In most paintings, money is a detail, a purse on a belt or a coin on a table. In these twelve, the whole scene depends on it, from a chapel wall in Florence to a studio in New York.
Among them, a French painter fights the tax men sent to his door, and an Italian duke opens a painting each time he goes to look at his coins. The list counts down from number 12 to number 1.
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A coin is hard to paint. It is small and flat, it shines like any gilded object in the room, and nothing in its look tells what it is worth. So painters rarely show it alone. They put it in someone's hand, and the picture becomes about what people do with it: count it, owe it, refuse it.
That is the test each picture here had to pass. The money itself is on the canvas, as coins, gold, a banknote or a contract, and the people in the scene are dealing with it. Fine clothes and rich rooms show what money buys, so they were left out.
Seen together, the twelve keep returning to two things. One is a small hand balance, used to check a coin's metal. The other is a tax, owed to a ruler, to a town, or, in two Gospel stories, to Rome and to the Temple in Jerusalem.
12. Woman Holding a Balance, Johannes Vermeer (about 1664)
Between her thumb and forefinger, a young woman holds a small balance above a table scattered with strings of pearls and a few gold coins. Johannes Vermeer painted her on a small canvas around 1664 in Delft, a town in what was then the Dutch Republic, today the Netherlands.
For a long time, her picture went by the wrong name. The first record of it, an Amsterdam auction catalogue of 1696, lists it as "a young lady weighing gold," and the title Woman Weighing Gold stuck.
Then conservators, the specialists who care for old paintings, looked at the paint under magnification. They saw what everyone had missed: both pans of her balance are empty.
If she is not weighing gold, what is she doing? A clue hangs behind her. On the wall is a large painting of the Last Judgment, the end of time in Christian belief, with Christ at the top raising his arms over the dead who rise to be judged.
In many old pictures of that day, the archangel Michael stands below Christ with a pair of scales, weighing each soul to decide its fate. Vermeer set the woman's household scale just below the frame of that picture, as if she were rehearsing the same gesture at her table.
Arthur Wheelock, for decades the curator of Dutch paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, built his reading on that empty scale. For him, the picture is not about her gold at all but about keeping a balance in front of it, the virtue of moderation that Vermeer's century called temperance.
The way Vermeer built the room points the same way. To draw in perspective, the method that makes lines on a flat canvas seem to recede into depth, a painter chose one point where all those receding lines would meet.
X-rays of the canvas show a tiny pinhole just to the left of her fingers. Vermeer fixed a pin there and stretched strings from it to rule each line, so that the edges of the table, the window and the wall all lead the eye to her hand.
At a Glance
Artist: Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675)
Painted: About 1664
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 39.7 × 35.5 cm (15.6 × 14 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
About This Painting
What does the mirror in Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance symbolize?
A mirror hangs on the wall near the window. In Dutch painting of the period, a mirror could stand for vanity or for self-knowledge, and scholars have not settled which of the two Vermeer meant here.
11. Dollar Sign, Andy Warhol (1981)
A single dollar sign, and nothing else, fills a white canvas taller than a man. Andy Warhol made it in New York in 1981. He was the American artist of Pop art, the movement that took its images from advertising and shop shelves, and he had already turned soup cans and film stars into pictures.
The sign was printed onto the canvas, but it did not come from a typeface. Warhol first drew it by hand, in marker and ink, and his drawing left a few traces on the canvas that no ready-made dollar sign would ever show.