In medieval depictions of Hell ‘… a punishment often visited upon userers, misers and the avaricious … are forced to eat excrement, either their own or (as in Taddeo di Bartolo’s Hell in San Gimignano) a devil’s. Now there is an essential and primitive connection between faeces and money. A baby’s fascination with (their) own excrement is, as child psychologists never tire of pointing out, possessive; the child wants to keep the first substance (they are) conscious of producing. Presumably this kind of childhood experience lay behind Bacon’s celebrated apothegm, “Money be like muck, no good unless it be spread” - Robert Hughes, Heaven & Hell in Western Art

‘He shits on the world (he despises the world)’ detail from Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’, 1559. Interpretation given by Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, page 35-7; Breugel The Complete Paintings, Taschen,1994

'The unconscious equation between gold, money, and feces - in folklore the devil's gold turns to feces - derives from the child's toilet training, which is his earliest "financial transaction". The child is asked to relinquish material produced by his own body "on time" and at certain intervals. In
return, he receives praise and approval from his "entourage". Conflicts arising during this period are transformed into such derivations as stubbornness,
hoarding and collecting, excessive preoccupation with money, withholding, stinginess, obsessive thinking, and compulsive behaviour.' - Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis, Icon Editions 1993, page 267