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.

This is expressed in an exhibition entitled Money and Beauty, Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities, currently on show at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy.

Curated by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi, author of Iconography of Girolamo Savonarola, 1495-1998, and Tim Parks, writer, translator and author of Medici Money – Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence, the exhibition aims to provide the visitor with an opportunity to look at art from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving economists, politicians and diplomats.

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, a spokesman for the exhibition said.

The exhibition analyses the systems that bankers used to build up their immense fortunes, 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.

The saga of the art patrons is closely linked to that of the bankers who financed the ventures of princes and nobles alike, and indeed it was that very convergence that provided the humus in which some of the leading artists of all time were able to flourish.

Visitors can delve into the daily life of the families that controlled the banking system and perceive the ongoing clash between spiritual and economic values.

The exhibition runs till January 22, 2012.