Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2020)
Market values in eighteenth-century Rome. Review of: The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Art, edited by Paolo Coen, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018
Abstract
This anthology, edited by Paolo Coen, contains contributions on various aspects of the creation, marketing, display, sale, and subsequent circulation of works of art (primarily paintings, drawings, and antique sculpture) in Rome from the early seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. By providing new detail on the ways Italian, British, German, and French artists, dealers, and collectors took part in the Roman art market, broadly conceived, the volume helps pick up where Francis Haskell left off in Painters and Patrons: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (1963). Of particular interest are essays by Coen on a set of copy drawings after Old Master pictures prepared for the 9th Earl of Exeter under the direction of Thomas Jenkins, and by Daniela Gallo on the prices paid for ancient sculpture acquired for the Pio-Clementino Museum and the economic repercussions for Rome’s antiquities market.
