Enfilade

Available from ArtBooks.com:

Neil De Marchi and Sophie Raux, eds., Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 340 pages, ISBN: 978-2503548081, $135 / 91€.

This collection examines the volume, contexts, and mechanisms of trade in visual images in Early Modern Europe. Focusing overtly on the internal dynamics and links between art markets in the Early Modern period, it presupposes that art objects—here visual images—are objects of desire. During this period, however, desire changed; a great deal more of these objects came to be made for ordinary domestic consumption, including devotional purposes, than as tokens of the magnificence, piety, cultivation, or learning of individual commissioners. Probably most still were commissioned, but to satisfy tastes that, though differentiated internationally, were widely shared within one country or region. Most too were commissioned at a distance, by agents, and were moved between maker and end-point distributor by specialised traders, many of whom—though far from all—were large-scale operators. The dominant focus of contributors here is therefore on the agents of this distance trade, its mechanisms, and its impacts in terms of both satisfying and subtly shaping tastes at a range of prices. Measurement and mappings are aspects of this traffic. Focus was sharpened by concentrating on three questions: what is currently known about the number of images, whether in the form of paintings, prints, small sculptures or woven textiles, that circulated in early modern Europe? Through what channels and networks were they distributed? And what were the economic, social and institutional contexts?

Neil De Marchi is Professor of Economics at Duke University. His recent writing has been on the circumstances in which key players in contemporary art markets operate and the behaviours that stem from these constraints.
Sophie Raux is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Lille (France). Her research focuses mostly on the circulation and consumption of images and art objects in the Southern Low Countries and France.

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C O N T E N T S

• K. Brosens, Quality, Risk and Uncertainty and the Market for Brussels Tapestry, 1450–1750
• N. De Marchi (et al), Supply-Demand Imbalance in the Antwerp Painting Market, 1630–1680
• M. Szanto, The Pont Notre-Dame, Heart of the Picture Trade in France, 16th–18th Centuries
• S. Raux, Circulation, Distribution and Consumption of Antwerp Paintings in the Markets of the Southern Netherlands and Northern France, 1570–1680
• C. Rasterhoff, The Zeeland Connection: The Art Trade between the Northern and Southern Netherlands during the Seventeenth Century
• N. Gozzano, From Flanders to Sicily: The Network of Flemish Dealers in Italy and the International Art Market in the Seventeenth Century
• I. Cecchini, Going South: The Space for Flemish Art Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Northern Italy
• P. Michel, Paris, Market of Europe: Russian and English Buyers on the Paris Market in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
• C. Guichard, Small Worlds: The Auction Economy in the Late Eighteenth-Century Paris Art Market
• B. Miyamoto, Bidding as a Guide to British Visual Preference: A Late Eighteenth-Century Case Study
• D. Lyna, Towards an Integrated Market? The Austrian Netherlands and the Western European Trade in Pre-Owned Paintings, 1750–1800