Scrambling for scudi: notes on painters' earnings in early Baroque Rome
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2003 by Richard E. Spear
Continued from page 5.
(1.) Papers on the economics of Italian Renaissance art far outnumber those on the Italian Baroque, just as the Dutch art market of the 17th century has been studied in much greater detail than Italian painting of the same period. See, as representative recent publications with extensive bibliographies (further titles are cited below), Arnold Esch and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, eds., Arte, committenza ed economia a Roma nelle corti del Rinascimento (1420-1530) (Turin: Einaudi, 1995); Michael North, ed,, Economic History and the Arts (Cologne: Bohlau, 1996); Michael North and David Ormrod, eds., Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800 (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998); and, with slightly more attention to later Italian painting, Simonetta Cavaciocehi, ed., Economia e Arte: Secc. XIII-XVIII (Florence: Le Monnier, 2002), which was not yet available when this article went to press; and Marcello Fantoni, Louisa Matthew and Sara Matthews Grieco, eds,, The Art Market in Italy (15th-17th Centuries) (Modena: Panini, in press ). Two organizations are especially responsible for promoting the study of art and economics in Italy: the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica "Francesco Datini" in Prato and ICARE (International Center for Art Economics), associated with the University of Venice, each of which sponsors conferences and publications.
(2.) See Volker Reinhardt, The Roman Art Market in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in North and Ormrod (as in n. 1), 81-92, who argues that the broad-based system of Roman nepotism, controlled by a narrow, wealthy upper class, shaped the buyer-based art market at a time when the middle class was very small. But also see Loredana Lorizzo, "II mercato dell'arte a Roma nel XVIIo secolo: 'Pittori bottegari' e 'rivenditori di quadri' nei documenti dell'Archivio Storico dell'Accademia di San Luca," in Fantoni et al. (as in n. 1); I am familiar only with an abstract of her paper.
(3.) In the conference "The Art Market in Italy (15th-17th Centuries)" (see n. 1 above), fourteen papers presented deal specifically with Florence, three with Venice, two each with Bologna and Rome, and one with Naples. Christopher Marshall's research an Naples uncommonly focuses more on the artist than the patron. See his "'Senza il minimo scrupolo': Artists as Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Naples," Journal of the History of Collections 12 (2000): 15-34; and idem, "Appagare il Pubblico: Public Exhibitions as Promotional Strategies in the Work of Luca Giordano," in Fantoni et al. (as in n. 1). Aspects of 17th-century patronage in Venice are discussed in the recent books by Linda Borean, La quadreria di Agostino e Giovan Donato Correggio nel collezionismo veneziano del seicento (Udine: Forum, 2000); and Isabella Cecchini, Quadri e commercio a Venezia durante it seicento (Venice: Marsilio, 2000). For a study devoted to one artist's wealth (which I have read only in abstract form), see Rob Hatfield, "The High E nd: Michelangelo's Income," also in Fantoni et al.
(4.) Francis Haskell, Painters and Patrons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963).
(5.) Mancini, 140. Sec below for further discussion of the value of these purportedly low payments.
(6.) Beverly Brawn, ed., The Genius of Rosne, 1592-1623, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001. For discussion of the important painters excluded from the exhibition, see my review, Richard E. Spear, "Classicism in the Shadows," Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 16, 2001, 18-19. A version of this essay was presented at the conference "The Birth of the Baroque: An Artist's Rome," held at the National Gallery, London, Mar. 23-24, 2001, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Royal Academy; it is preparatory to a much broader book-length study on the socioeconomic status of artists in Baroque Italy that Philip Sohm and I are editing and will address many questions unexamined here, including the economies of fresco work.
(7.) Domenico Sells, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, (1997), 35-41.
(8.) Ibid., chap. 2, provides a good overview of the Italian economy, with copious references, though Rome is conspicuously neglected. Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29, points out that economic decline did not necessarily result in a loss of wealth or a decrease in its accumulation.
(9.) See Delumeau, 416-32, on Rome's prostitutes (he states that an ordinary prostitute charged anywhere from 1 to 4 scudi, while a deluxe prostitute was paid as much as 12 scudi, without clarification of what such distinctions meant with regard to courtesans, who typically were not paid set fees).
(10.) Ibid., 422; and Ago, 6.
(11.) Cipolla, 68. Only Bologna had a higher percentage of clergy and religious (5.7 percent in 1624), but there the proportion of monks and nuns to priests was much higher.
(12.) See the rich study by Mario Romani, Pellegrini e viaggiatori nell'economia di Rome dal XIV al XVII secolo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1948); as well as Delumeau, passim.
(13.) Delumeau, 142,186-87. In 1615, he reports, Rome had 360 hotels. The owner of the most famous one, the Orso, became so rich that he could leave his daughter a dowry of 30,000 scudi (142). Ago, 8, gives the conflicting number of 120 hotels in the 1620s (and 652 osterie).
(14.) Ago, 6, 8.
(15.) Giovanni Bottero, quoted in Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 27-28. Determining the budget of the Vatican is a notoriously difficult problem; for the 17th century, see, among various studies, Georg Lutz, "Zur Papstfinanz von Klemens IX. bis Alexander VIII. (1667-1691)," Romische Quartal Schrift fur christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 73 (1973): 32-90, esp. the references in nn. 1-6.
(16.) Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome, 1500-1559 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 51. The fundamental study of Rome's late Renaissance economy remains Delumeau; also see Nussdorfer (as in n. 15), chap. 2.
(17.) Partner (as in n. 16), 56; and Delumeau, 453.
(18.) Delumeau, 765; and Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 4.
(19.) See Wolfgang Reinhard, "Papal Power and Family Strategy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 329-56; and Reinhardt (as in n. 2). In his richly documented thesis, Ferraro counts some five hundred titled and untitled noble Roman families, 20 to 25 percent of whose mature males entered ecclesiastical careers (49-75, 142).
(20.) The principal analysis of wealth and demand for art in Renaissance Italy is Goldthwaite (as in n. 8). See Delumeau, 258-61, 275-76, 358, regarding Rome's new and newly remodeled buildings.
(21.) A. D. Wright, The Early Modern Papacy: From the Council of Trent to the French Revolution, 1564-1789 (Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 2000), 91.
(22.) Ago, 198-201; Delumeau, 636-88; and, for the gold to silver ratio in Rome from 1560 to 1670, Enrico Stumpo, It capitale finanziario a Roma fra cinque e seicento (Milan: Giuffre, 1985), 24-29. From around 1610 until the end of the century, silver was gradually devalued in Europe following a long period when the nominal prices of gold and silver rose at fairly steady, similar rates. See Fernand Braudel and F. Spooner, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 378-86.
(23.) Cipolla, 75.
(24.) Peter Paul Rubens, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, trans. and ed. Ruth Magurn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 38-40, nos. 13, 14. Rubens's contract is published and analyzed by Michael Jaffe in Rubens and Italy (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 85-89, 118-19 n. 14. See, too, Hans Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, pt. 8, Saints. vol. 2 (London: Phaidon, (1973), 43-50, no. 109.
(25.) Brown (as in n. 6), 356, no. 137.
(26.) Jaffe (as in n. 24), 87.
(27.) See the excellent summary of the reasons in Steven Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 174-80.
(28.) Jaffe (as in n. 24), 92-94, 119 n. 55.
(29.) Patrizia Cavazzini, "Appendix 1: Documents Relating to the Trial of Agostino Tassi," in Christiansen and Mann, 442 (Oct. 21, 1612, fol. 111).
(30.) Cipolla, 66.
(31.) Christiansen and Mann, xvii.
(32.) On the poor of Rome, see Delumeau, 403-16.
(33.) Sella (as in n. 7), 79 n. 90, with further references.
(34.) Camillo Fanucci, Trattato de tutte l'opere pie.... (Rome, 1601), quoted in Cipolla, 12.
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