Where did artists buy their materials? Who prepared them? What did they cost? Where did they come from, and how? This volume draws together the international research in this new and rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary enquiry by historians, conservators, scientists, economic historians and historians of trade. The evidence concerning supply and distribution, availability, cost, quality and value of artists' materials is fundamental for interpreting surviving objects in a wider sense.
The authors draw on documentary material as diverse as pharmacy price lists, shipping and customs records, merchants' handbooks, traders' inventories and court account books. These sources are combined with technical evidence from works of art to explore the movements of pigments, dyes, panels, canvases, alabaster, parchment and paper from their point of origin to their purchase by the consumer in the major European centres of trade.
The contributions range from specific case histories to more general views of the mechanisms and actuality of trading. Questions of terminology that have dogged the study of this topic are addressed and clarified, and new evidence concerning the nature of the materials traded and their identification is presented. Much of the detailed material discussed is provided in table form, and the book, which is generously illustrated, includes many maps illustrating trade routes.
This volume is based on the papers for the international conference European Trade in Painters' Materials to 1700 held at the Courtauld Institute and the National Gallery, London, with additional contributions, and is supported by International Academic Projects and the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Foreword
Jo Kirby, Susie Nash and Joanna Cannon
List of contributors
Introduction: the European trade in painters' materials to 1700
Catherine Reynolds
Lapis, indigo, woad: artists' materials in the context of international trade before 1700
Peter Spufford
Moving goods by sea and by land
Painters' materials and the northern international trade routes of late medieval Europe
Wendy R. Childs
Aspects of the European trade in oak boards to England 1200-1700
Ian Tyers
The trade in painters' materials in Norway in the Middle Ages. Part I: The 'silent' trade in painters' materials in Norway in the High Middle Ages
Per G. Norseng
The trade in painters' materials in Norway in the Middle Ages. Part II: Materials, techniques and trade from the twelfth century to the mid-fourteenth century
Unn Plahter
Shipping colour: valute, pigments, trade and Francesco di Marco Datini
Julia A. DeLancey
The supply of alabaster in northern and Mediterranean Europe in the later Middle Ages
Kim Woods
Couleurs for the northern courts
'Pour couleurs et autres choses prise de lui...': the supply, acquisition, cost and employment of painters' materials at the Burgundain Court, c. 1375-1419
Susie Nash
Suppliers of artists' materials to the Burgundian Court
Lorne Campbell
Parchment, pigments and ink
'Pro lazurio auricalco et alii correquisitis pro illuminacione': the Werden accounts and other sources on the trade in manuscript materials in the Lower Rhineland and Westfalia around 1500
Doris Oltrogge
Manuscript materials: cost and the market for parchment in Renaissance Italy
Anna Melograni
The market in Italy: prices, inventories and vendecolori
The market for painters' materials in Renaissance Florence
Susanne Kubersky-Piredda
'Memoria de colori che bisognino torre a vinetia': Venice as a centre for the purchase of painters' colours
Louisa C. Matthew and Barbara H. Berrie
The inventory of the Venetian vendecolori Jacopo de' Benedetti: the non-pigment materials
Roland Krischel
The materials of production in Italian Renaissance pottery: the inventory of Francesco di Luca, orciolaio
Steve Wharton
A century of pigment prices: seventeenth-century Italy
Richard E. Spear
Fairs and pharmacies in sixteenth-century Germany
The Leipzig trade fairs as a market for painters' materials in the sixteenth century
Gunnar Heydenreich
Pigmenta et Colores: the artist's palette in pharmacy price lists from Liegnitz (Silesia)
Andreas Burmester, Ursula Haller and Christoph Krekel
'Administrator of Painting': the purchase and distribution book of Wolf Pronner (1586-1590) as a source for the history of painting materials
Ursula Haller
Commerce in London and Antwerp in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Trade in painters' materials in sixteenth-century London
Jo Kirby
The colour of money: dealing in pigments in sixteenth-century Antwerp
Filip Vermeylen
'Eenen ramenant van verf ende pinselen': some aspects of the materials used by seventeenth-century cabinet painters in Antwerp
Ria Fabri
The London linen trade, 1509-1641, and the use of linen by painters in royal service
Maria Hayward
Production and problems: some case studies
In quest of a useful blue in early modern Spain
Zahira Véliz
Early modern blues: the smalt patent in context
Nicola Costaras
Frankfurt black: 'Tryginon appelantes, faex vini arefacta et cocta in fornace'
Ad Stijnman
Tracing white: a study of lead white pigments found in seventeenth-century paintings using high precision lead isotope abundance ratios
Daniel Fabian and Giuseppino Fortunato
Glossary
Compiled by Jo Kirby
Index
Reviews
...the book is a treasure trove of information, a pleasure to read and a source of new ways of thinking about painting.
The Art Newspaper 21(233) (March 2012) 58
This exemplary editorial collaboration...introduces new evidence to consider in the investigation of art historical questions that relate to the materials used for making art...[This] publication is a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of technical art history.
The Picture Restorer 39 (Autumn 2011) 49-53
