Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700
Edited by Jo Kirby, Susan Nash and Joanna Cannon
This volume, due for publication in May 2010 is based on the papers for the international conference ‘European Trade in Painters’ Materials to 1700’, held at the Courtauld Institute and the National Gallery, London, with additional contributions. It addresses questions that sound simple but are notoriously difficult to answer: Where did artists buy their materials? Who prepared them? What did they cost? Where did they come from, and how? The resulting evidence concerning supply and distribution, availability, cost, quality and value of artists’ materials is fundamental for interpreting surviving objects in a wider sense. The volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to address these questions, incorporating contributions by art historians, conservators, scientists, economic historians and historians of trade, from throughout Europe and the US. The authors draw on documentary material as diverse as pharmacy price lists, shipping and customs records, handbooks for merchants, traders’ inventories and court account books. These sources are combined with technical evidence from the objects themselves so as to explore the movements of pigments, dyes, panels, canvases, alabaster, parchment and paper from their point of origin to their purchase by the consumer in the major European centres of trade. The contributions range from specific case histories to more general views of the mechanisms and actuality of trading. Questions of terminology that have dogged the study of this topic are addressed and clarified, and new evidence concerning the nature of the materials traded and their identification is presented. Much of the detailed material discussed is provided in table form, and the book, which is generously illustrated, includes many maps illustrating trade routes. There is no existing volume that draws together the international research in this new and rapidly-developing field of interdisciplinary enquiry.
This volume is supported by International Academic Projects and the Courtauld Institute of Art
Table of contents
Foreword
Catherine Reynolds
Introduction: The European Trade in Painters’ Materials to 1700
Peter Spufford Keynote lecture
Appendix: ‘Merchants’ Notebooks’.
Moving goods by sea and by land
Wendy Childs
‘Painters’ Materials and the Northern International Trade Routes of Late Medieval Europe’.
Ian Tyers
‘Aspects of the European Trade in Oak Boards to England, 1200–1700’.
Per Norseng
‘The Trade in Painters’ Materials in Norway in the Middle Ages. Part I: The ‘silent’ trade in painters’ materials in Norway in the High Middle Ages’.
Unn Plahter
‘The Trade in Painters’ Materials in Norway in the Middle Ages. Part II: Materials, techniques and trade from the twelfth century to the mid-fourteenth century’.
Julia A. DeLancey
‘Shipping Colour: Valute, Pigments, Trade and Francesco di Marco Datini’
Kim Woods
‘The Supply of Alabaster in Northern and Mediterranean Europe in the later Middle Ages’
Colours for the northern courts
Susie Nash
‘Supplying and Acquiring artists’ materials at the Chartreuse de Champmol’
Lorne Campbell
‘Suppliers of Artists’ Materials to the Burgundian Court.’
Parchment, pigments and ink
Doris Oltrogge
‘”Pro lazurio auricalco et alii correquisitis pro illuminacione”. The Werden Accounts and other Sources on the Trade in Manuscript Materials in the Lower Rhineland and Westfalia around 1500’
Anna Melograni
‘Manuscript Materials: Cost and the Market for Parchment in Renaissance Italy’
The market in Italy: prices, inventories and vendecolori
Susanne Kubersky-Piredda
‘The Market for Painters’ Materials in Renaissance Florence’
Louisa C. Matthew and Barbara H. Berrie
‘“Memoria de colori che bisognino torre a vinetia”: Venice as a Centre for the Purchase of Painters’ Colours’
Roland Krischel
‘The Inventory of the Venetian vendecolori Jacopo de’ Benedetti’
Steve Wharton
‘The Materials of Production in Italian Renaissance Pottery: the Inventory of Francesco di Luca, Orciolaio’
Richard E. Spear
‘A Century of Pigment Prices: Seventeenth-Century Italy’
Fairs and pharmacies in sixteenth-century Germany
Gunnar Heydenreich
‘The Leipzig Trade Fairs as a Market for Painters’ Materials in the Sixteenth Century’
Andreas Burmester
Ursula Haller and Christoph Krekel, ‘Pigmenta et Colores: The Artist’s Palette in Pharmacy Price Lists from Liegnitz (Silesia)’.
Ursula Haller
‘“Administrator of Painting”. The Purchase and Distribution Book of Wolf Pronner (1586–1590) as a Source for the History of Painting Materials’
Commerce in London and Antwerp in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Jo Kirby
‘Trade in Painters’ Materials in Sixteenth-Century London’
Filip Vermeylen
‘The Colour of Money: Dealing in Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’
Ria Fabri
‘Eenen ramenant van verf ende pinselen: Some aspects of the materials used by seventeenth-century cabinet painters in Antwerp’.
Maria Hayward
‘The London Linen Trade, 1509–1641, and the Use of Linen by Painters in Royal Service’
Production and problems: some case studies
Zahira Veliz
‘In Quest of a Useful Blue in Early Modern Spain’
Nicola Costaras
‘Early Modern Blues: the Smalt Patent in Context’
Ad Stijnman
‘Frankfurt Black: tryginon appelantes, faex vini arefacta et cocta in fornace’
Daniel Fabian and Giuseppino Fortunato
‘Tracing White – A Study of Lead White Pigments found in Seventeenth-Century Paintings using High Precision Lead Isotope Abundance Ratios’
ISBN: 9781904982258
£75.00 / $140.00
hardback
450 Pages
