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

“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.¹ 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