Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This study explores ways of integrating mentalities and ideas with practices in attempting to understand the production, copying, selling, and collecting of art in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Market valuation and the market itself as a forum for experimentation are found to lend coherence to many familiar details involving, for example, artists' behavior, guild restrictions on public sales, and the role of fashion in lending value to paintings. Also clarified is the basis for tensions between the mentality of the trader and that of the connoisseur.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil De Marchi

Neil De Marchi has published on economic methodology and the history of economic ideas in the American Economic Review, Economica, The Journal of Law and Economics, and History of Political Economy. Hans J. Van Miegroet has published on Netherlandish and German art and culture in the Art Bulletin, Simiolus, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and has written books on Konrad Witz (1986) and Gerard David (1989). The authors share a course on “Art and Mercantile Culture in the Netherlands” and are working on a book under the same title [Department of Economics and Department of Art History, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 27708].

Hans J. Van Miegroet

Neil De Marchi has published on economic methodology and the history of economic ideas in the American Economic Review, Economica, The Journal of Law and Economics, and History of Political Economy. Hans J. Van Miegroet has published on Netherlandish and German art and culture in the Art Bulletin, Simiolus, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and has written books on Konrad Witz (1986) and Gerard David (1989). The authors share a course on “Art and Mercantile Culture in the Netherlands” and are working on a book under the same title [Department of Economics and Department of Art History, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 27708].