Accounting Faith and Seeing ‘Ghost Money’ in Masaccio’s Tribute Money

AbstractMoney is uncommon in Florentine Renaissance art; more uncommon, largely undetected, are depictions of or possible references to the Florentine practice of registering money on account and transferring funds one location to another. One exception is Masaccio's Tribute Money, depicting the moment when Christ and his apostles approach Capernaum, are confronted by the tax collector of the temple, and are requested to pay the temple tribute. Christ directs his apostle Peter to seek the payment within a fish, Peter does so, and then pays the tax with the money miraculously provided. This essay argues that to the period eye and mind, Masaccio's fresco may well have doubled as biblical illustration and financial commentary of the soundness of Florentine financial transactions.Keywords: Masaccio, Brancacci Chapel, Tribute Money, “Ghost Money,” Monies of Account“Nel nome di Dio e del Guadagno” (“In the name of God and good earnings”) was the statement with which Francesco di Marco Datini, the “Merchant of Prato,” regularly opened his account ledgers. Datini (1335-1410) was an international merchant from Prato, a small town in the larger Florentine territorial state; his world was broadly Florentine at the beginnings of what we now call the Florentine Renaissance.Datini's unabashed conjoining of religion and earnings was most immediately expressed in relation to business, but it could just as easily have been articulated or later assessed in relation to any number of aspects of his and his contemporaries’ culture. For example, in the realm of artistic patronage, production, and collecting, economic historian Richard Goldthwaite has argued that the whole of Florentine Renaissance art, particularly its remarkable abundance, variety, quality, and distribution, much of it religious in nature, was a cultural manifestation of the strength and vitality of the Florentine economy. As a patron of art and architecture, most notably of a palace and a funerary monument in Prato, Datini was a demonstration of Goldthwaite's thesis. This chapter addresses another contemporary demonstration in Masaccio's Tribute Money fresco of the mid 1420s (fig. 9.1); it does so not so much as a discussion of the specific biblical story that is Masaccio's subject but, more broadly, of Florentine financial culture that would have created a receptive “period mentality” and contemporary Florentine linkage of the city's economy to this story from the life of St. Peter.