This article considers the impact that high demand had on the production and thus the quality of works of art. Considering Botticelli as a case study, and employing economic theory on reputation and demand, it argues that master painters made choices about the levels of excellence they produced. Drawing on the documentary and technical evidence concerning four of Botticelli's important altarpieces, the article demonstrates, through attention to the painter's approaches to design, preparation and painting technique, how Botticelli managed and controlled quality on a case-by-case basis in the workshop. It also argues that Botticelli maintained two individual strands of production, and that these amounted to methods of conceptualizing works of art. Referring to anthropological theory and drawing on the influential work of Hans Körner on Botticelli's workshop and the way works in series were produced, the research underlines the relationship between derivative works of art and issues of excellence and demand.

This book considers the impact that economics had on Renaissance art. In late fifteenth-century Italy, there was increasing demand for goods of all types, including sustained demand for art which exerted significant pressure on sought-after painters. Analysing specific works, the book demonstrates the consequences of demand for decisions about production. It addresses questions of how master painters employed their workshops to fulfill the requirement for new works, and how, in the face of high demand, they produced works of quality. The book traces the careers of four artists whose work defined painting in late fifteenth-century Florence: Alessandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi and Pietro Perugino, men who turned out high volumes of work and attracted the patronage of prestigious patrons, and whose reputations for excellence were widely publicized. Economic questions have long fuelled research in art history and we know a significant amount about prices and business on a macro level. Less is known about decisions on the micro level: what approaches painters took to the manufacture of bodies of commissioned work, how they made daily decisions on design and pigments application, how serial production related to creating work for commissions. The book considers these issues within the framework of two arguments. The first asserts that levels of excellence in production reflected master painters' choices; the second contends there was a central relationship among economics, design and quality. Using documentary evidence about price, scientific evidence about production, and formal analysis about appearance, the book demonstrates Renaissance business practices and shows the individual approaches artists took to producing excellence and meeting demand

This article focuses on women's luxury footwear to examine issues of economic, material, and familial life in Renaissance Italy. It uses graphic work by Albrecht Dürer to explore footwear design, and draw from disparate sources to propose a new method for evaluating its cost. The article argues that sumptuous footwear was available for a range of prices that are not reflected in surviving payment records, and that it was largely less expensive than moralists and legislators implied. In conclusion, it employs Minerbetti documentation to consider the role particular shoes may have played in developing personal subjectivity.

To consider the Renaissance altarpiece as an active social force, this article draws on ideas concerning the efficacy of works of art articulated by Alfred Gell in his compelling book Art and Agency (1998). Considering as a case study the altarpiece depicting the Virgin enthroned with saints and angels, commissioned by the Florentine Confraternity of the Purification in 1461 and painted by Benozzo Gozzoli, the text investigates the network of relationships that generated the work, including the confraternity's association with the Virgin, the Medici family, the convent of the Observant Dominicans, the citizens of Florence and the painters Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli. The essay argues that Renaissance altarpieces played a dynamic and practical role in the social life of the period. Moreover, it contends that altarpieces themselves were causal in the creation of works of art, and links this analysis to the problem of interpreting altarpieces that were made to be pictorially similar to an already existing work.

Inspired by research undertaken for the new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Re–thinking Renaissance Objects explores and often challenges some of the key issues and current debates relating to Renaissance art and culture:

Puts forward original research, including evidence provided by an in–depth study arising from the Medieval & Renaissance Gallery project

Contributions are unusual in their combination of a variety of approaches, but with each paper starting with an examination of the objects themselves

New theories emerge from several papers, some of which challenge current thinking

What is the economic meaning of reputation? The associations that existed among reputation, demand, production, and price in the careers of popular Renaissance painters are complex. A body of written, visual, and analytic material from about 1500 concerning the painter Pietro Perugino makes it possible to investigate these interrelations and to explore the strategies that arose to deal with the demand that resulted from fame. Reputation and demand together exerted immense force on production practices, and this pressure had significant effects on the quality of works of art, regardless of price.

Contracts are the most informative records we have about the nature of commissioning prestigious works of art in the Renaissance. The Business of Art provides a framework for interpreting these important documents by surveying a body of contracts and related records concerning altarpieces and frescoes painted in Italy from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. One of the distinctions of this important book lies in its quantifying of contractual information: it focuses attention away from individual commissions and emphasises the patterns and procedures that characterised the activity of commissioning and its development over time. Michelle O'Malley structures her inquiry around a trio of fundamental questions concerning the language that framed contract terms, the ramifications of contract stipulations for production and finance, and the means used to transmit information, particularly visual information, between a painter and his client. At the heart of the book is an analysis of the implications of the monetary decisions made by contracting parties. Set against a consideration of the background of the economic life of the period, the study widens the focus on commissions undertaken in Central Italy - which has been the subject of most of the research on contracts - to include in the analysis commissions from Venice and the Veneto, Lombardy, and Rome and the Papal States. It considers some of the most well-known works of the Renaissance, as well as little-studied and lost altarpieces and frescoes. In taking a fresh approach to the study of contracts and commissioning, The Business of Art demonstrates the fundamental quality of negotiation, involving the equal input of both parties, to the gestation of a new work of art. It underlines the contributions made by both parties, working together, to deciding such issues as the approach to the production of a work, the costs involved in its creation, and the details of its subject matter.

Most of the papers in this collection consider issues concerning the design and function of objects; they address their intended sites, the requirements of their owners and the import they held for their users. The objects made by artists and artisans were also nexus points in their careers: objects stood as much for their makers as for their owners. They constituted connections between artists and their clients, and they often acted as agents for the creation of new objects. This paper looks at the design and function of works of art from the point of view of the profession. Specifically, it considers the role key commissions played in the creation of reputations and the launch of stellar careers. Looking at the very early careers of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, the paper investigates connections among clients and the paths individuals took to hiring the painters, examines the response the painters made to their early commissions, and looks at the associations and reputations these painters built up in the years before they were hired to paint the walls of the Sistine chapel in 1481. It considers the role of Cosimo Rosselli, the fourth member of the Sistine team, in identifying and defining fame, and proposes a new way of considering the route Florentine painters took to painting the chapel newly built by Sixtus IV. The paper aims to demonstrate the significance of works for the trajectory of their makers' professional lives and to suggest how certain works, in specific contexts, attracted clients and drew new works into being.

Despite the recent interests of economic and art historians in the workings of the market, we still know remarkably little about the everyday context for the exchange of objects and the meaning of demand in the lives of individuals in the Renaissance. Nor do we have much sense of the relationship between the creation and purchase of works of art and the production, buying and selling of other types of objects in Italy in the period. The material Renaissance addresses these issues of economic and social life. It develops the analysis of demand, supply and exchange first proposed by Richard Goldthwaite in his ground-breaking Wealth and the demand for art in Renaissance Italy, and expands our understanding of the particularities of exchange in this consumer-led period. Considering food, clothing and every-day furnishings, as well as books, goldsmiths' work, altarpieces and other luxury goods, the book draws on contemporary archival material to explore pricing, to investigate production from the point of view of demand, and to look at networks of exchange that relied not only on money but also on credit, payment in kind and gift giving. The material Renaissance establishes the dynamic social character of exchange. It demonstrates that the cost of goods, including the price of the most basic items, was largely contingent upon on the relationship between buyer and seller, shows that communities actively sought new goods and novel means of production long before Colbert encouraged such industrial enterprise in France and reveals the wide ownership of objects, even among the economically disadvantaged.