The full title of this volume by Christopher R. Marshall signals the author’s ambition to present the first systematic analysis of the Neapolitan Baroque art market. As such, the volume will fill a significant gap in the historiography of Neapolitan art, which has been characterized hitherto by the ever-present legacy of the stylistic method pioneered by Roberto Longhi, and which has tended to overshadow, in turn, the development of a strong tradition of research into the social and economic dimensions of artistic production. The author investigates, on the basis of a full and in-depth knowledge of the historic and artistic landscape of seventeenth-century Naples, the research of the major Parthenopean archival historians, from Giovan Battista D’Addosio to Eduardo Nappi. The reader will not encounter within these pages new and unpublished documents on the relationship between artists, merchants, and patrons. What is new, instead, is the author’s methodology of relating the documentary evidence to a broader process of scene setting, through which the extent of existing knowledge is reanalyzed and reinterpreted.

In the first part of the volume, the author undertakes a comparative study of the ateliers of Jusepe de Ribera and Massimo Stanzione, the two leading masters of early seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting. The scarce documentation known up until now renders problematic any attempt to historicize the dynamics of these workshops, a major difficulty given that these two masters presided over the production of so many Neapolitan painters. Marshall’s analysis nonetheless courageously succeeds in marking out their essential differences. Stanzione’s teaching program, for example, had a much more favorable impact on the professional development of his pupils and helped to encourage their maturation toward an eventual independence from the master’s model. Ribera, by contrast, confined the contribution of his workshop, with the exception of the most important public commissions, to the repetition (in terms of both workshop replicas and outright counterfeits) of his most popular compositions for less demanding market requests.

In the second part of the book, the author mounts an insightful analysis of the various levels of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan art market. At the lowest level of the market were the rivenditori, or secondhand dealers selling their wares direct to the public from workshops along the streets. These individuals would employ the local painters, generally on low-paying day rates, and would order from them copies after famous originals that they would then resell fraudulently on the European market. The biographer Bernardo De Dominici identifies both Aniello Falcone and Bernardo Cavallino as commencing their careers in this way, painting first in the workshops of Piazza Carità, in a neighborhood where the major part of the local Neapolitan painters lived as well as worked. So, too, the early paintings of Salvator Rosa would be sold for a pittance under difficult social and economic circumstances.

Marshall justly underlines that, particularly at the beginning of the Seciento, when the activity of art dealing had not yet been consolidated, painters of the caliber of Carlo Sellitto, Giacomo Recco, and Paolo Finoglio also carried out a trade in paintings without the least scruple of conscience. The profession of art dealing nevertheless grew over time to gain for itself a certain level of prominence and respectability, particularly in the second half of the century when Neapolitan painting was also gaining a concomitant sense of higher cultural value and prestige in both a local and international context. In these years, the painter/restorer Giacomo de Castro, for example, was able to operate as an art merchant at the very highest social and cultural levels.

In the third and final section of the book, the author analyzes with insight the impact of the principal public and private commissions on the local artistic and social scene. One of the last sections is dedicated to the early Neapolitan public exhibitions, the most celebrated of which was that mounted under the auspices of the Marchese del Carpio, on the occasion of the festa del Corpus Domini of 1684. Much is still unclear about this fundamental chapter in the development of Neapolitan Baroque culture, and only new documentary research will shed new light on the event. The volume concludes with an appendix containing six useful tables. These document the key moments in the public reception of Neapolitan Baroque painting (table 1), as well as listing in a comparative manner the prices paid by patrons to Neapolitan painters in different phases of their careers (tables 2–6).

This monograph, published to a high typographical and editorial standard, is to be recognized as an important new benchmark for any future study of the topic: it has revealed, for the first time, the market for art in seventeenth-century Naples in all its scope and complexity.