece of any kind of merchandise less (than for a man).”40 In addition to textiles, the GWC also imported large quantities of copper manilla, which they called “armringen,” which were horseshoe-shaped rings used as currency in many parts of the Guinea Coast, but especially Benin, prior to the arrival of Europeans. 41 Dutch and Portuguese merchants also imported incredible amounts of cowries, a currency – also very common in Benin – that played an outsized role in the slave trade. 42 In short, although the GWC had the authority to strike coins – which they did in other contexts, as will be discussed below – a number of pre-existing systems of currency along the Guinea Coast superseded the Company’s numismatic authority. It was perhaps this inability to control or regulate the monetary standards of trade on the Guinea Coast that led to a sustained sense of anxiety in GWC merchants, who constantly feared they were being duped by debased gold.43 De Marees, in fact, was so concerned about purchasing false gold that he dedicated a whole chapter to 40 Original passage and quotation from Postma, Dutch Slave Trade, 364. Graaties, servetten, and platillios were common cargo on GWC ships. See, for example, the cargo list of the 1712 journey of the Dutch ship, Acredem, which contained 500 servetten, 100 graaties, and 396 platillios. Nationaal Archief Nederland 1.05.01.02_1293. 41 Green, A Fistful of Shells, 165-166. 42 Green, A Fistful of Shells, 166-169. See also the Bosman document in Postma, Dutch Slave Trade, in which he lists the prices of enslaved captives by cowries. 43 European traders also committed their fair share of dishonest acts in the name of making a profit, including lying about the lengths of measured linens, selling rusted knives and basins, as well as “rotten cloth through which one could even sift beans.” De Marees, Description, 55.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

the problem, entitled “About the value of Gold and their subtlety in the falsification of Gold.” De Marees describes both the methods of “falsification” and the ways in which an experienced buyer could detect them. In some cases, there were visual clues that pointed to a deception, as when gold krakas – perhaps a pebble-like form of gold – were mixed with pieces of yellow copper in order to increase weight and purchase price. According to De Marees: When these [copper] krakas have been freshly clipped and lie mixed with the other gold they are hard to recognize with the naked eye; but when they have been lying among the gold for some time, it is easy to recognize them, because by then they have generally become rusty and pale. 44

Here De Marees suggests how easily the “naked eye” could be deceived – a warning against hastiness for inexperienced merchants. Bosman is equally cautious about purchasing false gold, also questioning methods that rely on vision alone to ascertain the quality of gold. In the following, he writes of his reservations about using Aqua Fortis (nitric acid), which would turn green when mixed with false gold: A miserable trial indeed! Which they will soon be convinced of. For example, if they take the value of four pound in gold, a seventh, eighth or tenth part of which is false, and pour their Aqua Fortis up on it; let them, I say, observe whether their Aqua Fortis does not produce the same effect, though in less degree, as it would if the whole mass were false: for which reason their proof is very uncertain, […] and besides very prejudicial to trade, to refute the good gold on account of an eighth or tenth part being false. 45

It is telling that in the span of one hundred years that separates these two authors that the anxiety about being fooled by African traders wielding false gold seems only to have intensified, which is evidenced by the new techniques of detection described by Bosman. Nevertheless, both Bosman and De Marees, while clearly uncomfortable with some methods for ascertaining quality, assert the nearly infallible importance of physical contact to determine quality. De Marees, for example, recommends “cleaving [suspected false gold] into pieces;” if it contains copper, it will “splinter like quarry-stone.”46 Bosman’s advice on this subject is worth quoting in full. He writes:

44 De Marees, Description, 194. 45 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 84-85. 46 De Marees, Description, 194.

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If you are desirous to know how ’tis possible to avoid the reception of false gold, especially if offered at night or morning. The methods we take are, first, if it is in large pieces, to cut them clear through with a knife, which immediately discovers what it is: if the piece be small, like mountain gold, lay them upon a stone, and beat them with hammer; and if it made of coral, they will crumble into small parts; but supposing it stand beating, you may afterwards try them with your knife. 47

The tactile approaches described by both authors, of course, also parallels the activities of the goldsmith who, through a variety of subtle manipulations, shapes the gold so that it mimics – to brilliant effect – the flowing water, coarse rocks, and organic vegetation of the “African” landscape. This effect is reinforced by the presence of the jagged nugget of gold, which forces the viewer, who is of course handling as well as viewing this tactile object, to make an explicit comparison between the unworked ore and the artistic tour de force on the box’s lid. To draw out these subtle relationships, Thuret delicately works the metal, inviting comparisons between the unworked ore, the meandering, elegant lines of the foreground vegetation, and the more regularly patterned flow of water that seems to stream directly from the gold ore and in the smaller falls in the middle- and background. Moreover, the figures in the background are not only reduced in scale and relief in comparison to the foreground but are also chased with less detail in order to evoke their distance in the landscape – a form of atmospheric perspective that can be both seen and felt. The varied textures of the hammered and chased metal would of course also be compared to the flawlessly smooth Rococo flourishes that frame the composition, a laudable demonstration of artistic skill and contemporary taste. The landscape, then, is not simply a way in which to make visible the source of African gold, or to demonstrate a colonial order through a European visual language; it is also a demonstration of the purity of the commodity that has been extracted and transported from the landscape pictured on its surface. In other words, the delicate reshaping of this precious metal is a testament to its uncorrupted value. The three central figures that frame the gold nugget also play a critical role in demonstrating the properties of gold, which are closely bound to the ideological paradigms that have determined the box’s narrative. For, in the central figures, Thuret has constructed a textured, vertical hierarchy within which the rest of the lid’s compositional elements are arranged: the least refined (the ore) lies at the bottom and the most refined (the Rococo frame) at the top. In between are situated the human actors, who are arranged according to an iconographical formula that had been in place since the sixteenth century: the African man and woman are at the bottom and Mercury (represented as a white, European male) 47 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description, 83-84.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

4.6 Pieter Jannsen Bas, 12-guilder emergency coin issued by the Dutch West India Company during the Portuguese siege of Pernambuco. Obverse and reverse, 1645–1646, gold, 18 × 18 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

is at the top. Upon close inspection, however, the hierarchy is not only spatial, but continues the textural hierarchy of the decoration: Thuret has used a slightly rougher technique to render the imagined blackness of the skin of the African man and woman, whereas Mercury’s white skin is chased using an ever-so-slightly smoother technique. Thuret’s demonstration of his ability to orchestrate the tactile qualities of gold parallels, in its hierarchical schema, early modern perceptions of Dutch-African power dynamics, which were firmly rooted in contemporaneous visual culture. On the box’s lid, these hierarchies are reinforced in the surrounding landscape that seems to naturalize and arrest these conditions. In short order, the demonstrable properties of gold – its affordances48 – have become entangled with the box’s pictured narratives, of which gold is also the central protagonist. As I will presently discuss, the arrested narratives on the box’s lid can be understood as a numismatic impression, the iconographical and material substance of which was intended to assuage the pecuniary anxieties of Dutch officials. It is of course important to note that in addition to the implications of the “impressed” pictorial narrative discussed above, the lid has also been “stamped” with the Company’s insignia, “GWC,” a practice that was also maintained for GWC-issued coins. A “GWC” stamp marks the coins struck during the 1645 siege of Pernambuco in Brazil, for example, an emergency coin struck by order of the GWC (fig. 4.6). A 48 The term “affordances” is borrowed from psychologist James J. Gibson. According to Ann-Sophie Lehmann, the term “signif ies that the properties of a thing, a substance or material encourage the performance of particular actions with them.” Lehmann, “The Matter of the medium,” 31 and note 57. Jacobi argues that the “enduring gleam of gold, its lasting color, and its ductility are among the various properties that actuate its use.” Jacobi, “World-system,” 142.

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4.7 Unknown designer, medal struck by the Groningen chamber of the Dutch West India Company, 1683. Obverse and reverse, silver, 45 mm diameter. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

simple design – a circle inscribed within a square-shaped piece of gold – the coin displays the insignia below the roman numeral XII, indicating its value in guilders. On the obverse are the words, “ANNO BRASIL 1645.” The “GWC” insignia was also used in a silver medal struck by the Groningen Chamber of the GWC in 1683 to celebrate the 10% dividend earned from the Company, which had been restructured in 1674 (fig. 4.7). The reverse of the medal features the Dutch fort at Elmina in front of which sails a GWC ship, a clear indication of the perceived value of the outpost for the Company’s success. 49 The obverse includes the coats of arms of Groningen and the Ommelanden – articulated as a concentric circle within the shape of the coin – which surround the “GWC” insignia positioned at the centre. In both the coin and the medal, the authority of the GWC is asserted through the stamping of this insignia, just as it is in the box – a reassurance of both the material values and ideological narratives pictured on or embodied by their metallic surfaces. But while “stamping” the Company’s insignia on the Rijksmuseum’s box corresponds to contemporary numismatic practices, it is not the only way in which this object adopts numismatic forms. One of the box’s most unusual features – the map on the base of the box – engages with the idea of “double-sidedness” in a manner similar to coins and medals. It should be said at the outset that although small, finely crafted boxes were popular accessories for the Dutch elite in the eighteenth century, I am unaware of any boxes that included significant design elements on 49 Van der Ham, Tarnished Gold, 79-81.

BEYOND THE MINT: PICTURING GOLD ON THE RIJKSMUSEUM’S BOX OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY 

their base, making Saint and Thuret’s GWC box quite unusual indeed. Even for smaller snuff boxes that were meant to be held – and thus handled – as well as displayed statically in cabinets, their undersides were generally somewhat plain and unornamented.50 The conspicuousness of the GWC box’s “double-sidedness,” therefore, warrants further consideration. At a basic level, the box’s opposing facets present two views of the same place: on the lid, we see an imagined view of a coastal African landscape populated with people and commodities; on the base, our eyes are met with a map, in which the Guinea Coast is pictured cartographically. On both the base and the lid African rivers are conceptually and literally the source of the box’s gold. But whereas the close-up view on the lid pictures the labour required to extract gold from the earth, the distant view on the base occludes this information. The difference between these images, however, is not just a matter of perspective – near and far. Rather, they offer two different ways in which gold was circulated. On the lid, we see gold being dug from streams before being traded among European and African merchants on the coast. The map on the base, however, suggests the nautical journey that awaited gold once it came into the possession of Dutch merchants, at which point it would be shipped back to the Netherlands to be minted. The narrative trajectory pictured on the lid and base of the box, then, echo the passage by Pieter De Marees with which this essay opened, who – 150 years earlier – described how gold “pass[ed] from hand to hand till it reach[ed] the Dutch ships and thus ultimately our Dutch Mints.” The “double-sidedness” of the box’s design, then, acts both as a surrogate for the minted money that was absent from commerce on the Coast of Guinea, and as a pictorial space in which to articulate gold’s path from river to mint – an assurance of a desired outcome and a visual affirmation of the ideological values invested in minted currency.

Conclusion: gold’s entanglements Lauren Jacobi has rightly argued that the “material iconography” of gold could signal the “faraway-ness” of its origins.51 This is no doubt true in the case of the Rijksmuseum’s gold box, where the origin of the source of gold – the West African coast – is explicitly pictured on the lid of the box, making the connection between the procurement, trade, and circulation of gold a key element of the box’s narrative. But it is also the form of the box – the lid and base of which, as I have argued, 50 See, for example, the many examples in de Lorm, Amsterdams Goud. 51 Jacobi, “World-system,” 152-153. This position builds upon Lehmann, “The Matter of the medium,” 21-41.

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borrow from the authoritative impact of minted coins – that verifies that which is pictured on its surface. As I have demonstrated, the way in which shaped gold acquires meaning is complex, and an appropriate interpretation must by necessity move between gold as an idea – a narrative concept that fuelled European/African trade in the early modern period in close conjunction with the slave trade – and gold as a material – a precious metal that, if of a certain level of purity, had a unique set of properties that could be performed on its surfaces. In the Rijksmuseum box, these two modes of interpretation can be seen to merge. This essay has argued that on one hand, the scenes pictured on the Rijksmuseum’s gold box alleviated the monetary anxieties experienced on the African Coast. Here one witnesses the procurement and circulation of gold as a stable currency, regulated and sanctioned by divine authorities, one in which its purity is uncontested and its role in commerce divinely sanctioned. On the other hand, gold’s purity – its refutation of falsification – is demonstrated through its manipulation, whereby its fundamental properties – malleability and ductility – are enacted to great effect on its surfaces. For early modern viewers, the performance of these desirable properties seems to have been a necessary component of gold’s established value. The greatest success of the Rijksmuseum box, then, is that it alleviates the tensions felt so acutely by GWC traders, as it juxtaposes gold in its natural form – unshaped and un-minted – with gold that has been fashioned to reveal the malleable qualities for which it was most admired – an impression, so to speak, that narrates the contexts of its making.

Bibliography Unpublished sources Nationaal Archief Nederlands 1.05.01.02 Inventaris van het archief van de Tweede WestIndische Compagnie (WIC), (1624) 1674-1791 (1800).

Published sources Alpern, Stanley B. “What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List for European Trade Goods.” History in Africa 22 (1996): 5-43. Anderson, Carrie. “Between Optic and Haptic: Tactility and Trade in the Dutch West India Company’s 1749 Gold Box.” Oud Holland no. 2, vol. 133 (2020): 127-143. Baarsen, Reiner, et al. Rococo in Nederland. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2001.

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Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts, written originally in Dutch by William Bosman. London: printed for Sir Alfred Jones by Ballantype, 1907. Daaku, Kwame Yeboa. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Dantzig, A. The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674-1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archive at The Hague. GAAS-ACCRA, 1978. Drossaers, W.A. and Th.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Inventarissen van de inboedels en de verblijven van de Oranjes en daarmede gelijk te stellen stukken 1567-1795, 3 vols, Vol. II. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974-76. Green, Toby. A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. van der Ham, Gijs. Tarnished Gold: Ghana and the Netherlands from 1593. Amsterdam: Rijksmusem; Nijmegen: Vantilt Publishers, 2016. den Heijer, Henk. Goud, Ivoor, en Slaven: Scheepvaart en Handel van de Tweede Westindische Compgagnie op Afrika, 1674-1740. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997. den Heijer, Henk. Geschiedenis van de GWC: Opkomst, Bloei en Ondergang. Zutphen: Walburg Press, 2003. den Heijer, Henk. “David van Nyendael: The First European Envoy to the Court of Ashanti.” In Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants: 300 Years of Dutch Ghanaian Relations, edited by W.M.J Van Kessel, 41-49. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002. Doormont, M.R. “An Overview of Dutch Relations on the Gold Coast in Light of David van Nyendael’s Mission to Ashanti in 1701-02.” In Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants: 300 Years of Dutch Ghanaian Relations, edited by W.M.J Van Kessel, 19-32. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002. Jacobi, Lauren. “Reconsidering the World-system: The Agency and Material Geography of Gold.” In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, edited by Daniel Savoy, 131-157. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2017. Jones, Adam. “Decompiling Dapper: A Preliminary Search for Evidence.” History in Africa 17 (1990): 171-209. Kellenbenz, Hermann ed. Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion: Papers of the XIVth International Congress of the Historical Sciences. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. de Lorm, Jan Rudolph. Amsterdams Goud en Zilver. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1999. De Marre, Jan. Batavia. Amsterdam: Adriaan Wor en erven Gerard onder de Linden, 1740. De Marees, Pieter. Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, translated by Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Kea, Ray A. Settlements, Trade and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

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Klooster, Wim. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie. “The Matter of the Medium: Some Tools for an Art-Theoretical Interpretation of Materials.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logistics, c. 1250-1750, edited by C. Anderson, A. Dunlop and P. Smith, 21-41. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Munro, J.H. “Money and Coinage: Western Europe.” In Europe 1450-1789. Encyclopaedia of the Early Modern World, 6 vols., vol. 4., edited by John D’Agata, 174-184. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004. Perbi, Akosoua. “Merchants, Middlemen and Monarchs: Dutch and Ghanaians in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” In Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants: 300 Years of Dutch Ghanaian Relations, edited by W.M.J Van Kessel, 33-40. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2002. Postma, Johannes. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Postma, Johannes and Victor Enthoven, eds. Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003. da Silva, Filipa Ribeiro. Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System. London/Boston: Brill, 2011. Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Sutton, Elizabeth. Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa. Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Woodall, Joanna. “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Ortelius’s Album Amicorum.” In Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, edited by Walter Melion, Michael Zell, Joanna Woodall, 649-703. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Yarak, Larry W. Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1873. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

About the author Carrie Anderson is an Associate Professor of Art History at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her primary area of research is the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, within which she focuses on themes related to intra- and intercultural diplomacy and gift exchange.

Coins and Persons

5.

The Heft of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Plays Rana Choi

Abstract This chapter examines Shakespearean construction of inwardness in terms of debased coinage under a climate of economic uncertainty in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and how it mapped out a strategic stance towards the moral and psychological problem of penetrating through false appearances to a person’s inner truth. It explores different approaches to assaying inwardness in Shakespeare that involve agile, intricate puns on everyday words such as “light,” “weigh,” “touch,” “burn,” “angel” – sustaining, over the course of Shakespeare’s career, an unchanging critique of Tudor monetary policy under Henry VIII and Edward VI, which made no small contribution to the unsettling sense that appearances were unmoored from inward truth. Keywords: Coinage, debasement, inwardness, assaying

Time and again, the limited ability of human beings to discern another person’s inner quality from their outer appearance proves to be both the obsessive theme and ironic device of William Shakespeare’s theatre (1564-1616).1 Despite its innate deceptions, it seems that Shakespeare leveraged the medium of the theatre to explore the very problem of false appearances and to formulate a metaphorical structure to give voice to the anxieties about this pervasive epistemological problem.2 Following the estimated chronology of the plays, one may trace an abiding and even 1 Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Shakespeare are from https://shakespeare.folger.edu [Accessed 18/12/2021]. 2 The critical discourse on inwardness as distinct from outward appearances in Renaissance English literature is substantial. Two studies however are notable here: Kolb’s dissertation on the performance of credit as reputation on the early modern stage, “Outward Worth,” and the book that has become the touchstone: Maus’ Inwardness and the Theater. My paper examines an additional medium of early modern

Seaman, N., and J. Woodall (eds.), Money Matters In European Artworks and Literature, c.1400-1750. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463726078_ch05

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intensifying interest in the problem of trust in appearances – specifically, the problem of discerning good character from bad character behind the mask of appearances – or, as Shakespeare would put it, the discernment between “pure,” “noble,” and “base” natures, by which characters very frequently praise or chastise one another or themselves throughout the plays, as we shall see. However, as this chapter will explore, the opposition between these words refers not only to a moral division, but a division between metallurgical categories – specifically, a reference to the “purity” of “noble” metals such as gold or silver, unmixed with “base” metals such as copper, tin, or lead.3 In Shakespeare’s plays, this way of denoting value in a person’s character was not merely an ornamental metaphor, but an imaginative model by which to parse ethical realities. It was a model that mapped out a strategic stance towards the moral and psychological problem of penetrating through false appearances to the inner truth of someone’s character, based on the real possibility of doing so with physical metals, so that one can even read Shakespearean plots through this lens. However, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to make such a kind of interpretive readings of the plays. What I will focus on here instead is the groundwork for understanding the significance and relevance of the metallurgical metaphor in Shakespeare’s time, which is obscure and difficult to understand in the modern era. Our relationship to precious metal has undergone a paradigm shift since the sixteenth century, because metals no longer serve as the lifeblood of our monetary system, as will now be explained.

Precious coins as a monetary system Coinage made of gold and silver was a monetary system that was invented in ancient Lydia around 640 B.C.E. and prevailed through early modern times. 4 It was a system of exchange that depended on the inherent worth of precious metals. In Elizabethan England, for example, a “penny” was actually a small silver coin whose worth was equivalent to a litre of ale, three eggs, a loaf of bread, a bed in a tavern, or a ticket to see a Shakespeare play as a groundling.5 It is not hard to understand why gold or silver became currency in ancient times – when polished, the metals reflect light beautifully and thus are visually attractive and desirable on that account alone; their durability and resistance to rust or decay further enhances this desirability English discourse on inwardness – the monetary system of debased coinage as figured in Shakespeare’s plays. 3 The OED lists the earliest entry for the term “noble” as applied to precious stones or metals that do not oxidize in the year 1393, but this distinction was understood since ancient times: “noble, adj. and n.1.” 4 Davies, A History of Money, 178. 5 Ojima, “Money in Shakespeare.”

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

and functionality as a material, as well as making them ideal material to be cast and recast and to undergo thousands of exchanges between hands. They were both scarce enough to be precious and available enough to provide a steady supply to trade for goods. The original idea behind the invention of coinage was to standardize the size and weight of pure gold or silver pieces to save people the trouble of weighing the metals with a scale every time they made a transaction.6 While coins were visually distinguishable by colour, size and design, one might imagine that with enough experience, a coin’s size and weight would even be roughly ponderable by hand; but the purity of metal is less discernible. The purity and therefore value of the precious metal contained in the coin was thus supposed to be guaranteed by the impression, permanently stamped into its malleable surface, of images and texts relating to the authority under which the coin was issued. Yet the very physical and chemical traits that made gold and silver ideal material as money also afforded the predicaments of debased coinage. Gold and silver are easily cut; they melt and mix with other metals, flatten into foil, can be applied as a thin coating over copper alloy coins in a process Elizabethans called “plating” or dipped in molten silver or gold for an even thinner coating in a process called “blanching.”7 A common form of debasement called “adulteration” occurred when, in the official minting process of coins, precious or “noble” metals such as gold or silver were mixed in decreasing proportions with “baser” metals such as copper, yet were passed off or “enhanced” as equal in nominal value with coins of purer fineness, or higher percentage of gold or silver. These would be blanched in a solution of argol to remove copper oxide from the surface, to hide the higher content of copper on the inner parts of the coin.8 Another kind of debasement, “devaluation,” created more coins from the same weight of precious metal while keeping nominal values the same, simply by using slightly less metal for each disk.9 An unofficial form of debasement occurred when people clipped slivers of gold or silver from coins to collect and melt down later. It is not something anyone would bother to do nowadays, since coins in our modern fiat monetary system are made of base metals – nominal values in our monetary system are entirely independent of the commodity value of the materials by which currency is constituted. Clipping of gold or silver coins in the early modern period, by contrast, appears to have been a common enough and serious enough crime to be targeted in numerous writings in 6 Coin names originally were derived from weight systems. A drachm was 1/6000 of a talent, both of which are weight standards as well as coin standards. Metcalf, The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage, 3. 7 Challis, The Tudor Coinage, 13. 8 Ibid. 9 Davies, A History of Money, 433.

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Renaissance England and denounced in the highest possible terms. Clipping coins was condemned as treasonous against the person of the king himself, “wringing the sceptre of his kingdom out of his hand,” as John Calvin put it, and some writers, such as William Tyndale or William Perkins, likened it to the sacrilege of showing contempt for the Eucharistic wafer, such as in this 1552 sermon by the reformed writer Roger Hutchinson (d. 1555)10: The contemp of Gods sacrament, not ye contract or touching of christes reall body which is now in heauen, bringeth damnation & causeth this giltines. For as he which violently plucketh down the kings maiesties armes, or breaketh the kinges great seale, or clippeth his coyne, comitteth an offence against the kinges owne persone, so they, which abuse the sacrament of Christes body and bloud, presuming to come to it as to common bread.11

There is a startling sense here of the preciousness of coins beyond their value in weight as gold or silver metals – a kind of sacred integrity attributed to them as bodies that invited comparison even to the Eucharistic wafer. Though that integrity was evidently breached often enough through clippings, it was another matter when such acts of treason were committed by the king himself. As we shall see in the next section, when a king compromises the integrity of coins, their destabilized status as bearer of true or pure value itself has serious consequences for society as a whole.12

The “Great Debasement” of coinage in England In 1542, in order to pay for his enormous debts, Henry VIII issued an order to decrease the fineness of gold and especially silver in the country’s coinage, while keeping their nominal values the same.13 The tactic of “blanching” the coins mentioned 10 Calvin, Thirteene sermons. For references to William Tyndale and William Perkins, see Tyndale, The vvhole works, 144; and Perkins, A golden chaine, Chapter 34, “Of the Lordes Supper,” last paragraph. 11 Italics mine. Quoted from Hutchinson, A faithful declaration. Clipping coins is uncommon today because the commodity value of the metal in coins is very low. The last silver coinage in England was in 1817. Munro, “The Coinages and Monetary Policies of Henry VIII,” 7. 12 Two literary studies focus on the materiality of money and its contingent value as ideological or f inancial instrument in various cultural and political contexts: Deng, Coinage and State Formation and Landreth, The Face of Mammon. My chapter chiefly differs from these books not only in scale but methodology, as it focuses on close philological readings of Shakespeare’s representations of debased coinage in everyday life and subject formation. 13 “The process of […] debasement from the original pure sterling silver standard reached 75 per cent silver by March 1542, 50 per cent by March 1545, 33 1/3 per cent by March 1546, and reached its nadir of 25 per cent under the young King Edward VI in 1551 […] In contrast to the gross adulteration of silver, the gold coinage

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

5.1 Designer/Medalist unknown, “Old Coppernose” English Testoon, 1546-1551, silver and copper coin, dimensions unknown, Llantrisant, Pontyclun, UK. Image courtesy of the Royal Mint Museum.

above was used from 1546 onwards, and perhaps represented the lowest level of purity or fineness in coins during this period called the Great Debasement (1542-51). A copper coin was “blanched” or covered by a thin layer of silver, which quickly wore off with use, revealing the copper beneath. As the true “inner nature” of these coins (called “Testons” or “Testoons”) became widely evident as they circulated, the image of Henry VIII stamped on these was mocked by the poet John Heywood as “Brazen nose” (fig. 5.1, “Old Coppernose,” 1546-1551). He attributed the copper hue of the silver veneer to the king’s blush for shame: “[T]hese Testons looke redde: how lyke you the same? / Tys a token of grace: they blushe for shame.’14 As the nominal values of coins are legal tender, one might remained close to purity throughout the debasement period […] It was rather through ‘enhancement,’ or crying up its official price, that the policy of debasement was pursued in the case of gold, and even then to a much more moderate degree than with the silver coinage.” Davies, A History of Money, 432-433. 14 John Heywood, A fourth hundred of Epygrams (London: 1560), epigram 64. Quoted in Groves, “New Directions,” 147. “Brazen nose” was a reference to brass or bronze, which are copper alloys. The OED’s

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wonder what the problem might be, as this separation of the face value from the commodity value of coins is similar to the kind of fiat system we now live under without much problem. However, in the early modern period, the commodity value of gold and silver trumped any nominal values declared by royal fiat as soon as the coins were taken out of the dominion where that value was declared. By the time Queen Elizabeth arrived on the throne in 1558, England had been facing mounting monetary and inflationary crises for over two decades. Sir Thomas Gresham the Elder (1519-1579), the chief Tudor f inancial adviser, explained to Elizabeth in a letter of 1558 the reason why English currency had fallen so far in value: the debasement of the coinage under her father and her brother had caused people to hoard older, purer coins, since they were loath to trade those old coins for the new baser coins that were only nominally the same value and, at the lowest point, had only 25% the amount of silver.15 As the purer coins were either hoarded or exported to trade in foreign markets, only bad coins were left to circulate, leading to the situation that became known as “Gresham’s Law,” where the “bad (coins) drove out the good (coins)” from circulation. This in turn led to steep inflation, as more “bad” coins were needed to meet actual gold or silver bullion requirements. But this greater number of coins simultaneously created higher nominal prices. Thus, a vicious cycle emerged, driving down the value of debased coins in foreign exchanges on the one hand, while simultaneously driving up nominal prices in domestic markets on the other. In order to counter this economic crisis, Elizabeth’s government officially began to take the debased coins out of circulation and raise the inherent fineness of gold and silver in coins back to their original values, thereby producing coins whose inherent worth was reflected in nominal face-values in the Recoinage of November 1560.16 Elizabeth was hailed for returning nominal values back to reflect the intrinsic values of coins. The restorative, even utopian significance that some writers gave recoinage is understandable.17 In their view, so long as the nominal earliest reference for this usage of “brazen” happens to date just after this period, in 1573: “brazen, adj.” OED Online. We can find another direct literary reference to blanched coins in The Revenger’s Tragedy: “[W] here oaths are but the skin of gold” (3.1.7). Quoted in Groves, “New Directions: The Salvation of Oaths,” 146. 15 “Ytt may pleasse your majesty to understande, thatt the firste occasion off the fall of the exchainge did growe by the Kinges majesty, your latte ffather, in abasinge his quoyne.” John William Burg, On the Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham (London, 1839), 1:484. Quoted in Lander, “‘Crack’d Crownes,’” 143. 16 Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 79. Quoted in Lander, “‘Crack’d Crownes’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns,” 144. Silver content was fully restored to the traditional monetary standard of sterling silver before the Great Debasement, 92.5% fineness, in November 1560, whereas the lowest point was 25% fineness in June 1553. Munro, 2010, 40, table 1. 17 Thomas Smith, in A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1549) expressed a “most fervent wish” “that money should be refashioned and restored to its true, and ancient value.” Quoted in Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth, 174. The sense was that by calling down the inflated coins

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

value of coins reflected their intrinsic value, prices would be freed always to reflect the “real value” of things, and the nation would be healed. But by the 1590s, it had become clear that despite Elizabeth’s coinage efforts, prices had still failed to stabilize in the long run. This was most likely because of other disruptions, such as the massive influx of Spanish silver mined in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico that flooded the money supply in Europe at the time.18 Another problem was the “unprecedented volatility” of the exchange rates that deepened the crisis of the fluctuation of economic value.19 Yet the influx of silver from the Americas and central Europe did not mitigate the shortage of bullion for minting coins in England, effecting an increase in the reliance on credit exchanges in early modern England starting from the mid-sixteenth century.20 In mid-seventeenth century England, when Gerard de Malynes and John Locke were writing about credit and money, “[t]he vast majority of exchanges were transacted on credit, which was also largely oral and informal, with only a token amount of cash used to set a seal on the bargain.”21 Reliance on such a credit system and the deeper social interdependence that such longer-term transactional relationships brought entailed the primary importance of trust. As Craig Muldrew argues, within ever-increasing networks of credit chains, it stands to reason that maintaining reputation became of paramount importance, becoming the primary incitement to the fashioning of a social identity pitched towards a greater sense to their intrinsic value, and re-issuing good coins, all forms of valuations, especially prices, will return to their “truth-telling” function: “[P]rices will fall, the pressure for enclosure will cease, urban trades will begin to reorganize themselves as if of their own will.” Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth, 175. As the government tract, The Summarie of Certain Reasons which have moved the Queenes Maiestie to procede in reformations of here base & corse monies, put it, “[a]nd, consequently, every man ought to thank Almyghtye God, that he may lyve to see the honour of his countrey thus partely recovered; sylver to come in place of cooper, pryces of thynges amende, all people more able to lyve of theyr wages, every man’s purse, or coffer, made free from the privie thefe, which was the counterfaytour.” Sig. A3v_A4. Quoted in Lander, “‘Crack’d Crownes’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns,” 145. 18 This is referred to as the “Bodin-Hamilton thesis,” after the philosopher Jean Bodin and the economic historian Earl Hamilton. However, this long-accepted thesis has recently been challenged, attributing European inflation of this period rather to the silver mining boom in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary) from the 1460s to the 1540s. Munro, “The Monetary Origins of the “Price Revolution,” 6. 19 Harris, Sick Economies, 93. 20 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 99: “But the reality in England was that the economy grew faster than the money supply, and population growth created demand-driven inflation which caused prices to increase more rapidly than the money supply.” “J.Wordie has argued recently that little of this new gold and silver found its way into monetary circulation in England for any great length of time, because there was a net outflow of bullion as a result of the country’s foreign trade deficit and the need to pay for wars in Ireland and in the Low Countries.” J.R. Wordie, “Deflationary Factors in the Tudor Price Rise,” Past and Present, no 154 (Feb. 1997), 49-61. Quoted in Muldrew, “Hard food,” 88. 21 Ibid., 83.

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of mutuality, honesty, and just dealing. Building creditworthiness was not merely about building up one’s wealth but was tantamount to a “currency of reputation”, the means by which “trust was communicated beyond local face-to-face dealing between people.”22 In this account, local face-to-face transactions do not depend on networks of credit chains or reputations generated out of complex social organizations because they are evaluated based on “simple” familiarity and “direct emotional responses.”23 In the half-century before such prosocial influences of pervasive credit could purportedly be effected however, there appears to have been a climate of uncertainty surrounding the tainted coinage generated from the Great Debasement, as registered in both the plot and language of Shakespeare’s plays, where dialogues represent face-to-face relationships as well as direct emotional responses. The suspicion of debased currency was such that it seems to have steeply ramped up an atmosphere of mistrust, as indexed by Shakespeare’s debased coinage metaphors which illuminate the anxieties about discerning hidden qualities in others even in face-to-face relationships. Investigation of Shakespeare’s language deploying the properties of debased coinage seems to have lent certain moral and political meanings in the discourse of inwardness as distinct from false surfaces, to which we now turn.

Purity As mentioned before, the claim here is that Shakespeare’s usage of the morally evaluative terms “base,” “noble,” and “pure” had not only metallurgical origins, but also evoked the history of official debasement that was a living memory in Shakespeare’s active years (roughly the 1590s and onward). For example, Shakespeare refers to base persons as also being “light.” This may at first glance merely refer to the everyday metallurgical knowledge people had at the time, which was that base metals are lighter than noble metals – gold is heavier than silver, silver heavier than copper or tin. The opportunities for everyday pondering of the relative weight of metals of the same size is likely to have been available above all in the handling of coins. As all debasement results in lighter weight coins due to the decreased ratio of gold or silver relative to base metals, it invites a careful scrutiny of the relative lightness or heaviness of diverse coin issues. For example, in one of Shakespeare’s late plays, Cymbeline, the character Posthumus directly likens himself to a light coin begging to be accepted when he prays to the gods for good fortune. Earlier 22 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 7. 23 Ibid., 5.

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

in the play, he is referred to as a coin “[f]rom whose so many weights of baseness cannot / A dram of worth be drawn” (3.5.105-6). The term “dram” here comes from the Greek coin “drachma,” here meant as the smallest unit of value. In another passage, Posthumus discusses his sense of his worth deriving from his paternity, also in terms of coinage: We are all bastards, And that most venerable man which I Did call my father was I know not where When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit. (2.5.2-6)

As a bastard, he identifies as a “counterfeit.” Bastards were, like counterfeit coins, illegitimate, but they were also like counterfeit coins in that they were believed at the time to be the mixed products of adultery or adulterated with base material.24 He later counterfeits himself by wearing Roman garb, so that he is “stamped” as Roman in order to be taken hostage by Britons. Again, he explains his intentions using the metaphor of debased coinage: he wears Roman garb because he wants to exchange his life for Imogen’s, for whose supposed death he takes responsibility. He regards his own life as of lesser value than hers but as he says here, addressing the gods: For Imogen’s dear life take mine; and though ’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coined it. ’Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake; You rather mine, being yours. And so, great powers, If you will take this audit, take this life And cancel these cold bonds. (5.4.24-30)

When Posthumous says here, “Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; / Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake,” he suggests that two honourable men, face-to-face, do not need to “weigh” or resort to the use of a scale to test the value of each particular “stamp” or coin. This implies that the lightness of the coins or pieces can be discernible to both men without a scale, presumably when they hold 24 “bastard, n., adj., and adv.” OED Online. “Something which is of mixed or adulterated quality or nature.” See also Patricia Parker’s concise discussion of the consistent linguistic connection between “bastard,” “base” and “counterfeit” in Shakespeare from the Margins, 212. For a more extended discussion, see Neill, “Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny,” 397-416.

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them in their hands. By eschewing the fussiness of a scale, they mutually decide to accept the coins as equal, even if one is lighter than the other, for the “figure’s sake” – out of trust, friendship, magnanimity or mercy, perhaps. Posthumous prays that the gods to whom this speech is addressed may also call his and Imogen’s life even, even if, as Posthumous believes, he is of lower purity, and therefore lower worth and lower “weight” than Imogen. Another instance in Shakespeare that suggests that people of the time were alert to the difference of debased coins not only through scales or looks but by the relative heft felt by hand, is in a passage where again, the relative weight of inner substance and false surface are played off one another in the discernment of moral quality. Falstaff seems to refer to just this kind of haptic literacy or ability to “ponder” weight differences by hand in Henry IV, Part 2, lines 139-170. The stichomythic exchanges he has with the Chief Justice for thirty lines play like a classic comedic routine that we are familiar with today – with the stern straight man played by an authority figure repeatedly trying to pinion the clown with withering rebukes, while the clown deflects each with wisecracks. In this case, the clown Falstaff deflects all the Chief Justice’s moralistic metaphors by first reducing them to pure materiality, and then reducing in carnivalesque manner all materiality to corpulence, namely his own large girth and weight. If the Chief Justice says, “you live in great infamy” (1.2.139-140), Falstaff replies, “He that buckles himself in my belt cannot live in less” (141-142). When the Chief Justice scolds, “Your means are very slender, and your waste is great” (143-144), Falstaff ripostes, “I would my means were greater and my waist slender” (145-6). Falstaff carries on this way for a few more lines: “I am the fellow with the great belly;” he refers to himself as a large fat candle made purely of animal fat (“A wassail candle, my lord, all tallow”); refers to “my growth;” then as the consequence of overeating (“effect of gravy, gravy, gravy,” 161-165). When the Chief Justice rebukes, “You follow the young prince up and down like his ill angel,” Falstaff likewise responds, “Your ill angel is light, but I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing” (166-170). Like other Shakespearean references to debased coinage, there are several layers to the pun. On a literal level, the term “ill angel” recalls the famous evil angel competing with the good angel for Doctor Faustus’s soul in the eponymous play by Christopher Marlowe, written and performed in the years right before his death in 1593, and follows the now obsolete usage of “ill” meaning evil or morally depraved.25 But Falstaff quickly pivots to pun on the term “angel” as a coin. An Angel was a large, usually gold, coin manufactured 1464-1642, and worth about 10 shillings, or 120 silver pennies.26 An “ill” coin most likely refers to a debased coin, since it is both morally and physically 25 “ill, adj. and n.” OED Online. 26 Fujita, “Money in Shakespeare,” 113.

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

impure, and therefore “light.”27 The second half of the sentence where Falstaff says that he hopes “that he that looks upon me will take me without weighing,” suggests the possibility that the coin is felt to be lightweight by hand, without using scales. The logic here is that, if it were known to be lightweight because the copper in the coin is visible, this would not need to be confirmed by weighing either by hand or scales. But the only estimation that would need confirmation by weighing with a scale would be if the coin were at first pondered by hand. Another “tropological” or moral interpretation of the passage would then be a plea of mercy to the Chief Justice, that though Falstaff is indeed debased, to not scrutinize his faults too much, to take him at face value – being a knight and preferred friend of the crown prince, and not be judged for his inward moral quality, which the audience knows is dishonest. Finally, there is also a possible anagogical level of punning here, referring to angels of light that attend God’s judgment upon the soul: as in his plea to the Chief Justice, Falstaff hopes that God looks upon him with mercy and judges him without a precise weighing his sins. Unfortunately for Falstaff, the Chief Justice does not take him at face value, and does weigh him indeed – in doing so, the figure of the Chief Justice seems to directly index the figure of Lady Justice. The Lady Justice is famous for her attributes of blindfold and scales, which has led to the general assumption that the blindfold symbolizes impartiality, and the scales equality before the law. While Shakespeare’s representation of justice still retains these general meanings, the perspective through the frame of debased coin metaphors renders the blindfold and the scales more materially and structurally integral to one another, suggesting the same (though inverted) structural relation we have just seen with Falstaff’s plea: look, but do not weigh. The blindfold suggests that, like the Chief Justice, weighing is the only just means to measuring inner substance. Moreover, the consistent size of Lady Justice’s scales suggests, at this time in Europe, they are specifically for measuring the weight of precious metals, especially coins. Despite the fact that some debased coinage was visibly so, the Shakespearean premise of the debased coin metaphor depends on the assumed difficulty or even impossibility of discerning inner substance of a person visually. This rather modern insistence on the antagonism between inward and outward qualities is given further prominence in the (at the time) unconventional act of blindfolding Justice. For the ancient 27 It was possible that coins minted under Henry VIII that were at least of 50% fineness looked more silver than copper because of another blanching process, whereby “the surface was attacked with chemicals to oxidize the copper, which could then be removed with dilute acid to leave a silver-rich layer.” Wang, “A Metallographic Study,” 61. The dilute acid consisted of cleaning agents like “powdered tartar, salt and water, or urine.” Vannoccio Biringuccio. The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth Century Treatise on Metals and Metallurgy, ed. and trans. C.S. Smith and M.T. Gnudi. New York: Dover Publications, 1990, 360-361. Quoted from Wang, “A Metallographic Study,” 360.

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iconography of Justice was not originally blindfolded – the first known example of a blindfolded Justice occurs in the 1494 Basel edition of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff.28 The lack of realism of a blindfolded person holding a scale further underscores the intentionality of the structural dissociation between visual appearance and weighed inward substance being forcefully asserted by the symbolic blindfold, for as any use of a scale or image of moneychangers will show, the keen use of one’s eyes is necessary to judge the balance of the scales. By the same measure of realism, moneychangers’ scales are almost always set on an even surface, not itself pondered in the hand as blindfolded Justice invariably does. In both cases, a fortiori, the blindfolding of Justice as she simultaneously weighs not only the matter but ponders the scales themselves, serves further emphatically to divide these two modes of judgment, visual discernment and haptic pondering, that are structurally related in the situation of weighing coins. As Prince Hal, now Henry V, says to the Chief Justice when praising the judge’s “blind” probity in having once thrown the Prince in jail, as though he did not distinguish the Prince from everyone else: “You are right, justice, and you weigh this well. / Therefore still bear the balance and the sword” (103-104). The Chief Justice is praised here for refusing to subordinate the law to material status or worth, or reduce morality to corpulence as Falstaff does, but rather, submitting both to inward worth. The implication that what is “weighed” by the scales of justice is invisible because it is inward, while material worth or corpulence is outwardly visible but nonprobative, is one that only makes sense within the nexus of relations organized by the metaphor of debased coinage in Shakespeare’s deployment of it in these examples so far. In the next sections, we will see how Shakespeare deploys the metaphor of debased coinage to pursue what it actually meant to “weigh” a person’s inner, hidden, worth. Many of Shakespeare’s plots centre upon exactly this question of discerning a character’s inner worth – of whether they are base or noble – but I will focus only on certain instances where the image of debased coinage mobilizes for Shakespeare’s publics this idea of the dichotomy between outward appearances and inward quality in the pursuit of truth.

Metal / mettle In my discussion so far, I have tried to point out the centrality of the imagery of debased coinage to Shakespeare’s characterization of a climate of uncertainty where appearances and reality no longer necessarily operate in tandem. As Jesse Lander 28 Prosperi, Justice Blindfolded, 36. Another great resource on the history of the iconography of Lady Justice is found in Resnik and Curtis, Representing Justice.

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

astutely notes, even in the attempt to correct the consequences of debasement by raising the fineness of coins to their original near-purity, Elizabeth’s action of calling down base coinage to its “true” value by fiat itself was likely to have exacerbated the unsettling sense that, rather than being inherent and naturally apparent, nominal appearances were unmoored from true worth.29 In describing what might be termed the “debased numismatic subject” in Shakespeare, indexing characters’ tendency to identify as debased coins, I have so far used the terms “inward” or “substance” as antonyms of “outward” or “appearance.” While these terms were used by Shakespeare, they were not used in the same way. So, in precisely delineating his debased numismatic subject, discussion of Shakespeare’s usage of the terms “metal/mettle” would be necessary here. One might assume that the words are homonyms, facilitating puns on the idea of inherent moral character and intrinsic worth, but “metal” and “mettle” are used interchangeably in Shakespeare along with other spelling variations.30 The two connotations within the same word diverged over time, until English usage subsequently had one word applying only figuratively, that is, to the moral or social sphere, referring to the character of a person, and the other applying only literally or physically, that is, to materials such as copper, silver, or gold. Both “metal” and “mettle,” however, have retained their original sense of inherent, elemental substance or quality, as distinct from temporary surface appearances – the “stuff” that one is made of. This sense of “metal/mettle” is thus also associated with procreation and reproduction throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre.31 In Richard II, for example, the Duchess’ usage indicates that “mettle/ metal” pertains to deep family ties: “Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine! That bed, that womb, / That metal, that self mold that fashioned thee / Made him a man” (1.2.9);32 or in Richard III: “Even of your metal, of your very blood […]” (4.4.305). Henry V’s famous “Once more unto the breach” speech makes the English army’s “mettle” and “worth” its central overdetermined subject, with its references to sinews, 29 Lander, “‘Crack’d Crownes’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns,” 138-146. 30 “mettle, n. and adj.” OED Online. “Originally a variant of metal n., now usually distinguished in form in the senses below. The form mettle was a variant spelling used in all senses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; in the figurative senses documented here, there are many cases of -al spellings and -le spellings occurring in the same contexts within a single work with the result that quots. such as 1604 at sense A. 2a should be regarded as punning not on two words but on two senses of a single word. The first dictionary to record the figurative senses under the spelling mettle separately from metal is Kersey’s New Eng. Dict. (1702).” 31 On “metal” and “mettle” as synonymous, please see Paster, Humoring the Body, 46-7. On the connection of “mettle” and “metal” to ethnological distinctions and environment, please see Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” 131-2. However, neither Paster nor Floyd-Wilson discusses the connection of these terms to coinage. 32 The First Quarto spelling here is “mettall” (line 240). Richard II (Quarto 1, 1597). Internet Shakespeare Editions [online].

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blood, fathers, mothers, begetting, being “made in England,” and breeding.33 Metal/ mettle is that which cannot be completely masked nor completely performed; it is a fundamental datum. One does not so much act in a base or noble manner, as have base or noble inclinations emanating from one’s mettle/metal. Our terms “genetic” or “DNA” offer a similar sense of something within flesh, blood, and bones that is generative of a certain form of life. In Shakespeare’s conception of such inwardness, however, what provided an imaginative basis for a similar sense of visceral inherence appears to have been metallurgy, epitomized by the testing of coins for soundness or debasement. Testing or assaying the hidden metal/mettle of a person’s character appears prominently in his late, dark comedy, Measure for Measure, as exemplified in the metallurgical metaphors deployed to frame the plot as a test of metal/mettle. The Duke of Vienna is called away to another city and has just officially appointed Angelo, a man of high ethical reputation, to govern in his absence. Angelo responds: Now, good my lord, Let there be some more test made of my mettle Before so noble and so great a figure Be stamped upon it. (1.1.51)

Punning this time on his own name, Angelo likens himself to a gold or silver angel coin that is going through the process of being officially minted. The minting process at the time happened in the Tower of London, where large melting pots held up to 600lbs of silver. A pot was placed in a furnace and stirred until the metals liquefied and attained a certain degree of uniformity, at which point the purity of the metal was tested. Only when the fineness, or ratio of noble to base metal, was considered adequate to the requisite standard was the metal then poured into ingots, beaten flat, cut into correct sizes using scales, hammered into a circular shape, then hammered with stamps of its denomination on both sides – a “great figure” such as the monarch’s face or in the case of the angel coin, the image of the archangel Michael.34 Angelo is in effect humbly suggesting that the Duke, in bestowing the title and power of his office on Angelo, is prematurely stamping the quality of his metal/mettle before testing its purity. 33 Perhaps the “noble luster” Henry sees shining out of his soldiers’ eyes in this speech specif ically conjured the image of glinting precious metal within: Let us swear That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not, For there is none of you so mean and base That hath not noble luster in your eyes. (Henry V 3.2.30-33) 34 Challis, 11-13.

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

As we shall see, however, there is no test as effective as wielding power. In Act II, after Angelo takes command, he undergoes an apparent transformation. A nun named Isabella has come to plead for the life of her brother Claudio, who is about to be executed for fornication or premarital sex. Angelo rejects Claudio’s case but discovers that he now lusts after Isabella. Now, he understands metal/mettle in a very different way: Ha! Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin God’s image In stamps that are forbid. ’Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made As to put metal in restrainèd means To make a false one. (2.4.44)

The two different attitudes towards striking coins in these two passages express quite a contrast between Angelo before and Angelo after meeting Isabella. Before, he understood a “stamp” on “metal/mettle” as a certification of a coin’s fineness and his integrity – a kind of vow that what is denoted externally by the official stamp does indeed represent the quality of the “stuff” one is made of within. After meeting Isabella in Act II, however, Angelo now mobilizes coin metaphors to establish a false equivalence between murder and counterfeiting coins. A simple translation of this strange passage would be: “It would be like pardoning a murderer, to pardon those who fornicate. It is as easy to murder a person as it is to give birth to a bastard.” But by making the main terms metaphorically comparable to coinage, Angelo compares “A man already made” to “one” (a coin) that is falsely made, so that bastards are converted into counterfeit coins, which makes murder and fornication comparable in numismatic terms. The twisted equivalence is signalled by its chiastic form when “falsely to take away a life true made” is made equal to “To make a false [life].” Thus the description of murdering someone as “putting false metal in restrainèd means” could allude firstly to murder, stabbing a metal knife or dagger in “restrainèd” flesh; secondly to pouring base metal into ingots in order to counterfeit coins; and thirdly to unlawful sex in the sense of putting improper semen in “restrainèd means,” as “metal/mettle,” or the “stuff” of which one is made, could also refer to semen at this time.35 This last “counterfeits” bastards who “coin God’s image / In stamps that are forbid.” The text is conspicuously convoluted to make murder, fornication, and counterfeiting interchangeable. 35 “mettle, n. 2b.” OED Online.

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Somehow the parallels seem to work, but one cannot get rid of the sense that there is a suppressed premise or middle term somewhere. We realize that Angelo’s phrase, “putting false metal in restrainèd means” also ironically describes himself, thanks to the duke’s action of putting Angelo in dignified office. Thus, the government, in its official and legal capacity, engages in acts of murder and counterfeiting, as well – in the form of judicial executions and the debasement of coins for political and economic reasons. But because these are official acts of the government, they are not “false” but legitimate. In other words, Angelo, in contrast to his earlier attitude that the mettle of a leader must be consonant with the title and power of the “stamp” upon him, now asserts that might makes right. In doing so, the false equivalence he constructs between murder, fornication, and counterfeiting all do indeed converge – but on him, when he desires to fornicate with Isabella but sentences her brother to death for doing so. The agility of the very complicated metaphorical reasoning in this passage, showing how the crucible of power exposes Angelo’s inner baseness despite his pure outer appearance, attests to the fluency with which metaphors of coinage in a climate of debasement gave form to the conceptualization of false appearances, and the way the theatrical plot itself is organized as an assay of the hidden depths of character.36

Touch This section explores the methods of assaying metal/mettle that accompany the problem of inner worth in Shakespeare. The term “touch” in Shakespeare could refer not only to sensation on skin, but also to the discernment of metal/mettle by “feeling” the weight of the coin in a situation of trust or doubt, as we have seen in the earlier examples of Posthumus or Falstaff. “Touch” also referred to the ancient method of testing the purity of precious metals by using a touchstone, which is a type of black quartz or slate on which a gold specimen is rubbed.37 By comparing the colour of the streak to those of standardized metal sticks the fineness or degree of purity of the metal could be determined.38 Richard III refers to this assaying method when he says to Buckingham, “now do I play the touch, / To try if thou be 36 I explore the possibility that the affordances of this metaphor accommodate ways to solve the problem of false appearances, rather than just providing a vivid way to describe it, in a chapter of a book not yet published on Much Ado About Nothing, which makes comparison with modern economic theory that tackle similar problems of uncertainty under a climate of “debasement.” 37 “Certainly they readily exposed at least the grosser debasements which might otherwise easily pass the normal scrutiny of the marketplace.” Davies, A History of Money, 330. 38 For more precise comparisons, the Goldsmiths’ Company of the City of London issued 24 gold and silver “touch-needles” to represent each of the traditional 24 carats used for the weighing of gold and was

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

current gold indeed” (4.2.9-10), wherein he tests the limits of Buckingham’s loyalty to him. In Timon of Athens, a servant reports that friends of Timon, when asked for loans, “have all been touched and found base metal, / For they have all denied him” (3.3.6), indicating that these alleged friends have been tested for the purity of their friendship and failed. It might be argued that the sense of “touch” in these examples refers only to the exterior surface, thus aligning with the usual sense of “touch” and excluding it as an assaying of interior quality. However, despite the way actual touchstones physically work, Shakespeare’s usage attests to a deeper conception of “touch” that indexes inward quality as well. One trait that noble “metal/mettle” has with regard to touch at this time is that it “bides” it – that is, it withstands trial without transformation, as in this passage from the Comedy of Errors: I see the jewel best enamelèd Will lose his beauty. Yet the gold bides still That others touch, and often touching will Wear gold. (2.1.114-117)

What Adriana is saying here is that, unlike enamel, a surface that can disintegrate, gold can bide touch, though frequent touching will wear it down. The implicit point here is that even if pure gold gets worn out through repeated touching, it is gold all the way through, as it is a metal/mettle, not a surface covering. To “bide” the touch then is to show the stuff one is made of through and through, to the inner core. When Desdemona in Othello teases him and says, “Nay, when I have a suit / Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed, / It shall be full of poise and difficult weight” (3.3.89-91), she explicitly associates “touch” with assaying by weighing, suggesting that it bears not only upon surfaces, but inward quality to the core. Another example where touch is not merely a test of surfaces, but inward quality is the terrifying mock-trial of Falstaff proposed by Mistress Quickly in the Merry Wives of Windsor: MISTRESS QUICKLY, as Fairy Queen With trial-fire touch me his finger-end. If he be chaste, the flame will back descend And turn him to no pain. But if he start, It is the flesh of a corrupted heart. PISTOL, as Hobgoblin A trial, come! responsible for issuing these gold standards to the nine regional hallmarking centres where public trials of the purity of coins were conducted. Davies, A History of Money, 332.

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SIR HUGH, as a fairy Come, will this wood take fire? Sir Hugh puts a taper to Falstaff’s finger, and he starts. FALSTAFF O, O, O! MISTRESS QUICKLY, as Fairy Queen Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire! (5.5.89-96)

Falstaff, needless to say, does not bide the touch of the flame to his finger-end – which, according to his ruthless judges, shows proof that it extends from a corrupted heart. So, Shakespeare’s usage of this sense of “touch” indexes not only a surface streak on a touchstone, but one’s innermost mettle through contact with that surface.39 This comical method of assaying devised by Mistress Quickly however conflates two actual types of assaying: touch, as described above, and the most reliable method of assaying – the “gold standard,” if you will – trial by fire. The trial itself was an ancient practice, called cupellation, in which a small sample of the metal object in question – coin, jewellery, piece of ornament – was placed in a cupel, which is a crucible made of bone ash and heated in the furnace. Whatever impurities or base metals – together referred to as “dross” – that were melded with the gold or silver changes into black ash, meaning that the dross oxidized and burned away, absorbed into the cupel. Since gold and silver do not react with oxygen and are not consumed, what is left after trial by fire is pure gold or pure silver. 40 Cupellation must have been fairly common knowledge, since we see casual, quick, and punning references to it in Shakespeare. In the Comedy of Errors (4.3.52), Dromio again invokes the “angel of light” pun that we saw earlier in Falstaff’s and Angelo’s lines. While the phrase ultimately derives from II Corinthians 11:14, “for Satan himselfe is transformed into an Angel of light” (GEN), it had become a Protestant iconoclastic rallying cry against the demonic wearing false robes of religious piety:41 DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: Nay, she is worse; she is the 39 While the notorious medieval legal trial known as the “ordeal” – by combat, by water, and by fire – was off icially abolished by 1215, the metallurgical resonances of burning seems to have remained in the construction of the sense of inner moral worth in Shakespeare’s time. For more on the ordeal, please see Head, “Saints, Heretics, Fire,” 235. See also Murray, “The Burning of Heretical Books,” 82. The references to the ordeal by fire throughout the medieval and even Renaissance periods describes a situation where the accused is deemed innocent if they came through unscorched by a hot iron, or if they healed quickly enough after three days. For examples, please see Kerr, Forsythe, and Plyley, “Cold Water and Hot Iron,” 573-595. 40 Challis, 25. 41 Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? chapter 6, “Unmasking the Angel of Light,” 261-321, and chapter 7, “‘Men Should Be What They Seem,” 323-390. See also Hwang, “From Priests’ to Actors’ Wardrobe,” 282-305.

The Hef t of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare’s Pl ays 

devil’s dam, and here she comes in the habit of a light wench. And thereof comes that the wenches say “God damn me”; that’s as much to say “God make me a light wench.” It is written they appear to men like angels of light. Light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn: ergo, light wenches will burn. Come not near her.

It is difficult to make sense of this passage without understanding the embedded references to angels and to debased coinage. The phrase “light wenches will burn” must refer to assaying light coins through cupellation. But here is also a suggestion as to why heretics are burned rather than executed by other means – burning is a form of assaying. 42 If God damns them, as Dromio suggests, casts them in fire, they will burn, because they are “light,” or made of base metals or impurities. That connection between debased coinage, assaying, and heresy is made clearer in this casual and humorous reference in Much Ado About Nothing: CLAUDIO That I love her, I feel. PRINCE That she is worthy, I know. BENEDICK That I neither feel how she should be loved nor know how she should be worthy is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me. I will die in it at the stake. PRINCE Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty. (1.1.224-231)

With an understanding of cupellation, we can interpret that what fire cannot melt away from the “debased coinage,” or the mixture of base and noble metal/mettle that is Benedick, is that which he believes is noble and pure in himself. Benedick’s meaning is comedic: he commits to bachelorhood as if it were a pure and noble religious belief. He regards his indifference to a woman’s marriageability as his true and noble self, and thus will maintain this indifference to his martyrdom, 42 This is in contrast to the most common reason given for the burning of heretics: that it was perceived as the most painful form of death, hence the most effective deterrent to the spread of heretical beliefs. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 68-70.

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he declares. In irreverently eliding together cupellation and executing heretics, Benedick too suggests that burning at the stake is a form of assaying metal/mettle, and hence fashions himself and heretics as debased coins. 43

Conclusion As Benedick’s speech and other examples here seem to evince, understanding one’s inward self as having metallurgical properties that can be assayed was a readily comprehensible metaphor in the medium of theatre. Benedick’s excessively witty joke conjoining assaying with heretical burning indicates a familiarity with metallurgical processes so agile, along with so apt a cultural tendency to project features of metallurgical assaying into a sense of one’s own moral, inner mettle, as to comprise in itself an argument for the quick tendency of Shakespearean characters to fashion themselves as debased numismatic subjects. These references to officially debased coinage were so consistently embedded in metaphors or multiple-layered puns, so as to imply a sly and steady critique of the Tudor government’s subterfuge. Despite the climate of uncertainty and unabating economic crises to which the Great Debasement was no small contributor, Shakespeare’s theatre is unerringly optimistic. Even in its most horrifically tragic endings, the truth about deception ultimately comes out. No character is left continuing to suffer or enjoy their misprisions by the end of a play – the cast gathers to witness the discoveries of truths that had been hidden. It would be speculative to think that the ancient art of metallurgy made possible this optimism concerning inwardness, but it was at least certain that the techniques of assaying made available a distinct forensic modality available to engage with the problem of hidden realities. Shakespeare appears to have conceived of the new technological innovation that was theatre at the time as a means to reconstruct and perform the dynamics of deception through this forensic modality, ironically enough by having characters appearing to be what they are not, by actors appearing to be what they are not. However, the utopian condition where all may witness outward signs equal their inward value is all that the theatrical construct of assaying could be optimistic about – a shared clarity that is witness to, not necessarily justice or a happy ending, but in the very least a shared economy of truth. 43 Famous biblical examples of things that “bide the touch” of flames, i.e. do not oxidize and burn include: the burning bush (Exodus 3:2); Meschach, Shadrach, and Abednego (Daniel 3: 19-27); or Isaiah (Isaiah 43: 2) – which may further support the suggestion that burning heretics was associated with the assaying for purity of metal/mettle, and that the metallurgical properties of gold or silver appear to be the source of the imagination and construction of the ideology of holiness or purity in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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