Art sales and commerce

This collection of essays presents a status quaestionis concerning the dissemination of Flemish and Dutch art during the period 1500-1800 and highlights the role art auctions and dealers have played in this process. Auctions emerged as the primary channel for art sales at the end of the seventeenth century in the Low Countries and started a trent whereby countless local art collections were broken up and sold to the highest bidder. Especially (old master) paintings exchanged hands in great numbers at these public sales and the finest pieces frequently ended up in foreign holdings.

The activities of the professional art dealer form the focus of several essays. These intermediaries played an instrumental role in the commercialization and expansion of the art trade in early modern Europe. They had a profound impact on the history of collecting as they mediated and even influenced taste. Naturally the role of art dealers changed over time. Therefore the historians art historians and economists who contributed to this volume have approached this phenomenon in an interdisciplinary fashion in order to properly understand how art markets functioned. In doing so these essays explore the various ways in which art dealers helped shape markets for art and how they facilitated the increasing volume of exports of Netherlandish art from the sixteenth century onwards.

Hans Vlieghe is professor emeritus at the University of Leuven. He has published extensively on Flemish art of the 17th century especially on Rubens and his circle.

Filip Vermeylen is assistant professor of Cultural Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. His current research focuses on the history of art markets.

Dries Lyna works at the Center for Urban History (University of Antwerp) where he is currently preparing a Ph.D. thesis on art auctions in eighteenth-century Antwerp and Brussels.

This study examines the process of commercialization of art which took place in Antwerp during the long sixteenth century an era of rapid expansion of both the city’s economy and its art market. Indeed Antwerp carved altarpieces paintings tapestries books and other luxury items were exported to an area stretching from the Baltic region to the Mediterranean Basin during this time period. The key development that explains the success of Antwerp as an export center for the arts the author argues lies not only in the strength of the Antwerp economy and the artistic tradition of the Southern Netherlands but specifically in the shift from ordering artwork on commission to the production for the open market. In other words Antwerp artists were much more inclined to produce art on spec and consequently art was commercialized at an early stage and became the subject of intense trading.

Focusing on painting and to some degree on other art forms such as sculpture and tapestry the author surveys the various factors that contributed to this phenomenon: proto-industrial workshops engaged in standardized production of popular images and the sophisticated commercial infrastructure that the city could boast allowed art to be sold wholesale to an international clientele at the panden (specialized sales halls). However the flourishing of the art market was ultimately a direct result of the increased demand for luxury goods both foreign and domestic and Antwerp was essentially the locale where supply and demand for art converged.

The booming art market led to increased commodization of works of art; art dealers entered on the scene and further professionalized the art trade during the second half of the sixteenth century. In painting commercialization led to a diversification of the genres a form of product innovation that generated new demand. Clearly Antwerp’s pivotal position in the European trade network and its pioneering role in introducing capitalist commercial techniques had transformed the way art was marketed and produced.

The outbreak of the Dutch Revolt during the last third of the sixteenth century severely disrupted the economy of the Southern Netherlands and as a result the Antwerp art market collapsed in the mid-1580s. However in the difficult closing years of the sixteenth century a transformation process began to take shape in which the foundations were laid for yet a new era of cultural eminence for the city of Antwerp.