How did early modern artists not only survive, but profit from their work? Why did some paintings command vast sums while others, often of the same size and subject, only fetch minimal prices? Who decided the value of an artists’ oeuvre during and after their lifetime?

Seduced by the rhetoric of Renaissance writers who equated painting with poetry, art historians working on Italy used to ignore finance. Art was an activity inspired by God; its value could not be measured in mere gold and silver. Twenty years ago, prompted by Richard A. Goldthwaite’s Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (1993), Italian Renaissance specialists began to question this assumption, exploring the early modern art market. Goldthwaite is the final contributor to this 2010 volume and retains his caustic eye. He notes that art and culture made a very modest contribution to the Italian economy and should therefore be of limited interest to the serious economic historian. Wool and other textiles were the manufactures on which innovation was based, not painting. Nonetheless, he notes that there is much that historians, whatever their specialty or approach, can learn from looking at how pictures were priced and valued in seventeenth-century Italy.

Painting for Profit, which is really a coauthored rather than an edited book, is the latest attempt to bring money into the world of art and art into the world of money. It examines the questions of price formation that are the bread and butter of economic history, but the writers are, in the main, art historians. The book brings together five specialists on Rome, Naples, Bologna, Florence, and Venice (Richard E. Spear, Christopher R. Marshall, Raffaella Moreselli, Elena Fumagalli, and Philip Sohm, respectively) to describe the economic conditions within which painters operated and their pictures were priced. They have each written extensively and separately on the topic so the value of this volume is to bring them together to ask similar questions and provide answers in a similar format. Their essays are framed by an introduction by Sohm and by two final chapters by Renato Ago, who compares the five cities in a superb overview, and Goldthwaite himself, who finishes with some telling comments about the limitations of prestige in actually raising prices for paintings overall. While reading the book as a whole requires considerable concentration, the archival research and detailed information provided on almost every page make it a wonderful new addition to the emerging debate on how to understand the economy of art making in the Renaissance and early modern periods.

So what do we learn from the book as a whole? First, that there was no single market for paintings; there were multiple markets in each of the cities under investigation. In focusing on the small number of seventeenth-century artists whose names and reputations have survived into the twenty-first century, we often miss the many painters who struggled to survive or, even more so, those who prospered but are now forgotten. Second, artistic strategies did make a difference to price: an artist who labored over a detailed, highly polished narrative was able to charge more than one who produced a rapidly sketched portrait. Finally, if you wanted to really succeed financially, you needed to move to Rome where the level of demand was in excess of the supply of excellent artists. This was a feature that attracted artists from all over Europe as well as the Italian Peninsula, creating a competitive environment that was comparable to that of fifteenth-century Florence. In conclusion, while there are some criticisms that can be levied at the approaches taken (there is limited discussion of the ways in which barter, secondhand goods, exchanges, and favors work and almost no attempt is made to discuss the complexities of currencies and the investments in land and securities that artists made), Painting for Profit makes an important contribution to the increasingly sophisticated debate between art historians and economic historians over the values that we can ascribe to paintings in the past.