Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered

Quinten Massys,  Tax Collectors, late 1520s, Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz/ Vienna

One of the formative images of later Flemish genre paintings, Quinten Massys’s Tax Collectors has been rediscovered (now Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz). Its ledger clearly reveals the proper designation of the figures, despite interpretations of their activity as banking; one of them, wearing glasses, appears to be inspecting accounts. Telling markers of Massys’s own authorship (ca. 1525–30) reveal that his large workshop based at least some of the better copies on this painting. The subject clearly relates to local ambivalence in Antwerp about taxes and the money economy, especially during a period of financial recession. The article concludes with a discussion about later variants derived from Massys’s prototype, especially those by Marinus van Reymerswaele (Paris, London, plus lesser variants), but the theme is still present in Rembrandt’s 1628 Moneychanger (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and addressed anew in his etching of Jan Wtenbogaert (1639).

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.2
Quinten Massys,  Tax Collectors,  late 1520s,  Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz/ Vienna
Fig. 1 Quinten Massys, Tax Collectors, late 1520s, oil on panel, 86 x 71 cm. Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz/Vienna (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Two Misers,  ca. 1540,  National Gallery, London
Fig. 2 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Two Misers, ca. 1540, oil on panel, 92 x 74.6 cm. National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG 944 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Grotesque Old Woman,  ca. 1520,  National Gallery, London
Fig. 3 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Woman, ca. 1520, oil on panel, 64.2 x 45.5 cm. National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG 5769 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Moneychanger and His Wife,  dated 1514,  Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fig. 4 Quinten Massys, Moneychanger and His Wife, dated 1514, oil on panel, 74 x 68 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 2029 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Pieter Gillis, 1517,  Collection of Earl of Radnor, on loan to National Gallery London
Fig. 5 Quinten Massys, Pieter Gillis, 1517, oil on panel, 74.5 x 53.4 cm. Collection of Earl of Radnor, on loan to National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1517,  Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Hampton Court
Fig. 6 Quinten Massys, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1517, oil on panel, 50.4 x 45 cm. Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Hampton Court, inv. no. RCIN 405759 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Detail of fig. 1. Hands and jewels,  late 1520s,
Fig. 7 Detail of fig. 1. Hands and jewels [side-by-side viewer]
Pieter Bruegel,  Temperance, 1560,  Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam
Fig. 8 Pieter Bruegel, Temperance, 1560, ink on paper, 22.5 x 29.5 cm. Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, inv. no. MB 331(artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Gossaert,  Portrait of a Young Banker,  ca. 1530,  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 9 Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Young Banker, ca. 1530, oil on panel, 63.6 x 47.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1967.4.1 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Maarten van Heemskerck,  Portrait of a Thirty-Four-Year-Old Banker, 1529,  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Fig. 10 Maarten van Heemskerck, Portrait of a Thirty-Four-Year-Old Banker, 1529, oil on panel, 84.5 x 65 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. 1128A1 (inv. A3518) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Petrus Christus,  A Goldsmith and His Clients, 1449,  Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 11 Petrus Christus, A Goldsmith and His Clients, 1449, oil on panel, 98 x 85 cm. Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 1975.1.110 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  The Ill-Matched Pair,  early 1520s,  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 12 Quinten Massys, The Ill-Matched Pair, early 1520s, oil on panel, 43.2 x 63 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1971.55. 1 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Grotesque Old Man in Profile (pendant to fig. 4,  ca. 1520,  Private collection, New York
Fig. 13 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Man in Profile (pendant to fig. 4), ca. 1520, oil on panel, 64.1 x 45 cm. Private collection, New York (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Massys,  Peasants at the Tax Collector, 1539,  Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Fig. 14 Jan Massys, Peasants at the Tax Collector, 1539, oil on panel, 85 x 115 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, inv. no. 804 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Vermeer,  Woman Balancing Scales,  ca. 1664, Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.
Fig. 15 Jan Vermeer, Woman Balancing Scales, ca. 1664, oil on canvas, 42.5 x 38 cm. Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1942.9.97 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Banker and His Wife, 1538, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Fig. 16 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 79 x 107 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, inv. no. 2102 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Banker and His Wife, 1538,  Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Fig. 17 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 67 x 103 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. no. 138 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Rembrandt van Rijn,  Moneychanger, 1627,  Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Fig. 18 Rembrandt van Rijn, Moneychanger, 1627, oil on panel, 32 x 42 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, inv. no. 828D (Bredius 420) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Rembrandt van Rijn,  Goldweigher/Portrait of Jan Wtenbogaert, 1639,
Fig. 19 Rembrandt van Rijn, Goldweigher/Portrait of Jan Wtenbogaert, 1639, etching, 25.2 x 20.5 cm (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
  1. 1. Johann Kräftner, Die Fürst als Sammler: Neuerwerbungen unter Hans-Adam II. von und zu Liechtenstein, exh. cat. (Vienna: Liechtenstein Gallery, 2010), 20–21, no. 1, quoting extensively from the unpublished version of this article. There the provenance is given: “Before 1800 presumably acquired by Sir Thomas 2nd Baron Lyttleton of Frankley (1744–1779); around 1800 Sir William Henry Littleton (1724–1808); Barone Westcote and Lyttleton: 1880 documented as hanging in Hagley Hall, Worcestershire; until 2008 in family inheritance; July 9, 2008, auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, lot 8; acquired 2008 by Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox, London, inv. no. GE 2462.”

  2. 2. The best catalogue of the composition, based upon a version in the British royal collection, is Lorne Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114–18, no. 72 (with literature). Buried among this inventory of variants is the version (p. 116, no. E, fig. 40) that will be discussed below as the original Massys of the entire series. See also Adri Mackor, “Are Marinus’ Tax Collectors Collecting Taxes?” Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie 36 (1995): 3–13, who sees the original composition with its consistent headgear as a group (Type II of his three). Also see the excellent entry on the Marinus picture in the National Gallery, London: Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company, 2014), 648–60.

  3. 3. For the technical study of the image as well as analysis of its details, especially the coins on the table, the author gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of the team at the London gallery of Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox, which owned the painting before its recent acquisition by the prince of Liechtenstein. See also the discussion of coins in Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company, 2014), 657 n18.

  4. 4. Peter Klein, letter to Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox.

  5. 5. Ibid.

  6. 6. F. de Mely, “Deux tableaux signés de Corneille de Lyon,” Fondation Eugène Piot: Monuments et mémoires 38 (1910): 125–44, esp. 135; compare the inscriptions transcribed by Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 114.

  7. 7. See note 2 above.

  8. 8. Martin Davies, Early Netherlandish School, National Gallery Catalogues (London: National Gallery, 1955) 63–65, no. 944.

  9. 9. C. Huysmans, “Een onuitgegeven hekelschrift van het einde der 16e eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche taal- en letterkunde 16 (1897): 44–70, esp. 50; quoted in Paul Ackroyd, Rachel Billinge, Lorne Campbell, and Jo Kirby, “The ‘Two Tax-Gatherers’ by Marinus van Reymerswaele: Original and Replica,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 24 (2003): 55n33; see also Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 658.

  10. 10. A new study of the Louvre Moneychanger has just appeared; see Joanna Woodall, “De Wisselaer. Quentin Matsys’s Man Weighing Gold Coins and his Wife, 1514,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64 (2014): 38–75 (on Antwerp and exchange). I am grateful to Professor Woodall for generously sharing her ideas prior to publication and for offering commentary on an earlier version of this essay.

  11. 11. de Roover, Raymond, Money, Banking, and Credit in Medieval Bruges (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1948), 171–344.

  12. 12. Usually spectacles signal shortsightedness of a more general kind; compare the Spectacle Seller, ascribed toJacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Groningen Museum (illustrated in Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting.XII, trans. Heinz Norden (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975), 119, no. 288, plate 152. Also see the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for example, Elck (1558; British Museum, London); commentary by Jürgen Müller in Nadine Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 169. In a similar invocation of moral shortsightedness, eyeglasses sit next to the ass who reads sheet music in The Ass at School (1556; Staatliche Museen, Berlin); see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 142–44, no. 40. In this image the feckless teacher is dressed in fifteenth-century garb with another turbanlike head-covering.

  13. 13. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 96–101, no. 6, there still identified as Saint Eligius; but see Hugo van der Velden, “Defrocking St. Eloy: Petrus Christus’s Vocational Portrait of a Goldsmith,” Simiolus 26 (1998): 242–76.

  14. 14. Margaret Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 1400–1500 (London: Mills & Boon, 1980), 118, quoted in Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools (London: National Gallery Publications, 1998), 212-17, who concluded: “His hat, often described as a turban is a chaperon with a long cornette which is twisted round the patte and wound round and round the bourrelet to create the effect of a turban. It is difficult to find another instance of a cornette wound quite so extravagantly around a chaperon (p. 214).”  See also Lorne Campbell and Philip Atwood, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian (London: National Gallery, 2008), 178–79, no. 46. For the horns of Margaret van Eyck and the Arnolfini Double Portrait as well as the hoods of Leal Souvenir, the Berlin Arnolfini Portrait, and the London Self-Portrait/Man with a Turban, see Margaret Scott, “Dress in van Eyck’s Paintings,” in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 133.

  15. 15. Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 98–99, no. 9; Campbell, Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools, 218–23.

  16. 16. Nevertheless, because art history seldom fails to advance every possible interpretation, several observers have indeed viewed this pair of ugly men as portraits: Leo van Puyvelde, “Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys et les percepteurs d’impôts par Marin van Reymerswale,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 26 (1957): 3–23. In similar fashion, the claim of expensive patronage conditions the seemingly paradoxical conclusions, tending toward a positive reading, by Keith Moxey, “The Criticism of Avarice in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting,” in Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985), 21–34, esp. 30: “In view of the fact that the avarice satires of the Massys school must have been relatively expensive paintings, comparable in scale and presumably in cost to small altarpieces or devotional panels, it is reasonable to assume that they were intended for the wealthier commercial and professional classes of society. In other words it is likely that they were intended for a social group that included some of the occupations satirized. In light of these considerations, is it not possible that tax collectors and lawyers may themselves have owned pictorial satires of their own professions as a means of asserting their recognition of the abuses for which their colleagues were responsible as well as their own virtue in refusing to succumb to temptation?”

  17. 17. Larry Silver, The Paintings of QuintenMassys with Catalogue Raisonné (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld & Schram, 1984), 37–38, 140–44; Silver, “Power and Pelf: A New-Found Old Man by Massys,” Simiolus 9 (1977): 63-70. In 1658 Alexander van Fornenbergh mentioned in  Den Antwerpschen Protheus . . . (Antwerp: Hendrick van Soest, 1658), 31, seeing among Massys’s works, “several monstrous and comical mugs, men and women” (eenighe ouw-bollige monstreuse tronyen, mans en vrouwen).

  18. 18. Silver, “Power and Pelf,” 68, figs. 5–6.

  19. 19. Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 228–30, nos. 70–71. Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 446–63. Campbell’s catalogue entry, based in part on consultation with a physician, argues that the Woman is based on the disfigured features that mark Paget’s disease (ôseitis deformans), which causes bone deformations and an over-developed forehead, chin, and space between nose and mouth. He also correctly points to the fifteenth-century Netherlandish origin of the woman’s headdress, which can easily be compared to the simpler precedent worn by the subject of Margaret van Eyck (Bruges; Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 180–81, no. 47), though he points more specifically to copies after a lost portrait of Margaret of Bavaria, Duchess of Burgundy, ca. 1410.

  20. 20. Silver, “Power and Pelf,” 70–73, figs. 10, 12. The figure has also been compared to the lost portraits of the early fifteenth century of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, particularly by Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 228; see also Silver,  “Power and Pelf,” 70 n17, fig. 11.

  21. 21. Leontine Buijnsters-Smets, Jan Massys: Een Antwerps schilder uit de zestiende eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 1995), 166–67, no. 11.

  22. 22. See, most recently, Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), esp. 53–86 (with references). For the city of Antwerp in the period, particularly for its economic and social history, see Jan van der Stock, ed., Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, exh. cat. (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993).

  23. 23. de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit, 201, 242, 267. As noted in Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 231–32, after mid-century the projection of moral inferiority and transgression through self-indulgence was later projected onto rural lower classes, the farming peasants, in paintings by Pieter Bruegel and Pieter Aertsen.

  24. 24. See the recent Woodall article on this painting (note 10 above). Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 211–12, no. 16, quoting as the source for the lost frame the seventeenth-century adulatory biography of Massys by van Fornenbergh, Den Antwerpschen Protheus . . . 26–27. There the comparison was made between this balancing of a scale for its accuracy without weights, as repeated in Jan Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), discussed by Arthur Wheelock in Arthur Wheelock and Frederick J. Duparc, eds., Johannes Vermeer, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 140–45, no. 10; see also Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 34, 122.

  25. 25. The Erasmus is in the royal collection at Hampton Court; see Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures, 86–89, no. 54; Gillis is in a private collection in England; see Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 168–69, no. 42.

  26. 26. See the later dialogue and overlap between genre and portrait images in mid-seventeenth-century Holland, discussed by David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 407–30.

  27. 27. Other signed (and often dated) versions of this Marinus “banker and wife” composition appear in Copenhagen, Dresden (1541), Florence (1540), Madrid (1537, but also this best version of 1538), Munich (1538), and Nantes (1538).

  28. 28. de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, 183–84, also discussing “picking and culling,” sorting out heavier coins for their additional bullion content. He also notes that “clipping was not easy to detect until the introduction of a machine for milling coin in the middle of the sixteenth century.”

  29. 29. Still basic is Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956), 154–91 (see p. 17, fig. 13, for Barthel Bruyn the Elder’s 1524 juxtaposition of a skull with an extinguished candle, together with the explicit inscription in Latin, “everything is destined to perish, death is the final goal of all”). See also Alberto Veca, Vanitas: Il simbolismo del tempo, exh. cat. (Bergamo: Galleria Lorenzelli, 1981).

  30. 30. Dimensions 86.5 x 70.0 cm, the same size as the recovered original, indicating that this replica was carefully painted at exact size.

  31. 31. Although the London picture was long regarded as the original, its comparatively dry execution and its lack of underpainting when compared to the Paris picture, albeit in a current over-cleaned state, reveal that the Louvre work should take priority. This view has been confirmed by technical inspection: Ackroyd et al., “The ‘Two Tax-Gatherers,’” 50–63, which declares “the London painting is a replica, made from a tracing of the finished Paris picture.” Neither work is signed, although attribution to Marinus has been universal. See also Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 646–60.

  32. 32. Campbell, Early Flemish Pictures, 114–18, no. 72, also figs. 36, 38–41 (“Follower of Marinus van Reymerswaele”).

  33. 33. The locus classicus of this visual method remains Kurt Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), esp. 182–92; see also Weitzmann, “The Illustration of the Septuagint,” in Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. Herbert Kessler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 45–75.

  34. 34. Jean Denucé, De Antwerpsche “Konstkamers”: Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16e en 17e eeuwen (Amsterdam: De Spiegel, 1932), 28.

  35. 35. Ibid., 133.

  36. 36. No. 31: “un banquero contando getones sobre una mesa, y en ella y en el almario diferentes libros y papeles con sellos de letras y un beconquin en la caveça con orejas.” José Lopez Navio, “La gran colección de pinturas del Marqués de Leganés,” Analecta Calasanctiana 7–8 (1962): 271; Mary Crawford Volk, “New Light on a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Marquis of Leganés,” Art Bulletin 612 (1980): 267, Appendix Two. I am most grateful to Professor John Elliott for the reference to this Spanish collection.

  37. 37. Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 2; also Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 57, 145–46, 216n35.

  38. 38. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 91, pointing out that for Holland—in contrast to pre-Revolutionary France—tax-farmers were small and numerous (p. 103). For the experience of taxes in seventeenth-century Holland, see A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 171–81.

  39. 39. Herman van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy: II (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 144–66.

  40. 40. Ibid., 160.

  41. 41. Roelof van Straten, Jan Lievens, and Ingrid W L Moerman, Rembrandts Weg zur Kunst, 1606–1632 (Berlin: Reimer, 2006), 67-68, fig. 77; Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery Publications, 1991), 128–29, no. 2, where the work has its more religious title, suggesting (as pointed out by Christian Tümpel) that the theme is based on the parable (Luke 12: 13–21) of the rich man, which concludes: “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich before God.”

  42. 42. Stephanie Dickey, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2004), 66–88. The idea for using Rembrandt’s Goldweigher as a later comparison to Massys and Marinus stems from Basil Yamey, Art and Accounting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 57–58.

  43. 43. On historicizing costume, esp. berets from the sixteenth century, in early Rembrandt self-portraits, see Marieke de Winkel, “Costume in Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt by Himself, exh. cat., ed. Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot (London: National Gallery Publications, 1999), 67–68.

  44. 44. Dickey, Rembrandt, 83–85, noting that at mid-century the Amsterdam Town Hall would also show images of Moses in their council chamber; Werner Hofmann, Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel, 1983), 210–16, nos. 84–89; Donald Ehresmann, “The Brazen Serpent: A Reformation Motif in the Works of Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Workshop,” Marsyas 13 (1966–67): 32–47; Bonnie Noble, “Law and Gospel and the Strategies of Pictorial Rhetoric,” in Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2009), 27–66.

  45. 45. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 54: “In Antwerp, a tax-collector was obliged to have a surety or guarantor, who had the right to supervise the collection of money and its recording”; van Puyvelde, “Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys,” 20.

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___________. Late Gothic Europe, 1400–1500. London: Mills & Boon, 1980.

Silver, Larry. The Paintings of Quinten Massys with Catalogue Raisonné. Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld & Schram, 1984.

__________. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

__________. “Power and Pelf: A New-Found Old Man by Massys.” Simiolus 9 (1977): 63–92.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3780326

Smith, David R. “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting.” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 407–30.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043079.1987.10788441

Snow, Edward. A Study of Vermeer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Stock, Jan van der, ed. Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis. Exh. cat. Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993.

Straten, Roelof van, Jan Lievens, and Ingrid W L Moerman. Rembrandts Weg zur Kunst, 1606–1632. Berlin: Reimer, 2006.

Veca, Alberto. Vanitas: Il simbolismo del tempo. Exh. cat. Bergamo: Galleria Lorenzelli, 1981.

Velden, Hugo van der. “Defrocking St. Eloy: Petrus Christus’s Vocational Portrait of a Goldsmith.” Simiolus 26 (1998): 242–76.

Volk, Mary Crawford. “New Light on a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Marquis of Leganés.” Art Bulletin 612 (1980): 256–68.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3049993

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.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511666841

Wee van der, Herman. The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy: II. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3864-0

Weitzmann, Kurt. Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

_____________. “The Illustration of the Septuagint.” In Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, edited by Herbert Kessler, 45–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Wheelock, Arthur, and Frederik J. Duparc, eds. Johannes Vermeer. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995.

Winkel, Marieke de. “Costume in Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits.” In Rembrandt by Himself, exh. cat., edited by Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, 58–74. London: National Gallery Publications, 1999.

Woodall, Joanna. “De Wisselaer. Quentin Matsys’s Man Weighing Gold Coins and His Wife, 1514.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64 (2014): 38–75.

Yamey, Basil. Art and Accounting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

List of Illustrations

Quinten Massys,  Tax Collectors,  late 1520s,  Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz/ Vienna
Fig. 1 Quinten Massys, Tax Collectors, late 1520s, oil on panel, 86 x 71 cm. Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz/Vienna (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Two Misers,  ca. 1540,  National Gallery, London
Fig. 2 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Two Misers, ca. 1540, oil on panel, 92 x 74.6 cm. National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG 944 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Grotesque Old Woman,  ca. 1520,  National Gallery, London
Fig. 3 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Woman, ca. 1520, oil on panel, 64.2 x 45.5 cm. National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG 5769 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Moneychanger and His Wife,  dated 1514,  Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fig. 4 Quinten Massys, Moneychanger and His Wife, dated 1514, oil on panel, 74 x 68 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 2029 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Pieter Gillis, 1517,  Collection of Earl of Radnor, on loan to National Gallery London
Fig. 5 Quinten Massys, Pieter Gillis, 1517, oil on panel, 74.5 x 53.4 cm. Collection of Earl of Radnor, on loan to National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1517,  Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Hampton Court
Fig. 6 Quinten Massys, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1517, oil on panel, 50.4 x 45 cm. Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Hampton Court, inv. no. RCIN 405759 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Detail of fig. 1. Hands and jewels,  late 1520s,
Fig. 7 Detail of fig. 1. Hands and jewels [side-by-side viewer]
Pieter Bruegel,  Temperance, 1560,  Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam
Fig. 8 Pieter Bruegel, Temperance, 1560, ink on paper, 22.5 x 29.5 cm. Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, inv. no. MB 331(artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Gossaert,  Portrait of a Young Banker,  ca. 1530,  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 9 Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Young Banker, ca. 1530, oil on panel, 63.6 x 47.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1967.4.1 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Maarten van Heemskerck,  Portrait of a Thirty-Four-Year-Old Banker, 1529,  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Fig. 10 Maarten van Heemskerck, Portrait of a Thirty-Four-Year-Old Banker, 1529, oil on panel, 84.5 x 65 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. 1128A1 (inv. A3518) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Petrus Christus,  A Goldsmith and His Clients, 1449,  Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 11 Petrus Christus, A Goldsmith and His Clients, 1449, oil on panel, 98 x 85 cm. Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 1975.1.110 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  The Ill-Matched Pair,  early 1520s,  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 12 Quinten Massys, The Ill-Matched Pair, early 1520s, oil on panel, 43.2 x 63 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1971.55. 1 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Quinten Massys,  Grotesque Old Man in Profile (pendant to fig. 4,  ca. 1520,  Private collection, New York
Fig. 13 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Man in Profile (pendant to fig. 4), ca. 1520, oil on panel, 64.1 x 45 cm. Private collection, New York (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Massys,  Peasants at the Tax Collector, 1539,  Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Fig. 14 Jan Massys, Peasants at the Tax Collector, 1539, oil on panel, 85 x 115 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, inv. no. 804 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jan Vermeer,  Woman Balancing Scales,  ca. 1664, Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.
Fig. 15 Jan Vermeer, Woman Balancing Scales, ca. 1664, oil on canvas, 42.5 x 38 cm. Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., inv. no. 1942.9.97 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Banker and His Wife, 1538, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Fig. 16 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 79 x 107 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, inv. no. 2102 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Marinus van Reymerswaele,  Banker and His Wife, 1538,  Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Fig. 17 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife, 1538, oil on panel, 67 x 103 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. no. 138 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Rembrandt van Rijn,  Moneychanger, 1627,  Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Fig. 18 Rembrandt van Rijn, Moneychanger, 1627, oil on panel, 32 x 42 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, inv. no. 828D (Bredius 420) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Rembrandt van Rijn,  Goldweigher/Portrait of Jan Wtenbogaert, 1639,
Fig. 19 Rembrandt van Rijn, Goldweigher/Portrait of Jan Wtenbogaert, 1639, etching, 25.2 x 20.5 cm (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Footnotes

  1. 1. Johann Kräftner, Die Fürst als Sammler: Neuerwerbungen unter Hans-Adam II. von und zu Liechtenstein, exh. cat. (Vienna: Liechtenstein Gallery, 2010), 20–21, no. 1, quoting extensively from the unpublished version of this article. There the provenance is given: “Before 1800 presumably acquired by Sir Thomas 2nd Baron Lyttleton of Frankley (1744–1779); around 1800 Sir William Henry Littleton (1724–1808); Barone Westcote and Lyttleton: 1880 documented as hanging in Hagley Hall, Worcestershire; until 2008 in family inheritance; July 9, 2008, auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, lot 8; acquired 2008 by Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox, London, inv. no. GE 2462.”

  2. 2. The best catalogue of the composition, based upon a version in the British royal collection, is Lorne Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114–18, no. 72 (with literature). Buried among this inventory of variants is the version (p. 116, no. E, fig. 40) that will be discussed below as the original Massys of the entire series. See also Adri Mackor, “Are Marinus’ Tax Collectors Collecting Taxes?” Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie 36 (1995): 3–13, who sees the original composition with its consistent headgear as a group (Type II of his three). Also see the excellent entry on the Marinus picture in the National Gallery, London: Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company, 2014), 648–60.

  3. 3. For the technical study of the image as well as analysis of its details, especially the coins on the table, the author gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of the team at the London gallery of Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox, which owned the painting before its recent acquisition by the prince of Liechtenstein. See also the discussion of coins in Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company, 2014), 657 n18.

  4. 4. Peter Klein, letter to Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox.

  5. 5. Ibid.

  6. 6. F. de Mely, “Deux tableaux signés de Corneille de Lyon,” Fondation Eugène Piot: Monuments et mémoires 38 (1910): 125–44, esp. 135; compare the inscriptions transcribed by Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 114.

  7. 7. See note 2 above.

  8. 8. Martin Davies, Early Netherlandish School, National Gallery Catalogues (London: National Gallery, 1955) 63–65, no. 944.

  9. 9. C. Huysmans, “Een onuitgegeven hekelschrift van het einde der 16e eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche taal- en letterkunde 16 (1897): 44–70, esp. 50; quoted in Paul Ackroyd, Rachel Billinge, Lorne Campbell, and Jo Kirby, “The ‘Two Tax-Gatherers’ by Marinus van Reymerswaele: Original and Replica,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 24 (2003): 55n33; see also Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 658.

  10. 10. A new study of the Louvre Moneychanger has just appeared; see Joanna Woodall, “De Wisselaer. Quentin Matsys’s Man Weighing Gold Coins and his Wife, 1514,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64 (2014): 38–75 (on Antwerp and exchange). I am grateful to Professor Woodall for generously sharing her ideas prior to publication and for offering commentary on an earlier version of this essay.

  11. 11. de Roover, Raymond, Money, Banking, and Credit in Medieval Bruges (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1948), 171–344.

  12. 12. Usually spectacles signal shortsightedness of a more general kind; compare the Spectacle Seller, ascribed toJacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Groningen Museum (illustrated in Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting.XII, trans. Heinz Norden (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975), 119, no. 288, plate 152. Also see the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for example, Elck (1558; British Museum, London); commentary by Jürgen Müller in Nadine Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 169. In a similar invocation of moral shortsightedness, eyeglasses sit next to the ass who reads sheet music in The Ass at School (1556; Staatliche Museen, Berlin); see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 142–44, no. 40. In this image the feckless teacher is dressed in fifteenth-century garb with another turbanlike head-covering.

  13. 13. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 96–101, no. 6, there still identified as Saint Eligius; but see Hugo van der Velden, “Defrocking St. Eloy: Petrus Christus’s Vocational Portrait of a Goldsmith,” Simiolus 26 (1998): 242–76.

  14. 14. Margaret Scott, Late Gothic Europe, 1400–1500 (London: Mills & Boon, 1980), 118, quoted in Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools (London: National Gallery Publications, 1998), 212-17, who concluded: “His hat, often described as a turban is a chaperon with a long cornette which is twisted round the patte and wound round and round the bourrelet to create the effect of a turban. It is difficult to find another instance of a cornette wound quite so extravagantly around a chaperon (p. 214).”  See also Lorne Campbell and Philip Atwood, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian (London: National Gallery, 2008), 178–79, no. 46. For the horns of Margaret van Eyck and the Arnolfini Double Portrait as well as the hoods of Leal Souvenir, the Berlin Arnolfini Portrait, and the London Self-Portrait/Man with a Turban, see Margaret Scott, “Dress in van Eyck’s Paintings,” in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 133.

  15. 15. Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 98–99, no. 9; Campbell, Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools, 218–23.

  16. 16. Nevertheless, because art history seldom fails to advance every possible interpretation, several observers have indeed viewed this pair of ugly men as portraits: Leo van Puyvelde, “Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys et les percepteurs d’impôts par Marin van Reymerswale,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 26 (1957): 3–23. In similar fashion, the claim of expensive patronage conditions the seemingly paradoxical conclusions, tending toward a positive reading, by Keith Moxey, “The Criticism of Avarice in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting,” in Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985), 21–34, esp. 30: “In view of the fact that the avarice satires of the Massys school must have been relatively expensive paintings, comparable in scale and presumably in cost to small altarpieces or devotional panels, it is reasonable to assume that they were intended for the wealthier commercial and professional classes of society. In other words it is likely that they were intended for a social group that included some of the occupations satirized. In light of these considerations, is it not possible that tax collectors and lawyers may themselves have owned pictorial satires of their own professions as a means of asserting their recognition of the abuses for which their colleagues were responsible as well as their own virtue in refusing to succumb to temptation?”

  17. 17. Larry Silver, The Paintings of QuintenMassys with Catalogue Raisonné (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld & Schram, 1984), 37–38, 140–44; Silver, “Power and Pelf: A New-Found Old Man by Massys,” Simiolus 9 (1977): 63-70. In 1658 Alexander van Fornenbergh mentioned in  Den Antwerpschen Protheus . . . (Antwerp: Hendrick van Soest, 1658), 31, seeing among Massys’s works, “several monstrous and comical mugs, men and women” (eenighe ouw-bollige monstreuse tronyen, mans en vrouwen).

  18. 18. Silver, “Power and Pelf,” 68, figs. 5–6.

  19. 19. Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 228–30, nos. 70–71. Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 446–63. Campbell’s catalogue entry, based in part on consultation with a physician, argues that the Woman is based on the disfigured features that mark Paget’s disease (ôseitis deformans), which causes bone deformations and an over-developed forehead, chin, and space between nose and mouth. He also correctly points to the fifteenth-century Netherlandish origin of the woman’s headdress, which can easily be compared to the simpler precedent worn by the subject of Margaret van Eyck (Bruges; Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 180–81, no. 47), though he points more specifically to copies after a lost portrait of Margaret of Bavaria, Duchess of Burgundy, ca. 1410.

  20. 20. Silver, “Power and Pelf,” 70–73, figs. 10, 12. The figure has also been compared to the lost portraits of the early fifteenth century of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, particularly by Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 228; see also Silver,  “Power and Pelf,” 70 n17, fig. 11.

  21. 21. Leontine Buijnsters-Smets, Jan Massys: Een Antwerps schilder uit de zestiende eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 1995), 166–67, no. 11.

  22. 22. See, most recently, Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), esp. 53–86 (with references). For the city of Antwerp in the period, particularly for its economic and social history, see Jan van der Stock, ed., Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, exh. cat. (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993).

  23. 23. de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit, 201, 242, 267. As noted in Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 231–32, after mid-century the projection of moral inferiority and transgression through self-indulgence was later projected onto rural lower classes, the farming peasants, in paintings by Pieter Bruegel and Pieter Aertsen.

  24. 24. See the recent Woodall article on this painting (note 10 above). Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 211–12, no. 16, quoting as the source for the lost frame the seventeenth-century adulatory biography of Massys by van Fornenbergh, Den Antwerpschen Protheus . . . 26–27. There the comparison was made between this balancing of a scale for its accuracy without weights, as repeated in Jan Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), discussed by Arthur Wheelock in Arthur Wheelock and Frederick J. Duparc, eds., Johannes Vermeer, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 140–45, no. 10; see also Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 34, 122.

  25. 25. The Erasmus is in the royal collection at Hampton Court; see Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures, 86–89, no. 54; Gillis is in a private collection in England; see Campbell and Atwood, Renaissance Faces, 168–69, no. 42.

  26. 26. See the later dialogue and overlap between genre and portrait images in mid-seventeenth-century Holland, discussed by David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 407–30.

  27. 27. Other signed (and often dated) versions of this Marinus “banker and wife” composition appear in Copenhagen, Dresden (1541), Florence (1540), Madrid (1537, but also this best version of 1538), Munich (1538), and Nantes (1538).

  28. 28. de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, 183–84, also discussing “picking and culling,” sorting out heavier coins for their additional bullion content. He also notes that “clipping was not easy to detect until the introduction of a machine for milling coin in the middle of the sixteenth century.”

  29. 29. Still basic is Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956), 154–91 (see p. 17, fig. 13, for Barthel Bruyn the Elder’s 1524 juxtaposition of a skull with an extinguished candle, together with the explicit inscription in Latin, “everything is destined to perish, death is the final goal of all”). See also Alberto Veca, Vanitas: Il simbolismo del tempo, exh. cat. (Bergamo: Galleria Lorenzelli, 1981).

  30. 30. Dimensions 86.5 x 70.0 cm, the same size as the recovered original, indicating that this replica was carefully painted at exact size.

  31. 31. Although the London picture was long regarded as the original, its comparatively dry execution and its lack of underpainting when compared to the Paris picture, albeit in a current over-cleaned state, reveal that the Louvre work should take priority. This view has been confirmed by technical inspection: Ackroyd et al., “The ‘Two Tax-Gatherers,’” 50–63, which declares “the London painting is a replica, made from a tracing of the finished Paris picture.” Neither work is signed, although attribution to Marinus has been universal. See also Campbell, Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 646–60.

  32. 32. Campbell, Early Flemish Pictures, 114–18, no. 72, also figs. 36, 38–41 (“Follower of Marinus van Reymerswaele”).

  33. 33. The locus classicus of this visual method remains Kurt Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), esp. 182–92; see also Weitzmann, “The Illustration of the Septuagint,” in Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. Herbert Kessler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 45–75.

  34. 34. Jean Denucé, De Antwerpsche “Konstkamers”: Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16e en 17e eeuwen (Amsterdam: De Spiegel, 1932), 28.

  35. 35. Ibid., 133.

  36. 36. No. 31: “un banquero contando getones sobre una mesa, y en ella y en el almario diferentes libros y papeles con sellos de letras y un beconquin en la caveça con orejas.” José Lopez Navio, “La gran colección de pinturas del Marqués de Leganés,” Analecta Calasanctiana 7–8 (1962): 271; Mary Crawford Volk, “New Light on a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Marquis of Leganés,” Art Bulletin 612 (1980): 267, Appendix Two. I am most grateful to Professor John Elliott for the reference to this Spanish collection.

  37. 37. Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 2; also Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 57, 145–46, 216n35.

  38. 38. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 91, pointing out that for Holland—in contrast to pre-Revolutionary France—tax-farmers were small and numerous (p. 103). For the experience of taxes in seventeenth-century Holland, see A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 171–81.

  39. 39. Herman van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy: II (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 144–66.

  40. 40. Ibid., 160.

  41. 41. Roelof van Straten, Jan Lievens, and Ingrid W L Moerman, Rembrandts Weg zur Kunst, 1606–1632 (Berlin: Reimer, 2006), 67-68, fig. 77; Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery Publications, 1991), 128–29, no. 2, where the work has its more religious title, suggesting (as pointed out by Christian Tümpel) that the theme is based on the parable (Luke 12: 13–21) of the rich man, which concludes: “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich before God.”

  42. 42. Stephanie Dickey, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2004), 66–88. The idea for using Rembrandt’s Goldweigher as a later comparison to Massys and Marinus stems from Basil Yamey, Art and Accounting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 57–58.

  43. 43. On historicizing costume, esp. berets from the sixteenth century, in early Rembrandt self-portraits, see Marieke de Winkel, “Costume in Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt by Himself, exh. cat., ed. Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot (London: National Gallery Publications, 1999), 67–68.

  44. 44. Dickey, Rembrandt, 83–85, noting that at mid-century the Amsterdam Town Hall would also show images of Moses in their council chamber; Werner Hofmann, Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel, 1983), 210–16, nos. 84–89; Donald Ehresmann, “The Brazen Serpent: A Reformation Motif in the Works of Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Workshop,” Marsyas 13 (1966–67): 32–47; Bonnie Noble, “Law and Gospel and the Strategies of Pictorial Rhetoric,” in Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2009), 27–66.

  45. 45. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 54: “In Antwerp, a tax-collector was obliged to have a surety or guarantor, who had the right to supervise the collection of money and its recording”; van Puyvelde, “Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys,” 20.

Bibliography

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Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn. Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges. Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

Bergström, Ingvar. Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956.

Brown, Christopher, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel. Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop. Exh. cat. Edited by Sally Salvesen. London: National Gallery Publications, 1991.

Buijnsters-Smets, Leontine. Jan Massys: Een Antwerps schilder uit de zestiende eeuw. Zwolle: Waanders, 1995.

Campbell, Lorne. The Early Flemish Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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_____________. The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600. London: National Gallery Company, 2014.

Campbell, Lorne, and Philip Atwood. Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian. London: National Gallery, 2008.

Davis, Martin. Early Netherlandish School. National Gallery Catalogues. London: National Gallery, 1955.

Denucé, Jean. De Antwerpsche “Konstkamers”: Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16e en 17e eeuwen. Amsterdam: De Spiegel, 1932.

Deursen, A. Th. van. Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Dickey, Stephanie. Rembrandt: Portraits in Print. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2004.

Ehresmann, Donald. “The Brazen Serpent: A Reformation Motif in the Works of Lucas Cranach the Elder and His Workshop.” Marsyas 13 (1966–67): 32–47.

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DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.2
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Larry Silver, "Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7:2 (Summer 2015) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.2