The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

292 chapter 25and “morals” in illustration of folk proverbs, cannot be the subject of seriousart. Surely, like us, Dutch people must have thought of Art as being forArt’s sake, yes? The MoMA rules, right?No. Dutch people in the early seventeenth century read much of their artethically: Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer. That is why they had the centurybefore stripped their churches of the lovely papist ornaments accumulatedover centuries in one of the richest quarters of Europe. No non-Protestantmessages, please. Images were ethically charged, and were not viewed asobjects for Art’s sake alone. True, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 5 But the“genre” paintings so characteristic of the Golden Age in the Netherlands,like the conceits of metaphysical poetry in early seventeenth-century Englandand Milton’s “typologies” (a theological term for parallels and anticipationsof history), were often heavily and ethically metaphorical. As R. H.Fuchs observed in explaining such a sensibility, arising out of a Protestantduty to read and understand God’s texts oneself, “Had not Christ himselfspoken in parables?” 6The theme of the four virtues honored by the city hall is repeated, in caseyou missed it, in the little room known in English as the Tribunal. A woodenpublic scaffold to where the fated victim was to adjourn would have been setup just outside the room, on the Dam Square. The judges handing down thesentence of death faced a large statue of Justice with sword and blindfold andanother of Prudence with a self-reflecting mirror, as on the front façade. Thecondemned prisoner faced elaborate bas reliefs of Love and, again, Justiceand Prudence. Left to right he could read, if he had been classically educated,sculptures showing a Greek father who lovingly volunteered to be punishedin his son’s stead; then Solomon’s prudent judgment; and finally aRoman father, an early Brutus, who justly executed his own sons for treason.In other words, to repeat, in its icons the first bourgeois society in northernEurope dealt in the virtues of love, prudence, and justice as much asin rye and nutmeg. So we do still, though we have become embarrassed tosay so.As the Dutch of the Golden Age grasped, the ancient notion thatcourage, temperance, and justice could not flourish in a commercial societyis wrong. Prudence, it was always realized, could certainly flourish amongcity folk, which made suspect a hero with too much of it. A coldly maximizingmerchant is no Achilles. Remember that Odysseus was a trifle suspecton this score. One is not shocked to find Dante, no friend of commerce,