Art and Appropriability in Renaissance Italy and The ... - Springer Link

DE ECONOMIST 145, NO. 2, 1997

ART AND APPROPRIABILITY IN RENAISSANCE ITALY AND THE NETHERLANDS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE ROLE OF THE ACADEMY** BY N.M. WIJNBERG* Key words: arts markets, guilds, academies of arts, Italian Renaissance, Dutch Golden Age, selection systems 1 INTRODUCTION

Both in Italy during the Renaissance and in The Netherlands in the seventeenth century, a large number of artists were successfully employed, relative to most other periods and places, and their work has achieved high status in art history and attracted high prices at auctions. This paper aims to describe and explain the nature of the competitive processes on the art markets in these two place-period couples. The main purpose of the paper will be to show how the characteristics of art markets, and the strategies artists choose, are determined by the available means of appropriability, and that the availability of specific means of appropriability can be closely linked to the presence or absence of particular institutions, such as an academy. The market for art is generally considered to be very different from other markets and economists have attempted to explain how this anomalous market operates and which characteristics of art products cause these anomalies ~e.g. Mossetto, 1993; Heilbrun and Gray, 1993!. Some of the most striking aspects of the market for visual art products have to do with the relations between the demand and the supply side. There are, for instance, exceptionally high information asymmetries between producers, dealers and consumers. Although many authors, such as the ones mentioned above, point at the special characteristics of art products to explain the exceptional relations between demand and supply, this paper will attempt to explain the characteristics of art products from the relations between supply and demand, using the concept of the selection system, and the institutional structures that govern these relations. Art historians generally have focused more on the supply side. Economic historians who concerned themselves with art have more often been interested in the demand side. Again, the concept of the selection system seems appropriate to integrate both approaches. In introductory texts on microeconomics, consumers are considered to be completely independent of producers. Thus, the anonymous forces of the market will *¬ Universitair Hoofddocent, Faculteit der Bedrijfskunde, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Van Breestraat 131, 1071 ZL Amsterdam. Fax: 020-6645343; e-mail: [email protected]. **¬ The author wishes to thank two anonymous referees for their most helpful comments. De Economist 145, 139–158, 1997. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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distinguish winners and losers, and reward them according to their merits. This type of selection process can be called market selection. Of course, real market selection usually differs from the ideal type as described above. For instance, markets can be oligopolistic or strongly regulated. However, as long as consumers collectively remain an autonomous force, able to make or break producers, market selection can be said to dominate. Market selection can be contrasted with two other types: peer selection ~or auto-selection!, in which the selectors are part of the same group as the selectees ~Debackere et al., 1994!, and expert selection, in which the selectors are not themselves producers or consumers but have the power to choose instead of the actual consumers by virtue of specific knowledge or abilities attributed to them. Most importantly, different selection systems mean different means to achieve appropriability, the ability of a producer to profit from his competitive position, and, especially, from his innovations ~Wijnberg, 1995a, see also Wijnberg, 1995b!. Peer selection is the selection system that dominates science in modern times, defining the boundaries of that domain at this moment: science is science if another scientist, acting for instance as a referee for a journal, calls it science. In just the same way, expert selection is the system dominating visual art in the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of that domain: visual art is only art if an expert – a museum curator, an art critic – calls it art. To achieve success and appropriability, a modern visual artist needs the backing of experts. This state of affairs would have seemed strange to medieval or earlyRenaissance observers. To them, no real distinction existed between art and craftsmanship. This paper will attempt to show that this distinction dates from the Italian Renaissance and that it was caused by a radical change in the selection system dominating ~visual! art and the means of appropriability available to artists. It will be argued that the institutional innovation that played a principal role in allowing this change to take place, was the establishment of the academy of art because the academy became the cornerstore of the appropriability regime underpinning the new selection system. We will attempt to support this position by discussing painting in The Netherlands during the period that coincides, roughly, with the Dutch Golden Age, precisely because the triumphal progress of the academy was interrupted in The Netherlands in that particular period. The case of The Netherlands will thus serve as an argument a contrario with respect to the hypothesized relationship between the academy and the change in the selection system. This paper will first deal with the Italian case, showing how interrelated changes in demand and supply brought about a situation in which the selection system could change. Next, it will be shown how the academy played an essential part in this transformation. After some preliminary conclusions, the case of The Netherlands will be discussed, focussing on the strategies artists applied to achieve appropriability within a market selection system. More conclusions will be drawn from the comparison between the two cases.

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Two preliminary remarks have to be made. Already in this section, the word ‘academy’ has been used. Most academies had their own proper name, which could also change in the course of time. The academy in Rome was called Accademia de San Luca. The academy in Madrid was the Academia de San Fernando. In Napoleonic times the French academy was reborn as two sister institutions: the Academy des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Because this paper does not aim at providing a detailed history of European academies, but wants to show how the existence of the ‘academic institution’ was related to the development of the painting industry, it seems justified to go using the term ‘academy’ as a generic term, spelling it with a capital A whenever a particular academy is meant. Moreover, speaking of Italy or The Netherlands as if they were political or economic entities may seem anachronistic. However, for the painters involved, Italy and The Netherlands were recognizable entities with respect to the essential characteristics of supply and demand, even though, on the one hand, variation was enormous between the Dutch Republic and the ~Spanish! Southern Netherlands, or between Venice and Rome, and, on the other hand, there was a lively trade between the two main areas and many ideas and persons moved from the one to the other. Both for the painters and for their customers, ‘Italian’ and ‘made in The Netherlands’ were clear and distinct labels, allowing this paper to treat the two areas as economic entities. Thus, a painter like Rubens, who received an important part of his artistic education in Italy and who might even have felt more Italian than Flemish, will feature in this paper as a painter from The Netherlands. 2 RENAISSANCE ITALY: DEMAND AND SUPPLY

The demand for art in Renaissance Italy was in its own way as spectacular, with respect to its size and its innovative quality, as the supply. On the one hand, accumulated profits, in the period that Italian merchants and bankers dominated trade in Europe and especially trade between Europe and the Islamic world, were greater than could, with comparable profits, be invested in industry ~Goldwaithe, 1993!; on the other hand, not every consumption pattern that can be afforded economically can also be afforded socially. Although most sumptuary laws preventing non-nobles to imitate the consumption patterns of the nobles had disappeared or fallen into disuse, it often did not seem right or comfortable to the new urban elites to adopt the consumption patterns of the old feudal nobility. However, they generally could spend it on art without transgressing legal rules or social norms. Furthermore, not only was art socially affordable, its consumption could also function as a means of establishing or demonstrating social status, which made its consumption almost a social necessity in a society in which the hierarchical structure was more mobile than before, and more so than anywhere else at that time. In early-Renaissance Italy, the newly rich cities and their newly rich citizens had power and affluence. The citizens were not only new to wealth

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as individuals but the type of wealth, from international trade and banking, was also seen as new in nature and by definition lacking in legitimacy. The antithesis to this was provided by the newly poor, the new religious orders, whose rise was caused, at least partly, by the need to handle the changes in social relations caused by the growing wealth of some private citizens and churchmen. Even though some of the new orders, as for instance the Franciscans, epoused poverty as an ideal, their success brought them wealth, part of which was used to buy art for public places, such as their own churches, where the poor could benefit from it too. The instability of communal politics increased, from the fourteenth century onwards, the power on the ‘signori.’ The legitimacy of the power of these, mostly new, nobles was, however, in most cases not certified by a king or at least not by a king with real power in those parts. The industry of small-scale mercenary warfare conducted by freelance condotierri flourished and was characterized by low barriers to entry. This too gave great possibilities of social mobility into and within the ‘noble’ classes. Some of the most successful condotierri became lords over the cities that originally employed them as mercenaries. Other new noble lords arose from the merchant classes and the legitimacy of the nobility of a former merchant or banker seemed even weaker, to contemporary eyes, than that of a former smalle-scale warlord. New nobles of both types and especially those that took power in cities, such as the Carrara and the Medici, quickly saw the advantages of becoming important patrons of the arts ~Norman, 1995!. Finally, the upper ranks of the church hierarchy, more important and independent in Italy than elsewhere, offered additional possibilities for social mobility because of the non-hereditary nature of its posts. On the one hand, it was difficult for popes and cardinals to openly promote their sons to high positions, and, on the other hand, most church positions could be bought and especially the new noble families profited from this possibility. ‘In short, Italian society was subject to a dynamic of change unlike that of any other in Europe. Elsewhere, wealth was predominantly in land and therefore less subject to instability, it was largely in the hands of a closed caste that experienced less mobility, and it moved from one generation to another over well-charted and confined genealogical routes’ ~Goldwaithe, 1993, p. 52!. As started above, in a situation where mobility is high and legitimacy scarce, but where Bourdieu’s ~1979! three types of capital – financial, social and cultural – are exchanged with relative ease, conspicuous consumption can become almost a necessity. And few products are better suited to this type of consumption than ~visual! art, because among its product characteristics it has both content and form, and both can be used to express that what the conspicuous consumer wants to express. Content could be used to tell a story the consumer wanted to be told about himsalf or about something he considered important ~which also told something about the consumer!. Form could be used to show that the consumer was able to pay for large surfaces of expensive colours, such as ultramarine, or for


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intricate ornamentation, but soon it also was used to demonstrate the level of sophistication of the consumer. An art consumer could enhance his status by showing to be someone capable of appreciating the latest innovations in art, the subtle harmonies of colour, the excellence of the design. It is also significant that this kind of conspicuous consumption easily leads toward a process of demand competition and a strengthening of trends with respect to consumer preferences. The preceding remarks hold true for the demand side seen as a whole. However, the relative importance of the various actors at the demand side changed significantly in the course of the period. At the start of the period the dominant actors were the religious orders, and especially the new ones such as the Franciscans, and the newly rich cities and civic corporations. In a later phase, the courts, princely and ecclesiastical, became prominent, and the cities as well as the private citizens started to follow their lead, 1 both with respect to the taste and, as will be explained further below, to the way in which they thought about and treated artists. In the first phase, content clearly dominated form as a dominant product characteristic. The average citizen had to be able to understand what the picture above the altar or on the wall of the townhall was about. In the later phase, form in a broad sense, including the particular way in which a particular artist treated a piece of content, became more and more important. This shift, once begun, was reinforced by the process of demand competition and, combined with the way the supply side reacted, with the changes in the institutional structure surrounding artistic activity and the resulting effects on the characteristics of appropriability, allowed a fundamental change in the selection system to take place. At the supply side, there were the painters and the workshops of which they were a member. As discussed above, the typical customer of the early Renaissance was a civic or religious corporation or a private person who commissioned an artist and his workshop to make a particular painting for a particular purpose. The workshop’s organization was designed to be able to execute small and large commissions without loss of quality or stylistic consistency. Central to the functioning of the workshop was the system of on-the-job education. All artists, masters or journeymen, had to go through a period of apprenticeship where they learned both the essentials of craftmanship and the use of a specific style, while ascending the rungs of the organizational ladder of a specific workshop. The apprentice started with menial tasks and the preparation of materials for others, progressing to be allowed to assist with the easy parts of a painting and, later, could 1 Kempers ~1994! sees a different type of dominant consumer in each of Vasari’s three main periods: first the mendicant orders and city communes, secondly the rich merchants and thirdly the courts. However, the rich merchants, as self-assured as they might have been individually, were less confident in expressing their identity as a social group than the other two. Most often, the rich merchants can be seen to act as art consumers as if their house was either a rather small city or a rather modest court. For the purposes of this paper, therefore, only two types of dominant consumers will be distinguished.

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arrive at being entrusted with painting whole figures. The costs involved with training were compensated for by the benefits of the cheap labour the apprentice had to provide for a fixed number of years. It is important to note that the system of education also provided a means of appropriability; a workshop ‘owned’ its style which was difficult to imitate by those who were not willing to be trained in that particular workshop and assist the workshop in appropriating the profits from the use of its style. A customer was interested above all in the style of a workshop, not in the traces of the hand of a particular painter. Even if fourteenth century contracts specify that the painting should be the master’s own hand, this does not mean what present-day collectors and connoisseurs would mean by that phrase. Harrison ~1995, p. 79! writes: ‘it could be said that the concern to secure the master’s personal touch ... was not so much a condition under which Giotto himself worked ... as a long-term consequence of the skills demonstrated in such work as his and of the esteem accorded to those skills. ... If the concept of a stylistic personality is to make any sense under those conditions, we will need to acknowledge that the skills in organization, instruction, and delegation must have been among the identifying qualities of the individual concerned.’ Thus, a customer desiring a work by the master’s own hand required a work showing all the qualities of the workshop of which the master was not only the main artist but also the manager who ensured the level of skill of the workforce, the stylistic consistency, and the final quality of the product. The importance of his ‘hand’ in the sense as described above, also helped the master to appropriate the success of the style and the artistic innovations with which he and his workshop were associated. Masters, journeyman and apprentices had to be members of the guild if they wanted to be allowed to produce and, especially, to sell their work in a community where a guild for their particular craft existed. The guild officials determined the length of apprenticeships and the conditions for graduating to the level of a journeyman of a master. The guild functioned as a certifier of the quality of artistic education and of the quality of the products. If disputes arose, the guilds could also act as arbiters between artists and clients. Of course, local variation was great. For instance, the length of the period of apprenticeship did differ from city to city, as did the possibilities for a journeyman of setting up his own shop. Nevertheless, the general nature of the early-Renaissance art industry is clear. The painters worked under a system of market selection, in which the forces of the market were stringently regulated to protect the established producers against unbridled competition. The educational system helped to ensure the quality of the products as well as the stability of the producer’s quasi-cartel. The educational system together with the other elements of the guild-regulated environment provided appropriability to the masters. However, in the course of the Italian Renaissance, this picture started to change. The developments at the demand side that make the courts the dominant customers of up-market paintings increased the level of competition, which was


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already high, but also allowed some artists to put themselves outside and, as it were, above the market place. If an artist became a court artist, he usually was liberated from the regulations of the guild. Also, the court artist was typically paid a salary and was not paid per painting. This implied, at the time, that what was being paid was the quality of the man rather than how much the man did. Receiving a salary was a clear sign that one was not an artisan, but a noble or, at the very least, a performer of the liberal arts, something for which, at least according to humanistic doctrine, natural talent was required, and not only skills that could be learned. The courts’ interest in artists provided useful leverage for those artists to receive from cities the same things they could receive from the courts: freedom from guild restrictions, the status of a practitioner of the liberal arts and, in exceptional cases, a salary. However, the courts were not interested in painters in general but only in those artists of such individual talent that to patronize them was a sign of discernment, maybe even innate nobility, on the part of the patron. Three things are of importance here: individuality, talent, and recognition. Value was increasingly seen as being created by individuals. The emphasis shifted from the master as the hub of a workshop to the workshop as an extension of the master. Artists started to create works without having been commissioned beforehand, expecting that buyers will be found who desire their paintings. The crucial case is, as often, that of Michelangelo, and especially of Michelangelo according to Vasari, who grudgingly accepts papal commissions but executes them according to the demands of his artistic conscience and with a minimum of assistance. In 1519, Francis I, the king of France, asks Michelangelo for a painting by his hand, even if it is a very small one. In 1523 the Venetian cardinal Grimani writes him to remind him of his promise to produce something for him, leaving Michelangelo complete freedom to choose the subject, dimensions, and also to decide whether the product will be a statue or a painting. The cardinal does not want to improve the interior decoration of his palace, he wants a trace of Michelangelo’s individuality, possibly to improve his soul by contact with a soul that seems to have received more heavenly inspiration than those of most church officials. Another sign of this change is the appreciation of drawings, not as useful tools in the production process of the workshop and as a means to train apprentices in the workshop’s style, but as expressions of the individuality of an artist, of his hand in a modern sense. Incidentally, the price of drawing material had decreased in the meantime, with the effect of making it more affordable to artists to ‘think aloud’ on paper and not just on reusable surfaces. The importance of talent was closely linked to the importance of individuality. Talent was, as mentioned above, something one possessed or did not possess, not something which could acquired by training or practice alone. Therefore, the most essential way in which talent showed itself was through originality, doing something which one could not have learned to do. The premium on originality and innovation, in turn, meant that an ambitious apprentice would have to distinguish

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his style from the recognizable style of his master and his master’s workshop as soon as possible. Finally, individual talent had to be recognized. Ideally, the nobility of mind of princely patrons made them naturally suited to recognize individual talent. In practice, they relied heavily on the advice of others. Certification by the guilds clearly sufficed to prove craftsmanship only not individual talent. Instead, the opinions of men of proven talent in other fields, especially poets and scholars, were valued highly, even though they may not have been able to judge the technical ability of the painter. When Petrarch bequeaths a Giotto painting, ‘whose beauty is not appreciated by the ignorant’ ~quoted in Warnke, 1993, p. 17!, to Francesco Carrara, he is in fact certifying both Giotto as a talented painter and Carrara as a talented art consumer. Most important were the opinions and, especially, recommendations of recognized fellow artists. Vasari gives many examples of artists being helped to patronage by a good word from, for instance, Michelangelo. And if a universally acclaimed artist such as Michelangelo takes the trouble of informing a prince about the talent of a painter, he again certifies the painter and the prince. The growing emphasis on the value of individual talent thus increased the influence of both experts and peers. As has already been made clear, an important effect of the above-mentioned changes was a significant weakening of the powers of the guilds. The guilds had been useful for the early-Renaissance workshops by providing them with regulated and dampened market competition, certification of products and producers, and regulation and certification of the educational system. These three functions of the guild ensured at the same time a reasonable level of appropriability. Thus, capable and innovative masters could expect to be able to earn a good living, certainly not worse than that of other craftsmen, under conditions of market selection. Some artists were not satisfied with this state of affairs. Changes at the demand side rewarded them for distinguishing themselves from other craftsmen and for separating themselves from the marketplace. This, in turn, significantly reduced the importance of the guilds. When the power of the guilds decreased, another institutional structure had to be set up to fulfil some or all of the abovementioned functions and especially to provide an alternative appropriability regime, suited to the new situation and the new selection system that was in the process of formation. The academy served to provide this essential ingredient for the new institutional structure. 3 THE ACCADEMIA DEL DISEGNO

The occasion that led to the foundation of the Florentine Academy was the desire of Giovanni Montorsola, a former pupil of Michelangelo, to donate a chapel and a tomb he had built himself for the purpose of burying the bodies of poor artists. This desire was communicated to Giorgio Vasari and a number of other Florentine artists. They not only reacted enthusiastically to the suggestion by organizing


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the solemn re-burial of Jacopo Pontorno, they also profited from the occasion to extend their collaboration and decides, after consultation with the Duke of Florence and some of his advisors, to found an Anademy on May 31, 1562, with the purpose of educating aspiring artists and allowing established artists to improve their work in ~friendly! competition with each other. It is significant that what is meant here by competition is not the competition for the art consumer’s favour but for the high regard of their colleagues. Regulations were proposed for this organization and approved by Duke Cosimo on January 13, 1563. To be a member of the new organization one had to be a painter, sculptor or architect. It accorded with the desire of the founders of the Academy to create distance between them and mere craftsmen in that the differences in technique were considered relatively unimportant. Good artists, whether painters, sculptors or architects, excelled with respect to their powers of conception, the faculty of ‘design.’ A two-third vote of present members in one’s favour was necessary to be admitted as a member. Members could be promoted to academicians, again after a twothirds vote of present academicians in their favour and after approval by the Duke. The Duke appointed a luogotenente who represented the Duke and presided over the meetings. The luogotenente was not to be an artist himself but a ‘lover of the arts,’ in other words, an expert. Apart from providing a platform for artists attracted by the new ideas and a regulatory body, the primary purpose of the organization lay in providing education. Because regulation and certification of education had been the mainstay of guild-controlled production, this initiative seemed to be aimed at the destruction of the basis of the old system ~Reynolds, 1974!. In the academy, young artists would not only be taught the ‘art of design’ but would also study other subjects, that were, according to Vasari and his colleagues, intimately related to design, such as mathematics. In fact, the reality of academic teaching in Florence did not live up to the ambitious intentions mentioned in the statutes ~Goldstein, 1996!. However, the development of later academic teaching was determined by these intentions, not by their execution. Another innovation was the awarding of prizes, financed by the Duke, to the best students by the officials of the Academy. The regulations of the Academy were renewed a number of times. Of particular interest here is the creation, in the regulation of 1582, of a new office, that of an appraiser, whose function it would be to determine the value, if it was in dispute, of works of art. Formerly, again, such a task would normally be performed by guild officials in the context of market regulation, to ensure that producers received a satisfactory price and to prevent escalation of price competition. The implicit challenge of the Accademia to the guilds was made explicit by the ducal degree of 1571 that freed all members of the Academy from their obligations to the guilds. To the Duke, the benefits of this measure also lay in fur-

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ther diminishing the political power of the guilds whose natural allegiance was more to the memory of the Florentine republic than to ducal tyranny. 2 The previous section distinguished three main functions of the guild: regulation of market competition, certification of producers and products, and certification of artistic education. These three functions together served to guarantee the master and his workshop a healthy level of appropriability in an environment dominated by market selection. However, the interrelated changes in demand and supply in the course of the Italian Renaissance allowed a new selection system to arise. The academy took over the function of the guilds with respect to certification of products and producers. Only those producers allowed to become academicians were true artists, officials of the academy had final authority in establishing the value of art works. The academy not only certified education, it aimed to provide it itself. What the academy did not do was to regulate market competition for the simple reason that the need for this function declined along with the importance of market selection which was replaced by a mix of mostly peer selection and a small, but growing, amount of expert selection. The new art consumers needed to be able to recognize individual talent, not just good craftsmanship conforming to the best traditions. Only people who were extraordinary talented themselves were considered equal to the task of recognizing talent in others. Among these who appeared qualified figured princes, because of the presumed nobility of their minds, philosophers and writers, but first and foremost: other talented artists. The Accademia del Disegno represented the ‘knowledgeable’ classes. The Duke was its titular head, the real president, the Duke’s representative, was an expert and membership consisted not of anyone who painted or sculpted but of those artists considered worthy by their peers because of their artistic talent. An artist who was not educated by the academy, or in accordance with its doctrines, did not have much chance of entering the academy. Art consumers generally came to trust the judgment of this institution on the question whether an artist was individually talented or not and whether his works deserved the price of a work of genuine art. Finally, the appraisers of the academy could be expected to put a higher value on artwork produced by academicians than on those by others. All these facts together meant that the academy was able to provide appropriability to its members. Only if the peers, especially the academicians, and the experts, the noble connoisseurs who, ideally, sponsored academies and the philosophers and writers who sometimes had developed into semi-professional connoisseurs and consultants, considered a painting to have value could 2 It is possible to take this line of reasoning one step further. Shearman ~1992, p. 52! comments on the placing of Cellini’s Perseus next to Donatello’s Judith and Michelangelo’s David: ‘Yet, I think that the political strategy of Cosimo Primo, as he transformed the main civic space of Florence, so resonant with republican memories, from Piazza dei Signori to Piazza Ducale, was rather to neutralize the political message of existing images by making them more emphatically works of art in an open-air gallery.’


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this value be realized on the ‘market’ for art products. A mixture of peer selection and expert selection had replaced market selection. The academy should not simply be considered as a successor of the guild. It is a different kind of institution. However, the academy was as necessary to the new selection system and to its appropriability regime as the guild was to the old. 3 Vasari was not the most excellent painter of the Italian Renaissance. However, his importance was greater than that of any other individual with respect to his part in the transformation of the selection system dominating art. Vasari played at least three roles: adviser to the Duke, painter and prominent member of the Academy, and art historian. As adviser to the Duke, Vasari emphasized the link between the prestige of the artists patronized by the Duke, or working under the Duke’s gracious protection, and the prestige of the Duke himself. The stylistic movement to which the painter Vasari belonged, mannerism, was in itself a statement against the ‘blind’ forces of market selection. The mannerist theoretician Paolo Pino writes in his Dialogo della Pittura that the artist should include in every painting at least one figure so distorted and ambiguous that he shall be recognized as a true artist only by those who understand the subtle nuances of art ~Shearman, 1967!. The same tendencies were displayed with respect to colouring. Hall ~1992, p. 149! writes that ‘Mannerist colour sought to amaze and to startle by improving upon nature. Like much of our art today, it was intended to display the invention of the painter.’ Vasari’s third role, that of pioneering art historian, has two different effects. On the one hand, his celebration of the genius of individual painters increased the prestige of painters and the value attributed to their opinions on the work of their peers. On the other hand, the rise of art history strenghtened the position of the non-artist art expert, especially qualified to recognize the quality and innovative capability of a particular artist by comparing his work with that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Therefore, Vasari can be considered not only as one of the principal actors in bringing about the academic revolution but also as a harbinger of the system of expert selection that would come to dominate the art industry after the nineteenth century revolt against the academy. Neither Vasari nor Michelangelo had much respect for paintings from The Netherlands that were, according to Michelangelo in his conversation with Francesco da Hollanda, mostly pleasing to old women and other people with little knowledge of the arts. They might not have been surprised to learn that The Netherlands in the Dutch Golden Age became the place where the art of painting developed in a completely opposite direction, not away from market selection but towards an even more untrammeled version of market selection. For the purposes of this paper, the case of The Netherlands in the Dutch Golden Age deserves close attention in 3 See also Wijnberg ~1977! where the implications of the foundation of the Accademia on the development of the workshop are especially highlighted.

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order to study the relation between art and appropriability in an environment where the academic tradition did not prevail. 4 THE NETHERLANDS: DEMAND AND SUPPLY

Just as Goldwaithe did with respect to the Italian case, Bok ~1994! argues for the importance of the level of wealth as a factor determining the level of demand for art in The ~Dutch! Netherlands. In The Netherlands too, at the start of the Golden Age the main customers for art were the civic and ecclesiastic authorities. The Dutch nobility had not yet become sufficiently interested in art consumption to play an important part in the market. Because most of them chose the Spanish side in the rebellion, their later influence on the development of Dutch art was negligible. In the Spanish Netherlands, the native nobility had less power than their Italian counterparts and, consequently, less need to legetimize their power by consuming art. The reformation also led to iconoclasm, removing the churches and cloisters almost completely from the Dutch art market, at least as consumers. Private citizens stepped into the gap and especially the religious corporations had left. Montias ~1982! writes: ‘I suggest that private collecting, for many substantial citizens may have become a substitute for publicly displayed artwork that had disappeared.’ An unheard of proportion of the population, maybe two out of three in a city such as Delft, owned at least one painting ~Montias, 1982, p. 220!. These new customers primarily wanted something they considered pleasant or interesting to look at, not an instrument to increase or consolidate social status. In The Netherlands, and especially in the Dutch Republic, the possession of financial capital was much more closely correlated with that of social and educational capital than in Renaissance Italy, and the need to transform the one into the other was therefore much less urgent. At the end of the Dutch Golden Age the level of demand decreases sharply, because of the declining, or at least stagnant, level of wealth and because of what Bok ~1994! calls the ‘structural overproduction’ of the preceding decades, worsened by the increasing supply of ‘used’ paintings. At the supply side the guilds of St. Lucas regulated the market to the extent that the work of non-city and non-guild artists could not be sold in a city where a particular guild was active. The important exception was the city of Amsterdam in which, for most of the time period this paper is concerned with, such regulations did not operate. Amsterdam was by far the largest art market in the country and this fact significantly undermined the effective power of the guilds. Also, Dutch painting became increasingly successful in foreign markets ~Van der Woude, 1991! and the guilds had little power over exports. Education remained a function of the individual workshops, loosely controlled by the guild. Apprentices had to pay large amounts of money to their masters for the privilege of being taught. For some masters, teaching constituted a highly significant source of in-


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come. Thus, the guilds lost some of their powers to control the market process, but not to the academy. Although academies had been founded in both the Spanish Netherlands and in the Dutch Republic, they did not achieve the power and influence of their Italian and French predecessors. The Academy in Antwerp was founded in 1663 by the local St. Lucas guild and Jordaens received the commission of painting the ceiling for the room destined for lectures. The title of the painting was: ‘How trade and industry promote the flowering of the arts.’ It is doubtful whether a French or Italian academy would have appreciated a painting with such a title, especially to decorate the room where the public identity of the academy would be expressed. In the cities of Haarlem and Utrecht, organizations came into existence that aimed at increasing the possibilities of ~advanced! artists to make studies of nude models. Even though contemporaries described these organizations as academies ~Bok, 1994, p. 180!, they were very modest organizations compared to the French and Italian academies and, most importantly for the argument of this paper, they had little effect on the operation of the art market. In this market the value of a painting primarily depended on how the consumer himself felt about it as a decorative or even elevating object. The value of cheap paintings in a Delft estate usually was determined by the notary or one of his clerks. If the paintings seemed expensive, successful painters would sometimes be consulted ~Montias, 1982, p. 230!. Quite a lot of these painters who occasionally functioned as appraisers, such as Vermeer, were also dealers in paintings by others and therefore presumably well-informed about what a particular painting would fetch in the market. Painters were not asked about the value of a particular painting in their eyes, as a professional painter and peer; they were asked to estimate what a particular painting would be worth in the eyes of consumers. This is different from the work of a guild official concerned with upholding market regulation and especially different from that of the appraiser of the Florentine Academy who would put a price on a painting according to its worth in his eyes as representative of the Academy, not as someone knowledgeable about the state of the art market. Also, according to Montias, after the middle of the century, signatures on paintings were increasingly perceived by consumers as a signal of quality and signed paintings by certain artists fetched significantly higher prices. However, consumers were still judging with their own eyes. Recognizing certain signatures as trademarks of quality decreases transaction costs, but it was still the consumer who made the choice which trademarks he trusted, and not the expert or the peer. 5 THE NETHERLANDS: STRATEGIES FOR THE MARKET

In the art industry in The Netherlands that was dominated by the forces of increasingly less regulated market selection, individual suppliers had to find suitable strategies. Leaving apart those who focused their attention on the down-mar-

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ket segments, and of whose work relatively little remains, three main strategies can be distinguished in the high-quality/up-market segment. The first is the strategy chosen by Rubens whose workshop produced in an almost factory-like manner, with a great deal of division of labour and with little attention to the expression of individuality in the execution, a large number of ‘tasteful’ pictures? Tasteful is the sense of a court in the Italian Renaissance, with lots of history and allegory that could be understood by well-educated humanists and explained to well-educated noblemen. The second is the strategy chosen by Vermeer and other ‘fijnschilders’ ~meticulous painters! such as Van Mieris or Bol. Even though they certainly respected and studied the work of the Italian masters of the late Renaissance, their work exemplifies craftsmanship in the best tradition of the guild. Vermeer was a guild headman in the Delft guild that survived longer than the other main painters’ guilds, until 1750 ~Alpers, 1983!. The ‘fijnschilders’ created unsurpassable descriptions of valuable and often rare objects. Their style did not lend itself to mass production, both because of the technical mastery required and because of the fact that the paintings too had to be rare objects themselves. Montias ~1989! estimates Vermeer’s total lifetime production at less than sixty paintings. The third, and most innovative commercial strategy, is the one of ~the later! Rembrandt. The young Rembrandt starts off by attempting to imitate Rubens’ strategy. Although he was quite successful, circumstances and maybe dissatisfaction at not being as successful as Rubens, made Rembrandt opt for a new course. Where Rubens conforms to the norms of the academy with respect to the product, Rembrandt internalizes, as it were, the academic standards into the product. Rembrandt sells individual talent. Alpers ~1988! writes about Rembrandt’s ‘enterprise of the self.’ Where Rubens produces for courts as if they were consumers in an ordinary market with a specific set of courtly, academic, consumer preferences, Rembrandt produces for consumers in the market as if they were courtiers/experts, able to recognize and appreciate the expression of extremely talented individuality. Chapman ~1990! points out that other painters had shown themselves with their tools, but usually dressed in their best apparel, and either as ‘the craftsman at work; a genre painting,’ or as ‘a successful bourgeois modestly aware of the sources of his good fortune;’ The adherents to the academic ideal preferred to show themselves as humanists and scholars, in clean clothes and with unencumbered hands. In the etchings of 1648 and in later self-portraits, Rembrandt chooses to show himself in his dirty working clothes, with his tools in his hands, as a person who is proud and dignified because he is what he is and he sells what he is, an exceptionally gifted painter. After his death, Rubens was retroactively given a place in the academic mainstream. The famous debate between ‘Poussinistes’ and ‘Rubenistes’ was mainly a debate within the French Academy. Of course, Rubens had done all the right things: he went to Italy, copied classical sculpture and high-Renaissance painting, and studies with famous humanistic scholars. He was also an eminent courtier.


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He had little in common with a humble craftsman. In 1609, he was explicitly exempted from all his obligations towards the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp by the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. Peers and experts could forgive such a man for adapting to the market. Little attention was paid to Vermeer for two centuries. Only in the late nineteenth century did interest in his work revive, not coincidentally in the same period in which interest in and admiration for the late medieval and earlyRenaissance craftsman revived. The pre-Rafaelists, for instance, strongly preferred guilds to academies. Admiration for his works, and that of other ‘fijnschilders,’ further increased in the twentieth century without, however, either his style or his business strategy having appreciable influence on the development on the art of painting. The crucial figure of Dutch seventeenth century art is Rembrandt. Precisely because he became to be considered an archetypical artist, much of the debate about what or how an artist should be has involved his case. Because the modern history of art is so dominated by the academic tradition, most views of Rembrandt are within that framework. Some have considered him a failed academician. Early eighteenth century writers criticized his failure to adhere to classicistacademic values with respect to subject matter as well as style. The romantics saw Rembrandt as their forerunner who expressed his individuality, unfettered by academic traditions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Rembrandt was depicted as a lonely genius, misunderstood by his contemporaries and crushed by the forces of the market that are per se inimical to artistic greatness. In reaction to this point of view, later writers, such as for instance Schwartz ~1985!, have emphasized Rembrandt’s commercial activities. He first worked in Uilenbergh’s painting factory, which was ironically called ‘Uilenbergh’s Academy.’ Later he employed a large number of apprentices in his own workshop which was increasingly geared to the anonymous market, not so much to patronage in a narrow sense. Although Rembrandt had earlier made good money with portraits, a product normally painted on commission by a particular private patron, his preferred genre later became history painting and his self-portraits became much more numerous than his portraits. Rembrandt did paint many history paintings, which is the preferred genre in the academic tradition. However, he does not use the genre for academic purposes. He does not show off his scholarship and good taste, neither does he allow buyers or spectators to show off theirs. Consequently, few of these paintings were commissioned by specific patrons with academically-formed tastes. 4 Alpers ~1988! also pointed out that a large number of the self-portraits, usually considered to be the most individual expression of Rembrandt’s individuality, were by the hands of members of a 4 And when the history painting was meant for a specific patron, Rembrandt often seemed to do his best not to take his patron’s tastes into account, with disastrous consequences, as for instance in the case of the Oath of Julius Civilis.

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workshop that produced ‘Rembrandts.’ Rembrandt operated as an old-fashioned guild master, but with a radically new product and in a market in which the regulating and appropriability-providing powers of the guild had almost completely disappeared. The Delft guild of which Vermeer was a member had much more power and also endured much longer ~until 1750!. Rembrandt was not willing, or according to Schwartz not able, to become a court painter. At least in the second half of his life he had no desire to become a noble 5 or a pseudo-noble academician. Art experts, to him, were at best suitable subjects for scurrilous caricature. He was certain there was demand for his type of painting and he was right about that. He simply lacked the appropriate means of appropriability to convert his being right in his being rich. That he went as far as to bid for his own etchings at auctions to drive up the price is a tragic illustration of this fact. Controversies over the genuineness of a particular painting ascribed to Rembrandt seem fiercer than with respect to the works of many other artists and also relatively often lead to discussions about what art is or should be. Because the work of Rembrandt seems so closely linked to his personality, every time a Rembrandt is exposed to be only a ‘Rembrandt,’ this is felt as an irreparable loss, and not only to the owners. One can regard the Rembrandt Research Project, which is responsible for a great deal of the unmasking of the last decades, as the revenge of the art experts. When the art market collapsed in The Netherlands in the late 17th century, all three strategies adapted to market selection became unprofitable. The academic tradition had its propagandists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Netherlands, such as Van Mander who imitated Vasari not just in his style of painting but also in founding an Academy in Haarlem and writing a book on the lives of the famous artists. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the academic tradition in The Netherlands triumphed. Then, it helped to isolate the pitiful remains of the Dutch art industry from the market by offering its particular type of appropriability. However, Rembrandt’s enterprise had failed much earlier. Rembrandt attempted to supply expressions of talented individuality in an industry governed by market selection. Regretfully, no fitting means of appropriability were available to allow him to fully profit from his extraordinary talents in the market place.

5 That would not have been easy. In the Northern Netherlands, there was no king or emperor who could offer him a peerage or even membership in a knightly order. Velazquez could at least become a knight of Santiago, after having proved never to have been an apprentice to a guild member or having sold paintings from a shop ~Warnke, 1993, p. 160! – two highly significant conditions from the point of view of the argument of this paper.


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6 CONCLUSIONS

In the fifteenth century, Italian painting and painting from The Netherlands had developed distinctive stylistic traditions. However, the way in which paintings were produced, sold and appreciated, did not differ much. Both in the cities of Italy and of The Netherlands, painters were craftsmen who were organized in guilds. Only masters of the local guild could manage a workshop, teach apprentices, and sell their output. In this way, the guilds provided appropriability on a market that was, moreover, highly regulated by these same guilds to guard against overproduction and cut-throat competition. However, even though competition was regulated, the dominant selection system was clearly market selection. The main customers were the religious and civic corporations. In Renaissance Italy, new types of art customers start to appear: the newly powerful and the newly rich who discover the value of art consumption as a means to legitimize their power and affluence. Changes at the demand side trigger changes at the supply side where artists see opportunities to improve their social, and financial, status. The higher the status of art and art products, the better they are able to satisfy the needs of the new constumers. At first, only a few artists, backed by extremely powerful customers, succeeded in transcending the status of craftsmen and liberating themselves from guild restrictions. Later artists used the prestige of these predecessors to create, in collaboration with princely patrons and humanistic scholars, a new institutional structure that allowed artists, as a professional group, to separate themselves from the practitioners of the crafts and the guilds. In fact, they separated themselves from market selection. This was only made possible, however, by the presence of adequate alternative means of appropriability. The cornerstone of the new institutional structure providing this essential element of appropriability was the academy. By way of the academy, peer selection, and a measure of expert selection, could dominate painting. The success of the academy and the success of the new selection system were mutually reinforcing. The higher the prestige of the academy, the more useful the certification it provided in a market that was distancing itself from market selection. At the start of the Italian Renaissance the guild was the essential organization, determining the market conditions the artists would face and providing a level of appropriability for stylistic innovations. At the end of the Renaissance, at least in places such as Florence, the Academy had usurped most of the functions of the guilds, including the provision of appropriability. Even in cities where no academy was founded, a similar development took place with artists striving to dissociate themselves from the guild-regulated craftsmen and associating themselves with the practitioners of the liberal arts. The prestige of Italian painting and the new high status of Italian painters helped to spread the academic gospel to France. The French monarchy enthusiastically supported the academic idea. Just as the Duke of Florence, the French king was not averse to creating an institution that would diminish the power and status of the guilds and

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guild-related organizations such as the troublesome and antimonarchical Parliament of Paris ~Crow, 1983!. The Academy served as a tool to impress royal power and taste on the nation and to legitimize this power and taste. The French Academy started to take ‘theoretical’ instruction much more seriously than its Italian predecessors had done ~Bryson, 1981; Goldstein, 1996!. The Academy also controlled the system of prizes, including the Prix de Rome, and the regular exhibitions that came to be calles ‘Salons.’ The French Academy, in turn, became the model for academies in other countries, such as Austria and Spain. Everywhere in Europe, the academy was the lever with which artists moved themselves, often with the support of absolutist rulers, from a system of market selection to the new system in which the opinions of peers and experts determined the market value of artwork. The exception to this trend is the case of The Netherlands during the Golden Age. There too, the level of demand had risen, relative to the previous period, and the civic and religious corporations had been replaced as major art consumers by private individuals. However, in The Netherlands, and especially in the Dutch Republic, legitimation of power and wealth was not such a significant motivation for art consumption as in Renaissance Italy. In the Dutch Republic Bourdieu’s three categories of capital, financial, social and cultural, were to a great extent concentrated in the same hands. Relative to the rest of Europe, a much larger part of the population consumed art. The rich bought bigger and better paintings, just as they bought better furniture or clothing. Some Dutch artists were envious of the quasi-noble status that was obtained by the most famous Italian painters, and of the new selection system the Italian painters enjoyed. However, their customers did not have to raise the status of painters to derive social benefits from patronizing extraordinary men. The Dutch customers generally just wanted a great number of extraordinary paintings. In contrast to France or Spain, the Dutch Republic had no absolutist ruler who could use an academic to shatter the guilds and strengthen his power. However, the rapid growth and internationalization of the market helped to reduce the power of the guilds in The Netherlands. This meant that competition on the art market became more free and less regulated. The art industry in The Netherlands remained dominated by market selection. Artists had to develop new strategies and find adequate means of appropriability. The most striking example is that of Rembrandt who, although his enterprise ended in failure, developed the most innovative strategy for the art market of the Dutch Golden Age. The case of The Netherlands in the seventeenth century is so important because it shows how the development of artistic activity as something separated from the forces of the market was, and is, not the only possible road to aesthetic glory. However, the academic system quickly conquered the rest of Europe. Both art customers and artists began to consider it the suitable, even natural, environment for artistic achievement. When demand for art from The Netherlands drastically decreased at the end of the seventeenth century, and the strategies adapted


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to market selection became unsuccessful, artists from The Netherlands saw no other choice than to adjust themselves to the academic system. The art market underwent further transformations. The academy lost its central position to a triumvirate of dealers, critics and museum curators. Peer selection lost importance with respect to the visual arts, and expert selection clearly became the dominant selection system. Market selection has not returned to ~western! visual arts. Texts about the economics of the art market sometimes give the impression that the peculiarities of this market are caused by the exceptional nature of the artistic product or of the average art producer. This paper has argued that the main causes for these peculiarities are to be found in the historical evolution of the means of appropriability available to artists and of the selection system dominating art production. Especially in recent years, public authorities have been searching for ways to make art production less dependent on subsidies. Artists are told that they should adapt themselves better to the market. Art education is encouraged to become more ‘market-oriented.’ The argument of this paper shows, on the one hand, that there is nothing against or unnatural to the proposition that art of the highest quality can be produced in a system of market selection. On the other hand, this paper also attempted to demonstrate that a selection system can only change radically if alternative means of appropriability, suitable to the new system, are found or created.

REFERENCES Alpers, S. ~1983!, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Alpers, S. ~1988!, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Bok, M.J. ~1994!, Vraag en aanbod op de Nederlandse kunstmarkt 1580–1700, Utrecht ~Ph.D. thesis!. Bourdieu, P. ~1979!, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, Paris, Editions du Minuit. Bryson, N. ~1981!, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancient Regime, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Chapman, H.P. ~1990!, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth Century Identity, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Crow, T. ~1983!, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Debackere, K., B. Clarysse, N.M. Wijnberg, and M.A. Rappa ~1994!, ‘Science and Industry: A Story of Networks and Paradigms,’ Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 6, pp. 21–37. Goldstein, C. ~1996!, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Goldwaithe, R.H. ~1993!, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press. Hall, M. ~1992!, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Garrison, C. ~1995!, ‘Giotto and the Rise of Painting,’ in: D. Norman ~ed.!, Sienna, Florence and Padua; Art, Society and Religion 1280–1400, New Haven, Yale University Press, p. 73–96. Heilbrun, J. and C.M. Gray ~1993!, The Economics of Art and Culture: An American Perspective, New York, Cambridge University Press. Kempers, B. ~1994!, Painting, Power and Patronage; the Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy, London, Penguin Books. Larsen, E. ~1985!, Seventeenth Century Flemish Painting, Freren, Luca Verlag. Montias, J.M. ~1982!, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Montias, J.M. ~1989!, Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Mossetto, G. ~1993!, Aesthetics and Economics, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic. Norman, D. ~1995!, ‘The Three Cities Compared: Patrons, Politics and Art,’ in: D. Norman ~ed.!, Sienna, Florence and Padua; Art, Society and Religion 1280–1400, New Haven, Yale University Press, p. 7–28. Reynolds, T. ~1974!, The Academia del Disegno in Florence, Its Formation and Early Years, New York, Columbia University ~Ph.D. thesis!. Schwartz, G. ~1985!, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings, New York. Shearman, J. ~1967!, Mannerism, Hammersworth, Penguin Books. Shearman, J. ~1992!, Only Connect. . .: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Warnke, M. ~1993!, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wijnberg, N.M. ~1955a!, ‘Selection Processes and Appropriability in Art, Science and Technology,’ Journal of Cultural Economics, 19, pp. 221–235. Wijnberg, N.M. ~1955b!, ‘Technological Paradigms and Strategic Groups: Putting Competition into the Definitions,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 29, pp. 254–258. Wijnberg, N.M. ~1997!, ‘The Academia del Disegno and the Art Industry,’ Journal of Cultural Dynamics, 9, 1, pp. 5–16. Woude, A.M. van der ~1991!, ‘De schilderijproduktie in Holland tijdens de Republiek,’ in: J.C. Dagevos, P.H. van Druenen, P. Th. van der Laar, and P.R.A. Oeij ~eds.!, Kunstzaken, Kampen, Kok Agora, pp. 18–51.

Summary ART AND APPROPRIABILITY IN RENAISSANCE ITALY AND THE NETHERLANDS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE ROLE OF THE ACADEMY The concepts selection systems and appropriability are used to discuss the developments of the competitive process between painters and the strategic choices open to them in Renaissance Italy and The Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The presence or absence of an ‘academy’, an institution such as the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, is seen to be a crucial factor with respect to safeguarding appropriability in the new selection system that replaced market selection.