The Moneylender and His Wife
Quentin Massys (Metsys) (1465/66-1530) · 1514
A money changer sits at his counter weighing gold coins and pearls on a delicate balance, while his wife, turning the page of an illuminated Book of Hours open at a Virgin and Child, lifts her eyes from devotion to the scales. Between them the table carries the whole apparatus of sixteenth-century finance and of the moral argument about it: stacked coins, rings, a small jewel box, a folded document, weights, a snuffed candle, a carafe of clear water and, on the shelf behind, books, an apple and a rosary. Antwerp, where Massys worked, had just become the money market of Europe, and the couple are its citizens.
The convex mirror on the counter is the passage visitors return to. In its bulging reflection appear a window with red-and-gold bars, a strip of street, and a man in a red hat reading beside it, a quotation of the mirror in Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait and an assertion that Massys could do anything his predecessors had done. Notice too the enamel-smooth surface, so tight that the pearls read as separate globes of light, and the way the wife's hand hovers, caught between two pages and two value systems. The original frame is recorded as carrying the command from Leviticus, that you shall have just balances and just weights.
Massys founded the Antwerp school and effectively invented this kind of half-length genre subject, which was copied and adapted for a century, most persistently by Marinus van Reymerswaele. Older readings treated the picture as a sermon against avarice; recent ones stress that the scales are honest, the water is pure, and the painting may just as easily praise scrupulous commerce carried out under the eye of God.
Did You Know? The tiny reader reflected in the convex mirror has often been proposed as Massys himself, slipped into the picture the way Van Eyck slipped into the Arnolfini mirror.
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