The Economics of Renaissance Art

Abstract

I analyzed the market of paintings in Florence and Italy (1285–1550). Hedonic regressions on real prices allowed me to advance evidence that the market was competitive and that an important determinant of artistic innovation was driven by economic incentives. Price differentials reflected quality differentials between painters as perceived at the time (whose proxy is the length of the biography of Vasari) and did not depend on regional destinations, as expected under monopolistic competition with free entry. An inverse-U relation between prices and age of execution is consistent with reputational theories of artistic effort, and prices increased since the 1420s.

Art return rates from old master paintings to contemporary art

“…More than three hundred price records are all converted into gold florins and are available for all the most famous Renaissance masters of Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, Neaples, Mantua and other minor artistic centers of Italy, as well as for some minor painters. One of us has presented the original dataset elsewhere ( Etro, 2018 ), arguing that this primary art market was already quite competitive, with price differentials reflecting quality differentials as perceived at the time and independent from the regional destinations of the commissions. The number of artists for whom we could match historical and contemporary records is limited to 51 artists, and the data show that price changes are quite variable across painters, which should not be surprising since primary prices reflect evaluations that can be widely revised over more than five centuries.…”

“…Using art historical data from Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical periods we identify artists for whom we can match historical prices and contemporary prices, and we test whether price changes have been independent from the initial prices, a long run implication of the lack of masterpiece effects. The data derive from the primary market of Renaissance Italy ( Etro, 2018 ), from inventories and auctions in the markets of the 1600s in Italy and Amsterdam (see Montias, 2002 ) and from auctions in Paris and London between 1700s and early 1800s (from the Getty Research Institute; see Etro andStepanova, 2015 , 2017 ). We focus on the highest prices per painter between the historical records and the highest prices per painter between the contemporary sales.…”

Specialization and the firm in Renaissance Italian art

“…Cities like Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Siena, and Venice became centers of artistic excellence, developed their own "schools" of painting, and began exporting their products to the rest of the Italian peninsula (Berenson, 1980). The demand for Renaissance was largely a demand for paintings, which had surpassed mosaics and tapestries as the most popular art form from (Etro, 2018). Due to the nature of the demand, most paintings contained religious subjects and themes, such as scenes from the Old Testament, the Gospels, or the lives of Saints (Sekules et al, 2001;Welch, 2000).…”

“…If the demand side of the Renaissance market for paintings was competitive-with patrons outbidding each other for the services of the most skilful artists-so was the supply side (Etro and Pagani, 2012;Etro, 2018). Competition was especially fierce at the local level (Welch, 2000, 91), but by the fourteenth century there already existed a national market for paintings in Italy.…”

Liberalizing art. Evidence on the Impressionists at the end of the Paris Salon

“…While our focus is on a liberalization of artistic policy that has not been studied in the economic literature, our work relates to multiple strands of research. At a preliminary level, it belongs to the recent interdisciplinary literature on the economic determinants of artistic creativity (Hulst, 2017;Borowiecki and Greenwald, 2018), including works by Galenson (2006Galenson ( , 2007Galenson ( , 2009 on the careers of artists, David et al (2014) on the role of art dealership, Borowiecki (2015Borowiecki ( , 2017 on the origins of cultural supply and the creativity of music composers, Etro (2018), Etro and Stepanova (2015); Etro andPagani (2012, 2013), Etro andStepanova (2016, 2017) on a Schumpeterian approach to artistic creativity. Our contribution is to show that centralized and decentralized organizations of the art market can affect differently the reward of artistic innovations.…”