What does money have to do with beauty? If we think about the Italian Renaissance, high finance not only funded high art, but its money and movement helped to fuel the humanist ideals that inspired this great historical period.

“Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities” is a show which started on 17 September and will be displayed till 22 January in Florence, at Palazzo Strozzi. Since its founding in July 2006, the key challenge of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has been to bring an international approach to cultural activities in Florence and to provide a platform for experimentation and a place for debate with other cultural players – in short, to ‘think global, act local.’

Money and Beauty is curated by Tim Parks, a British writer based in Italy, and Ludovica Sebregondi, an Italian art historian. The show is divided into two parts: how money was made, and how it was spent. Masterpieces by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, Piero del Pollaiolo, the Della Robbia family and Lorenzo di Credi – the cream of Renaissance artists – show how the modern banking system developed in parallel alongside the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world.

The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey to the roots of Florentine power in Europe, but it also explores the economic mechanisms which allowed the Florentines to dominate the world of trade and business 500 years before modern communication methods were invented and, in so doing, to finance the Renaissance.

The exhibition analyses the systems that bankers used to build up their immense fortunes, it illustrates the way in which they handled international relations, and it also sheds light on the birth of modern art patronage, which frequently began as a penitential gesture only to then turn into a tool for wielding power.

In fact power and money often go together, but analysing how money talks through art is both provocative and priceless. Money is ephemeral, beauty lasts forever.