‘The Moneychanger and His Wife’ — Marinus van Reymerswale
An exemplary work on the use of art as a form of social criticism in the service of power or the State.
Marinus’ work was scarce and focused on a few themes, the most important of them being that of the money changers or collectors. Other themes also had some relation to this central idea, which was the center of his artistic production and the source of the expression of his thoughts and concerns.
In those productions, scarce and inspired by Quentin Massys’s compositions on the same theme, Van Reymerswale’s focus was always on certain moral issues of the time, directly linked to religion and its influence in both the private and public spheres of civic life.
Let’s take as an example The Moneychanger and His Wife, a perfect example of the theme that the painter explored in many works of similar conception and structure. In this work, we can observe a couple, husband and wife, who are concentrating on counting some coins on the table. The man handles a scale with which he values the coins, while the woman seems to be attentive to the results and writes them down in what looks like a ledger.
The clothes indicate that these are people who work in the handling of other people’s money, specifically usury, a…
