http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/05/historical-echoes-from-the-bonfires-to-the-frozen-assets.html
During the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, many Florentine
bankers hired artists to produce devotional paintings and then donated
those pieces to the Catholic Church to offset the Church’s disapproval
of interest-bearing loans. Since usury was very much frowned upon, this
practice of buying penance did not sit well with one Friar Girolamo
Savonarola. He was such a vocal critic of the donations that he arranged
for bonfires of “vain, lascivious, or dishonest things” (including many
Renaissance artworks) in 1497 and 1498. The Medici Bank, the largest
bank at that time, had much success in evading the ban on usury; its
collapse in 1494 gave Savonarola leverage in his cause. The recent
Florentine exhibit Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire
of the Vanities depicts “how the modern banking system developed in
parallel alongside the most important artistic flowering in the history
of the Western world.”
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