I’m fascinated to see that three of the great literary figures of 20th century Scotland – Nan Shepherd, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig – will adorn the new Royal Bank of Scotland £5 and £10 notes which will come into circulation later this year. The great scientist Mary Fairfax Somerville has already been selected to grace the £10 note. Norman will appear on the back of the tenner, while poor Sorley only gets the fiver: how both would have loved the defining status of that particular pecking order!

Bank notes are rather beautiful objects. It may be that the more you have of them stashed under your mattress the more beautiful they become. The notes themselves are of course promissory tokens, make payable to the bearer on demand, but from the very beginnings in China some 14 centuries ago have often been aesthetically exquisite. Capitalism and Art have long been willing, and sometimes unwilling, lovers. Beauty sells.

A quick search of the internet will quickly show you some of the gorgeous notes that have been produced over the centuries. The world’s earliest paper money, the Chinese Jiaozi from the Song Dynasty is lovely, as is the old Cent Francs with its classical Greco-Roman imagery. Commercial institutions have long known the power of persuasion and the value of art: a plain white piece of paper promising you £20 feels less trustworthy than a coloured piece of paper bearing Adam Smith’s portrait: you trust the image more than the paper.

Bankers, of course, have had a hard time of it in recent years: their excesses have made them easy scapegoats for all the ills of the world, even though most of us acknowledge there is a huge difference between the innocent bank clerks who still serve our local branches (the ones which have survived) and the high city end of hedge fund and subprime mortgage gambling. For every Fred Goodwin there is a Fiona or a Finlay working on low enough wages serving individual customers.

The relationship between commerce and art has a long and complex history. The Medicis had good reason to hire Michelangelo: he exalted their business. Cesare Borgia had equally good reason to hire Leonardo da Vinci as his chief military engineer: he pre-dated William Morris in knowing that everything should be beautiful as well as functional. Though sometimes even he failed, as is demonstrated by his spectacular, but somewhat useless tank.

Literature, science and music exalt products. Handel’s music sells football; Rimsky-Korsakov sells Black and Decker tools; Johann Sebastian Bach sells Havana cigars; Tchaikovsky sold Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut; even the great rebel John Lydon of the Sex Pistols sold us butter, and so the list goes on…icons and angelic music persuading us to buy everything from shampoo to chocolate.

Some of our greatest modern writers have worked in the advertising industry. Salman Rushdie famously came up with these gems – “Naughty but nice” (cream cakes); “That’ll do nicely” (American Express) and “Irresistibubble” (Aero Chocolate bars) – while the wonderful Scott Fitzgerald came up with with the slogan “We keep you clean in Muscatine” for a local steam laundry company. Maybe I should try my hand at it: “Portree for High Tea?” No? “Like Garlic, Gaelic adds flavour”? Double no??

Meantime I can hardly think of two nicer guys to grace the fiver and the tenner than Sorley and Norman. Even though neither of them were great friends of the tokens or agents of capitalism. I don’t suppose this particular poem of MacCaig’s about the staid but greedy waxwing will adorn any bank note:

Waxwing, smart gentleman, gaudy bank manager,

in your leafy bank, your swept-back crest,

is the only thing about you that looks wind-blown.

Do you never face down-wind

or fly across the grain of a breeze?

Do you look with hauteur

when the grebe’s crest frays sidewards

and the lapwings top-knot unravels?

I watch you choking down

plump, crimson berries – and the bank manager becomes

a lorry driver in a hurry

gobbling and gulping

in the wayside café of this branchy cotoneaster.

So many colours being busy at once!

Such a dandified gluttony!

You flirt to another branch:

and the wax-blob berry on your either side

winks among the clusters.

Could it be that Norman’s poem from 1976 sharply foresaw the dandified gluttony that would lead to the inevitable crash 30 years or so later on?

I’m glad that our banks will use bits of poetry on their new notes. What we need next is for the banks to commit to annually donating a percentage of their profits to a Living Writers' Fund. Now that would be poetry.