Rachel Cohen

Sienese painting and financial crisis, an old essay on a current topic, briefly available at the Believer magazine.

Painters and bankers have a long double history. Through the ages, in Siena, Florence, France and New York. It’s not just that they exchanged things of value. Painters and bankers discovered similar representations, especially of time, new ways of seeing that allowed them to create value.

I wrote an essay about this 12 years ago called ‘Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering,’ that took me more than a year and 1,000 rabbit holes. It’s about a tiny Duccio, a Damien Hirst skull, the Medicis, the Lehman bank, double entry bookkeeping, Aby Warburg, wind in Botticelli and Jackson Pollock, and a few other things… It’s still one of my favorite pieces. And, for the next few weeks, while the big Siena show is up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the good people at The Believer have taken down the paywall, so you can read the essay there.