Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800

Michael North, David Ormrod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351957045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The reinvention of art-history during the 1980s has provided a serious challenge to the earlier formalist and connoisseurial approaches to the discipline, in ways which can only help economic and social historians in the current drive to study past societies in terms of what they consumed, produced, perceived and imagined. This group of essays focuses on three main issues: the demand for art, including the range of art objects purchased by various social groups; the conditions of artistic creativity and communication between different production centres and artistic millieux; and the emergence of art markets which served to link the first two phenomena. The work draws on new research by art historians and economic and social historians from Europe and the United States, and covers the period from the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century.

1
Manuscript Acquisition by the Burgundian Court and the Market for Books in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands

Wim Blockmans

The collection of manuscripts of the Valois dukes of Burgundy belonged to the largest collections of the fifteenth century. Of the 867 manuscripts mentioned in the inventory drawn up after Duke Philip the Good’s death in 1467, some 600 had been acquired by himself, since the inventory of his father’s collection from 1420 numbered around 250 manuscripts.¹ Nearly half the total inventoried in 1467 still exist, the larger part, 247, being preserved in the Brussels Royal Library. These have been described in an extensive catalogue which is limited, however, to the illuminated manuscripts.² Around a hundred of the remaining manuscripts are to be found in another Brussels catalogue.³

Quite understandably, exhibition catalogues tend to over-represent the lavishly illuminated books.⁴ The analysis of libraries therefore has to take account of the bias of most catalogues of collections and exhibitions to exclude or underrepresent books which were not illuminated, although these made up a considerable share of medieval libraries. Most present-day collectors and librarians have focused on illuminated manuscripts. The study of manuscripts has mainly been a speciality of art historians, particularly interested in making attributions on stylistic grounds.⁵

The distinction our present-day catalogues make between illuminated and other books cuts right through historical collections. A closer look in the Burgundian library shows that even there the famous lavishly illuminated large manuscripts are merely a spectacular minority, while lots of other books had a rather modest appearance. The choices of present-day librarians thus hamper in some respects our insight in the basis of historical collecting: the purchaser’s preference. A correct understanding of the functions books had for their owner and of the ways by which he acquired them, thus requires the consideration of complete collections.

In this essay, I will investigate the production and distribution of books on two levels: first that of the manuscripts commissioned by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, representing the absolute summit in patronage and purchasing power for books in his own day; then I will confront these findings with a totally different research method focusing on all preserved books in Dutch and Latin produced in the Low Countries. This confrontation will hopefully throw some light on the functioning of the market for books in the fifteenth-century Low Countries.

During the last twenty years of his reign, from 1445 onwards, Duke Philip the Good certainly was the most active manuscript collector of his dynasty and perhaps of his time. Production might have been concentrated at his court and carried out by artists held on his payroll. His grandfather and father thus employed famous artists as their valet de chambre. Among them were the painter Melchior Broederlam, the woodcarver Jacob de Baerze, and most notably the celebrated sculptors Klaas Sluter and Klaas van der Werve. The latter worked at the mausoleum in Champmol near Dijon from 1385 to 1439. Philip the Good himself attracted Jan van Eyck as his valet de chambre from 1425 until his death in 1441.⁶ In 1453, he bestowed the same dignity upon his main master goldsmith Willem van Vleuten. This did not imply, however, that Philip would stop his purchases and commissions, with nearly 180 different goldsmiths established as masters in various cities.⁷

Although the duke engaged on a permanent basis the miniature painter Dreux Jehan from 1448 until 1455 and again in 1464,⁸ and the copier Jean Wauquelin from 1447 to his death in 1452,⁹ these ‘officials’ certainly were not the sole producers of the books in his collection. The ways by which Philip acquired his books can be studied from three types of sources. First, inventories were drawn up of the library at dramatic moments for the dynasty, such as in 1420, 1467 and 1487. These inventories have been used intensively by specialists. Second, the court accounts reveal payments for salaries as well as for particular commissioned works. Third, the preserved books can provide information in their colophon or prologue, while the formal aspects such as the format, materials and the characteristics of the handwriting and illumination enable codicologists and art historians to distinguish producers. Such data have to be related to the content.

Studies of illuminators have shown that even the most famous among them held private workshops in different cities such as Valenciennes, Mons, Hesdin, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels. Most of them, however, were not permanently in the duke’s service.¹⁰ Moreover, copiers worked for some periods intensively for the court, at such a high speed that they necessarily must have been helped by colleagues; then they received no salary or commission for some years after which they again were employed on a more than full-time basis. This was, for example, the case with David Aubert, originating from Valenciennes in Hainault, who was very busy in Duke Philip’s service in Brussels from 1458 to 1465. He reappeared working for his son Anthony in 1468 and 1469, to fade away until 1474-75, when he wrote a series of books for Duchess Margaret of York.¹¹ The court payrolls show that apart from the miniature painter Dreux Jehan and the painter Jean Hennequart, most book producers did not belong to the duke’s court personnel. This does not exclude other ways of regular payment on other receipts, but it shows the greater distance to the patron. Jean Miélot, a canon at Saint Peter’s at Lille, who became a ducal secretary in 1449 and who was in charge of translations of devotional Latin texts into French,¹² and the official chroniclers such as Jean Froissart and Georges Chastellain, do not appear in the court payrolls.¹³ These findings urge us to reconsider the modes of production and acquisition of manuscripts by Duke Philip the Good.

Recent studies of the production and distribution of manuscripts in Flanders have convincingly shown that well before 1400, private lay workshops produced books for an anonymous market, especially books of hours, prayer books and psalters. Liturgical manuscripts, saint’s lives, devotional and moralistic works belonged to the common sphere of production, as well as a few astrological and classical books. Those, however, were mostly produced on commission. The former were sold to local and foreign burghers and found their way to all regions commercially linked with Flanders: Southeastern England, the Rhineland, Westphalia and Lübeck, the Vistula basin, the Po valley, Northern France, Burgundy and the Rhone valley, Catalonia and Navarre.¹⁴ In Bruges, specialised production came to be organised during the fourteenth century in the craft of the painters and in the fifteenth also in that of the librarians. This led to typical conflicts of competence between the two with regard to miniature painting. It is important to note that the scale of book production allowed, just as in the textile industry, for standardisation and specialisation. Miniatures were painted in specialised workshops, sometimes even in another city, on separate leaves in a more or less fixed iconography. These sheets were bound together with the text under the supervision of the librarians who tended to monopolise the negotiation with the customers and to develop into entrepreneurs working with subcontractors. The Bruges city magistrate, however, issued in 1427 an ordinance protecting the independence of the illuminators.¹⁵ Parchment makers, copyists, illuminators and bookbinders all worked and lived in small workshops normally located in the same neighbourhood. This facilitated their collaboration as independent artisans.¹⁶

Against this knowledge of the existing tradition in Flanders, we can shed new light on the issue of the court’s commissions themselves. How sure are we about the duke’s personal involvement with the books in his library? We can be pretty certain only in rather few cases, those in which payment could be traced in the ducal accounts, or where the manuscript’s prologue, colophon or a presentation miniature, heraldic or emblematic features demonstrate the identity of the initiator. Manuscripts bought at a workshop do not display such features but do represent a decision of the owner.¹⁷ Less obvious is the relation with manuscripts offered as gifts by either a relation or the artist himself. Similarly, it has recently become clear that among the 386 books owned by governess Margaret of Austria at the moment of her death in 1530, large sections had not been commissioned by her but received as gifts, inherited or bought in a whole package such as the seventy-eight manuscripts bought from Charles de Croy’s l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Manuscript Acquisition by the Burgundian Court and the Market for Books in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands
• 2 Some Aspects of the Origins of the Art Market in Fifteenth-Century Bruges
• 3 Is Art a Barometer of Wealth? Medieval Art Exports to the Far North of Europe
• 4 Artistic Enterprise and Spanish Patronage: The Art Market during the Reign of Isabel of Castile (1474-1504)
• 5 The Italian Renaissance Courts’ Demand for the Arts: The Case of d’Este of Ferrara (1471-1560)
• 6 The Roman Art Market in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• 7 The Upper German Trade in Art and Curiosities before the Thirty Years War
• 8 Pricing the Unpriced: How Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painters determined the Selling Price of their Work
• 9 Dealer-Dealer Pricing in the Mid Seventeenth-Century Antwerp to Paris Art Trad
• 10 Probate Inventories, Public Sales and the Parisian Art Market in the Seventeenth Century
• 11 Art Auctions in Germany during the Eighteenth Century
• 12 Arenas of Connoisseurship: Auctioning Art in Later Stuart England
• 13 The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660-1730
• 14 Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century England
• 15 Intrigue, Jewellery and Economics: Court Culture and Display in England and France in the 1780s
• Bibliography
• Index