The cover of Lisa Jardine’s “Worldly Goods” shows the Portrait of a Merchant (c. 1530) by the Flemish artist Jan Gossaert (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Here we can see the complete work.

The merchant, caught in the act of writing up his transactions no doubt, stares out at us, assured and confident. And it is he and his fellow merchants, bankers, dealers and other entrepreneurs of the 16th century who assume centre stage in this fascinating book, the likes of Gossaert, the Bellini brothers, Van Eyck, Mantegna and all the other great artists of the period given just walk-on parts.

For what we learn is how the vast profusion of goods - from damask to dyes, from carpets to coral - changed hands, ending up as evidence of the good taste or, at the least, the healthy purses, of those people who commissioned the paintings we so much admire.

Portrait of a Man

Robert Campin (c. 1530)

                                                                         

                                                                          Doge Leonardo Loredan

                                                                          Giovanni Bellini  (1501)

The sitters in both these paintings (found in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London) wear costly clothing: the first, an elegant fur cloak and a turban coloured this amazing shade of crimson by the use of  indian lac, ‘a dye made from ground-up cochineal beetles, or from the bark of the trees in which the beetles lay their eggs’ and imported into Venice or Amsterdam at great expense. (Look at the similar head covering worn by the sitter in Jan Van Eyck’s Man in a Turban, just a few feet away from the Campin, and reputed to be a self-portrait of the artist).

Doge Loredan, meanwhile, is resplendent in the damask robes befitting his office (an equally rare material - imported from the Levant - which the new Doge insisted on as a symbol of ‘Venetian access to wealth and goods in the East through its historic position as dominating maritime power in the Mediterranean’).

Once you have read this book, you will never look at paintings of the period in the same way again.  One of my favourite works in the Sainsbury Wing, for example, is The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486) by Carlo Crivelli, of which this is a detail.

Next time I look at the Crivelli (when it is back from its temporary loan),

in addition to the familiar details which have always struck me (the little boy peering down from the top of the steps on the left, the tiniest of windows through which the light of the Holy Ghost is passing, the battered brick wall visible through the archway), I will be looking out for the evidence of opulence in the decor and fittings: in this case, the beautiful Turkish carpet casually draped over the balcony directly up from the kneeling Virgin, the elegant ceiling bosses above the balcony.

And when the painting includes representations of the donor, then the painter would sometimes feel free - or would be encouraged - to include some of the donor’s own goods as part of the decor.

In the left panel of Robert Campin’s (1425) Merode Triptych, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), for example, we see the donors gazing in awe as the Archangel Gabriel announces the good news to the Virgin Mary in a house which would seem rather more luxurious than that of the average carpenter and his wife.

Tempting as it is to go into more detail about Lisa Jardine’s ever informative book, I will end with some details about the absolutely extraordinary problems encountered by travellers attempting to navigate their way through the multitude of different currencies in use in Europe at this period, providing - as she says - ‘easy opportunities for extortionate demands and short-changing’.

In fact this is not your average traveller, since Professor Jardine concentrates on Albrecht Dürer’s year-long journey around the Low Countries from Bruges to Cologne and northwards to Nijmegen, where he had to deal with the following currencies:

pfennigs (silver);

heller;

stuivers (stüber);

weisspfennigs (2 heller 20 weisspfennigs = 24 stuivers = 2.53 g. gold;

blanke (2 stuivers);

pfund (30 pfennigs);

orrt (quarter gulden);

Rhenish gulden (8 pfund 12 pfennigs);

‘schlechter’ gulden (12 stuivers);

Hornish gulden (issued by the Count of Horn);

Portuguese gulden;

Philipps gulden (Netherlandish: 25 stuivers);

crona (Sonnenkrone: gold pieces worth c. 1 florin 9 stuivers);

anglot (English coins: 2 florins 2 stuivers);

rose nobles;

Flemish nobles;

Hungarian ducats;

gold Carolus gulden (1.71 g.gold = 20 stuivers).

(And we used to think things were bad when we travelled around western Europe before they introduced the euro!)

I shall finish with Dürer’s own account of the various settlements he had to make before setting off for Nuremberg after a month’s stay in Antwerp in July 1521.

Paid the doctor 6 stuivers, again I gave the Steward of the Augustinian convent at Antwerp a Life of Our Lady and 4 stuivers to his servant. I gave Master Jacob an Engraved Passion and a Woodcut Passion and 5 other pieces, and gave 4 stuivers to his servant. I changed 4 florins for expenses. I bought 14 fishskins for 2 Philipps florins.  I have made portraits in black chalk of Aert Braun and his wife.  I gave the goldsmith who appraised the three rings for me 1 gulden worth of art.  Of the three rings which I took in exchange for prints, the two smaller are valued at 15 crona, but the sapphire is worth 25 crona - that makes 54 gulden 8 stuivers. And among other things that the above Frenchman took are 36 large books: that makes 9 gulden.  I bought a screw-knife for 2 stuiver. Item: the man with the rings has cheated me by half - I do not understand it.

I bought a red beret for my god-child for 18 stuiver. Item: I lost 12 stuiver at card play. Drank 2 stuivers.  Item: I bought 3 fine little rubies for 11 gulden and 12 stuivers. I changed 1 gulden for expenses.  I have eaten one more time with the Augustinians.  I paid 5 stuivers for brushes made of wild guinea-pig bristles. I bought 6 more brushes for 3 stuivers.

Item: I made the great Anthony Haunolt’s portrait on a royal sheet of paper carefully with black chalk.  I made careful portraits of Aert Braun and his wife with black chalk on two royal sheets of paper, and I drew him once more with the silverpoint.  He gave me an anglot.