The Case of Domenico Castiglione,Mercante di Quadri

Abstract

Art dealers in seventeenth-century Rome existed for the most part at the margins of polite society. When their activities are noted at all by contemporary authors, it is usually by way of execration. To the classically trained mind, the traffic that they carried on in the products of creative endeavor was a defilement; they were money changers in the Temple of the Arts, a sin that they were thought often to compound by dealing in the debased coinage of fakes and copies.' To what extent classical prejudice alone may account for the contempt in which these men were often held, or in what degree their low estate can be attributed to actual unsavory and unethical business practices, has not always been easy to determine in the absence of detailed documentary evidence of their activities. Some recently discovered documents, however, make it clear that there were a few men in Rome who had been driven by the exigencies of living by the sale of art and related objects to activity that may have exceeded even the darkest suspicions of their detractors. On July 15, 1688, one such man, a certain Domenico Castiglione, was denounced to the Sacra Congregazione della Visita Apostolica in the following terms: