Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Late nineteenth-century art markets and their social networks

Abstract

In recent years, studies in the history of collecting have seen a shift away from the monographic towards an investigation of social and professional networks. Born from a double session at the 2018 College Art Association conference, with further invited contributions, this weighty volume takes the networks of Berlin art historian Wilhelm von Bode and Florentine art dealer Stefano Bardini as its point of departure. As complex connections are teased out in fourteen case-studies presenting meticulous archival research, the provenances of the works of art under discussion are revealed to be ‘anything but linear’, as editor Lynn Catterson puts it at the outset. This volume is, in many ways, an ode to Bode, who was less prominent in Catterson’s previous volume for Brill (Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860–1940, 2017). As Fulvia Zaninelli notes, to study Bode is to study dealers. Detailed analysis of Bode’s correspondence forms the backbone of many of these discussions, which trace works of art from post-unification Italy to their final resting places around the world. Jeremy Howard’s presentation of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s purchase of Botticelli’s Chigi Madonna includes a timely aside on contemporary debates around art patrimony, which complicates the backdrop against which many of these transactions take place.