Scrambling for scudi: notes on painters' earnings in early Baroque Rome
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2003 by Richard E. Spear
Continued from page 7.
(63.) My figures are based on the data in the catalogues by Mia Cinotti (as in n. 53); and John Spike, Caravaggio (New York: Abbeville Press, 2001).
(66.) Ago, 82-89, for discussion of the meanings of ricco and povero; and Ferraro, 244-46, for estimates of how much income the nobility required.
(67.) For a brief discussion of Lanfranco's earnings and financial pressures, see Richard E. Spear, "Colorno, Naples and Rome: Lanfranco," Burlington Magazine 144 (2002): 128 (knowingly or not, Lanfranco underreported Domenichino's earnings in the same letter when he says that his rival was paid only 18,000 ducats in eleven years).
(68.) Rubens (as in n. 24), 53-54, no. 21.
(69.) Joachim von Sandrart, quoted in Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 56 (there is no documentary evidence for Elsheimer's imprisonment).
(70.) Delumeau, 497-98; and Masetti Zannini (as in n. 38), xxxvii-xxxviii, on artists as debtors, some of whom also served time in debtor's prison.
(71.) Werner Sumowski, "'The Artist in Despair': A New Drawing by Adam Elsheimer," Master Drawings 33 (1995): 152-56. (I am very grateful to Ann Sutherland Harris for bringing this drawing to my attention.)
(72.) Mancini, 141, 250; and Stumpo (as in n. 22), 39-40.
(73.) Rice (as in n. 57), 14, 162-64 (St. Peter's); and Hammond (as in n. 18), 3, 8 (musicians).
(74.) I have discussed some of these issues, with further references, in Spear, 1994 (as in a. 63), 592-602, and in idem, The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 12, "Marketing." On the cost of copies after Caravaggio, see Michele Maccherini, "Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini," Prospettiva 86 (1997): 71-92. A similar price (22 scudi) was paid to Carlo Magnone in 1642 for making two copies after Caravaggio's Cardsharps and Lute Player (Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories ofArt [NewYork: NewYork University Press, 1975], 9, doc. 78).
(75.) For the cost of ultramarine blue in Rome, see the testimony by Lanfranco regarding Fabrizio Valguarnera's payments to him in diamonds and ultramarine blue (the painter twice accepted altramarino in lieu of cash, at the values of 20 to 30 and 50 scudi an ounce), in Jane Costello, "The Twelve Pictures 'Ordered by Velasquez' and the Trial of Valguarnera," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 274. A decade later in Naples, Lanfranco used three qualities of ultramarine blue for his fresco in the cupola of the Cappella del Tesoro di S. Gennaro, the best of which ha said was evaluated at 12 ducats an ounce "although it is worth more"; 37 ounces of ultramarine cost the patrons 351 ducats (see Erich Schleier, ad., Giovanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma, Rome e Napoli, 2d ad. [Milan: Electa, 2002], 439-40 [Sept.11, Nov. 1, 1641, July 29, 1642, and Feb. 23, 1643]). For Hilliard's treatise, see Nicholas Hilliard's Art of Limning, ad. Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston: Northeastern Univer sity Press, 1983), 33 (Hilliard notes that "the worst which is but badd" costs 7 1/2 pounds an ounce); and for John Hoskin's pricing, see Edward Norgate, Miniature, or, The Art of Limning, ed. Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 122 n. 32. Around 1650, according to the English antiquary Richard Symonds, "the best azzurro or Oltramarina is now sold in Rome at 21 crownes [scudi] the ownce & so downward so that wch. they call cenneri [the lowest grade] are sold at 3 Julios the ownce [a seventieth as much as the finest grade].... In Engl. (Mr. Sheppard told me then in Rome) they pay 8 pounds for an ownce"; Symonds, quoted in Mary Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds (New York: Garland, 1984), 220.
(76.) For the much lower cost of other pigments in England at the time of Orazio's stay, see Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, Pictoria sculptoria & quae subalternarum artium, 1620, ad. M. Faidutti and C. Versini (Lyons: Audin, 1974), 100-101; and, for the sequestering of Artemisia's goods, Christiansen and Mann, 449, xvi (1620), respectively.
(77.) This estimate was made for me by Dorothy Mahon, conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Both she and Sarah Fisher, conservator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., calculate that an ounce of ultramarine mixed with oil would fill a modern medium-size tube of paint. I am very grateful to them and to Jo Kirby in the Scientific Department of the National Gallery, London, for discussing with me various aspects of artists' use of ultramarine. For an example of how painters "stretched" ultramarine, see Richard Symonds's observations on Canini's techniques, in Beal (as in n. 75), 245-55.
(78.) For the cost of linseed oil, see Mayerne (as in n. 76), 100; regarding Rubens's use of a secondhand stretcher, see Jaffe (as in n. 24), 92.
(79.) For Valentin, see Lavin (as in n. 74), 42, doe. 342, Aug. 1628; Rice (as in n. 57), 236, records the cost as 8 scudi. For Poussin, Caroselli, Passignano, and Spadarino, see Rice, 230, 240, 243, 248, respectively.
(80.) Il libro dei conti del Guercino (as in n. 63), 169-70 (no. 498), 66-67 (no. 53).
(81.) Lavin (as in n. 74), 43, doe. 345.
(82.) See the Libretto dei conti del pittore Tiberio Tinelli (1618-1633), ad. Bianca Lanfranchi Strina (Venice: Il Comitato, 2000), xxxi, though the 180 braccia di tela that cost 360 lire puzzlingly is not cited in the text of the libretto. For some canvas sizes and prices in mid-17th-century Rome, see Richard Symonds, in Beal (as in n. 75), 293; a tela d'imperat ore measuring 4 by 6 palmi (one palmo equals about 8 3/4 in., or 22.35 cm) cost just half a scudo.
(83.) Christiansen and Mann, 449. I have not yet gathered adequate data on the cost of hiring models. In the later 1620s and earlier 1630s, the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome typically paid models only 1 scudo 20 baiocchi a month, but for unrecorded hours of work (Ann Sutherland Harris kindly shared with me records from the academy's archives of payments to models).
(84.) Bernini, cited in Paul Freart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France, trans. Margery Corbett, ed. Anthony Blunt and George Bauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 35.
(85.) Ruffo (as in n. 62), 52; and Garrard (as in n. 35), 398, letter 25.
(86.) Klaus Lankheit, Florentinische Barockplastik (Munich: Bruckmann, 1962), 248, doc. 72, on the Florentine academy; for Orazio's Saint Jerome, see Christiansen and Mann, 94-96, no. 16, and esp. Christiansen's essay, "The Art of Orazio Gentileschi," 10 and passim, on Orazio's extensive use of the model and penchant to make replicas.
(87.) Cavazzini (as in n. 29), 434, June 23, 1612, fol. 374v.
(88.) Corradini (as in n. 38), 74.
(89.) On the problem of pricing art, see Neil De Marchi, introduction to Economic Engagements with Art, Annual Supplement to vol. 31, History of Political Economy, ad. Neil De Marchi and Craufurd D. W. Goodwin (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1999), 1-11, as well as the essay by Toon Van Houdt, "The Economics of Art in Early Modern Times: Some Humanist and Scholastic Approaches," 303-31 in ibid., with reference to the southern Netherlands in the early 17th century.
(90.) Andrews (as in n. 69), 50, doe. 14.
(91.) Mancini, 9-10, 139-41. See, too, Vincenzio Borghini's discussion of prices and value of art in the context of the paragone between sculpture and painting, in Paola Barocchi, ad,, Scritti d'arte del cinquecento (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1971), vol. 1, 630-35. He insists that neither the material cost nor the expenditure of time of production matters, but that a work of art is to be judged by "I'ingegno" it displays.
(92.) Louisa Ciammitti, "'Questo si costuma ora in Bologna': Una lettera di Guido Reni, aprile 1628," Prospettiva 98-99 (2000): 194-203 (her complex reading of ordinario, however, is not supported by Reni's or general usage of the time). For a market definition of "il prezzo ordinario at honesto" in 1573, see Ago, 118-19.
(93.) On the virtue of magnificentia in distinction to liberalitas, see Guido Guarzoni, "Liberalitas, Magnificentia, Splendor: The Classic Origins of Italian Renaissance Lifestyles," in De Marchi and Goodwin (as in n. 89), 332-78.
(94.) On Reni's and Guercino's contrasting marketing strategies, see Spear, 1994 (as in n. 63); and idem, 1997 (as in n. 74).
(95.) Malvasia (as in n. 37), vol. 2, 34.
(96.) Mancini, 258.
(97.) Ibid., 249-51; and Craig Felton, "Ribera's Early Years in Italy: The 'Martyrdom of St. Lawrence' and the 'Five Senses,'" Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 81.
(98.) Anne Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 91-92.
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