This collection of essays presents a status quaestionis concerning the dissemination of Flemish and Dutch art during the period 1400-1800, 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 during the eighteenth century, countless local art collections were broken up and put up for auction. 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.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

In Anonymous Art at Auction, Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker takes the opposing view of the superstar economy by examining contemporary sales of Early Flemish paintings with unknown authorship and the effects of various substitutes for real names on price formation.

Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.