Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities
Catalog of a recent exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, edited by Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks
Florence: Giunti, 288 pp., e38.00
Money comes in many colors: greenback dollars, Chinese “redbacks” (which are only figuratively red), euros in a range of pastel shades that might have been drawn straight from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But for sheer evocative punch, for money that expresses the very Platonic idea of money, it is hard to beat that mighty and ubiquitous Renaissance coin, the Florentine florin.
