Money as a work of art

Having almost reached the end of the path, a large androgynous figure wrapped in white drapery stands out isolated, like a warning, the Carrara marble sculpted by Giacomo Manzù for what should have been the tomb of Raphael Mattioli. It is the Angel of the Resurrection, still in the Chiaravalle Abbey where the great patron banker, supporter of all the arts to “liberate them from every form of servility”, had planned to have his burial. With an esoteric wink that didn’t clash with the enlightenment of the character, he wanted to engrave a verse from Psalm 138, Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum, “I rose again and I’m with you again” on the base of the statue. Not esotericism or religion matter in this beautiful exhibition, in the last section dedicated precisely to Mattioli. But certainly that idea of ​​permanence in the spirit – entrusted to art through a great sculptor who was his friend and part of his circle – perfectly conveys the idea of ​​what the great system banker meant by patronage. Right here, in the palaces now of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Galleries of Italy in Piazza della Scala, which were once Comit’s headquarters and also his home-studio-refuge. “I realized that I was in the presence of a Renaissance patriarch who was temporarily loaned to the twentieth century,” wrote the Moravian-American writer Joseph Wechsberg of him. Wealth produces beauty, and vice versa beauty amplifies the meanings and possibilities of “stuff”, as Mattioli defined it: money as a commodity to be trafficked. Modern patronage arises from this conception.