The merchant who financed Christ by expelling the moneylenders

When the man expelling the moneylenders is paid for by a merchant

In the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, a Christ with a contorted face lunges at a merchant dressed in purple. Around him, a lamb leaps in terror and a child hides in an apostle's robe. It is the scene Giotto painted, and it was paid for by Enrico Scrovegni: the son of a moneylender condemned by Dante to the seventh circle of Hell. In other words, the merchant expelled from the Temple financed the criticism of merchants to clean up his family's image. If that isn't the origin of modern foundations and cultural vanity projects, let Giotto come down and see for himself.

From Padua to Antwerp: money always finds a way

A century later, Quentin Matsys painted the same scene in Antwerp, capital of Atlantic trade and Flemish money. Jesus, whip raised, about to strike a merchant sprawled on the floor spitting out coins; in the background, the Pharisees whisper like councillors at a council meeting. The painting ended up in a guild hall or in the house of an enriched burgher. The one flogging the merchants was paid for by the merchants with the fruits of their usury. Hypocrisy is not a modern invention, it has merely been perfected.

Hans Holbein the Elder's version, from 1501, is colder. There is no completed violence: Christ raises the whip, the table is overturned, a cage of doves recalls that religion was an all-inclusive deal (you paid for the dove, the candle and the forgiveness), and the merchants leave without fuss. An apostle pointedly gestures at the coins: "look, the money, it isn't mine".

El Greco: the Venetian flea market is beyond saving

The prize for chaos goes to El Greco in his Venetian period, in 1568, today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Here there is no peaceful eviction: there is a flea market in a state of decay. Women with bared breasts (pure Venice: the divine and the carnal on the same canvas), an old man with a basket of bread, eggs, rabbits, and a child born with the gold coins already in place, as if greed were hereditary. The era's equivalent of a payday lender scandalized no one as long as it arrived with doves and a good foreshortening.

The curious thing is that the "I'll smack you" meme circulating about Holbein's Christ works for almost all of them: Giotto is about to throw the punch, Matsys already has the whip raised, and El Greco turns the expulsion into a fair. Eight centuries of painting to remind us that money and the temple never got along. The Pharisees are still in the background, whispering. Now they do it in boardrooms.