The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A study in the social history of art

Abstract

This anthology in ten chapters, based on an international conference held in 2012 at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, is a welcome addition to Brill’s series Studies in the History of Collecting and Art Markets. Paolo Coen, author of an earlier monographic study on the Roman art market of the eighteenth century – Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo (2010) – brings together essays by well-known scholars working on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rome. The aim of the volume is to take stock of the current state of studies and to offer new approaches to a subject that, especially in the last two decades, has received much attention. The main ambitions of the publication are twofold: first to re-evaluate the history of collecting, patronage and the art market – a field of study that sits precariously between art history, history and the social and economic sciences – as being placed firmly within the social history of art. The methodological position is clearly outlined in Coen’s introduction to the volume and in Peter Burke’s opening essay. The former provides a very useful overview of the dynamics and historiography of the Roman ‘art system’ in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the need to adopt a humanistic rather than a purely economic approach to the study of art production and consumption. The latter, entitled ‘The social histories of art’, offers an incisive introduction to the field of studies and its developments in recent decades.