The purchase agreement

Metsys virtually invented the genre of the money-changer or banker at work—a subject that would be endlessly imitated by later Flemish painters. This version in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, painted around 1510, belongs to the same creative impulse as his famous 1514 Moneylender and His Wife in the Louvre. In Antwerp, where the first modern stock exchange was founded during Metsys’s lifetime, images of financial transactions carried both documentary and moral weight.

The still-life elements—coins, documents, the balance—are painted with Netherlandish precision that transforms commercial objects into symbols of worldly attachment. Metsys’s rendering of metallic and paper surfaces is virtuosic.