The title of this book is a bit misleading. “Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy: 1300-1600” (1993) by Johns Hopkins history professor Richard Goldthwaite isn’t actually very much about art at all. It says nothing about individual artists or their patrons, nor does it attempt to interpret works of art or the functioning of the broader art market. Rather, it looks at the demand that generated the material culture out of which art emerged. In short, Goldthwaite argues that it was the steady accumulation of wealth in northern Italy throughout the Renaissance along with the dramatic expansion of often religious and secular institutions with a competitive demand for various forms of artwork that propelled the market to new heights. That is, unprecedented wealth combined with new consumers and a new consumer culture provided the vigorous demand necessary to create the artistic effervescence of the Renaissance.
A central thesis of this book is that continual generation and accumulation of wealth in northern Italy between 1300 and 1600 was the permissive cause of high growth in consumption that generated a totally new epoch in art. This newfound wealth led to increased demand for art, as individuals and institutions sought to express their status, power, and values through artistic commissions. The author says that the consumption of art became so great that it emerged as “a notable economic activity.” The incredible demand and self-conscious patronage for art in this period drove a variety of new forms, refined the skills required to create them, and elevated some of these goods into a higher spiritual realm, altering the very definition of art in the process.
Goldthwaite considers and then rejects the so-called “Lopez Thesis,” an argument articulated by Yale University professor Robert S. Lopez in his seminal book “The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350” (1952), which maintains that disposable wealth increased after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century because entrepreneurs were discouraged from reinvesting capital in business enterprises. Goldthwaits argues that wealth accumulated in Italy in the centuries after the Black Death, along with the dearth of attractive investment opportunities in capital-goods industries, combined with the stability and lower taxes associated with the presence of a great power on the peninsula, generated an unprecedented level of disposable wealth looking for a home. Therefore, the timing of the Renaissance as a consumer phenomenon was very much the direct result of the stability provided by despotic city-state governments, re-emergent papal authority, and great power intervention on the peninsula.
The purpose of this book, Goldthwaite says, is “to say something about the new consumption habits of Italians that produced a major change in their material culture.” If Burckhardt famously argued that Renaissance Italians discovered antiquity, nature, man, and the individual, Goldthwaite adds “things” to the list of discovery, what he calls “the first stirrings of what today is called consumerism.”
Core to Goldthwaite’s thesis is that the Italian city-state economies capitalized on their intermediary geographic position between the developed economies of the eastern Mediterranean and the underdeveloped economies of western Europe. The Italian system focused on the export of goods and services, especially luxury cloth (wool, cotton, and especially silk) and financial services, which created a favorable balance of trade and the steady accumulation of wealth. Even the invasion of Italy by large French and Spanish armies at the turn of the sixteenth century triggered massive inflows of resources into the peninsula, much of it was bullion pouring in from the New World, which dramatically increased the money supply and led to falling interest rates and skyrocketing real estate prices. Foreign domination of Italy also led somewhat ironically to political stability, which led to lower defense expenditures, which led to lower taxes, which led to more disposable income among the wealthy, which led to greater demand for art.
The worldwide expansion of the global economy in the seventeenth century would quickly turn Italy into a backwater. However, the consistent and large scale inflow of ecclesiastical revenue unrelated to the mainstream market and a favorable balance of payments in a shrinking economy still ensured the accumulation of wealth for at least another century, albeit at an ever-slower pace. In short, it was this steady accumulation of per capita wealth that ultimately drove the consumption of art, Goldthwaite says.
However, accumulation of wealth is only part of the story, according to this book. Just as important was its structure. For instance, wealth tended to be concentrated in a relatively small number of urban centers. By 1500, ten of the eighteen largest European cities with a population over 40,000 were in Italy. Over 10 percent of the entire Italian population lived in cities, twice the proportion found elsewhere in Europe. These cities acted like magnets for wealth, but once the wealth gathered in the cities it was relatively widely distributed within those centers. For instance, in 1427, roughly 15 percent of Florentine families owned 65 percent of the city’s wealth, and only 15 percent of families had no property to declare, an extraordinarily low concentration of wealth compared to what we know about other places, including modern America. A century later, in 1528, there were 80 Florentine families with estates valued at over 50,000 florins, a fortune that only Palla Strozzi possessed in 1427. Moreover, the rich tended to get richer, often thanks to the high margin silk business, and their tax burden was light, usually under 10 percent. Moreover, the rich in Italy were not a frozen caste; they tended to turn over with some regularity, especially those associated with the church. Upward mobility in Italy, Goldthwaite says, was “a fact of life. ”The upshot was that the leading consumers were constantly changing and the demand for art consistently renewed. The polycentric urban Italian economy also tended to produce artists with distinctive styles. In short, Goldthwaite says, “Italian society was subject to a dynamic of change unlike that of any other in Europe.”
The other major influence on the demand for art was the proliferation of religious orders. “Christianity was, almost from its inception, a religion oriented around things,” Goldthwaite writes, especially things that clergy needed to perform their essential liturgical functions, items like chalices, bells, candlesticks, pyxes, and reliquaries that the author calls “liturgical apparatus.” The more churches, chapels, monasteries, and convents there were, the more of these items were needed. Goldthwaits says that this liturgical apparatus was “the necessarily prior condition” for the overall demand that propelled Renaissance art forward.
Also, during the Renaissance this liturgical apparatus underwent “luxurious elaboration” in terms of materials and craftsmanship. Meanwhile, religious imagery, specifically wall fresco and panel painting, served as mediums for instruction, especially “didactic, devotional, mnemonic functions.” Goldthwaite argues that the exploding demand for religious artwork arose from the pressure put on the church to expand its operations, including the doubling, if not tripling, of the proportion of priests, nuns, and monks in Italian society between 1427 and 1515. The institutional proliferation within the church, creating a loose, complex, and sprawling organization, occurred independent of demographic trends. “The production of much Renaissance art,” Goldthwaite writes, “supplied a market that was expanding as a result of organizational developments within the church.”
Italy’s political fragmentation and urbanization aided and abetted the birth of new religious institutions. The fluidity, anonymity, and violence associated with rapid and uncontrolled urban growth contributed to the widespread feeling of spiritual restlessness, Goldthwaite says, while the numerous and rivalrous city-states assured the relative freedom and autonomy of the new institutions. Goldthwaite maintains that this dramatic institutional proliferation occurred in four phases over half a millennium. First, there was growth in secular clergy and the establishment of the Benedictine order (1000 to 1200). Second, there was the emergence of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, such as the Franciscans (1209), Dominicans (1216), Carmelites (1247), and Augustinians (1256). Third, reforms movements within both the monastic and mendicant orders split the organizations into hostile Observant and Conventional wings (1300 to 1500). And, finally, there was the reform of the secular clergy during the Counter-Reformation in the 1500s, which provided the backbone of the Church’s direct interaction with the laity. All of this led to a dramatic expansion of the “physical plant” of the church (i.e. new buildings and liturgical apparatus) and “a veritable religious consumerism centering on demand for services,” such as commemorative masses, magnificent altarpieces, and an extensive cult of saints. “There was hardly a church anywhere in Italy,” Goldthwaite says, “that did not get redecorated in one way or another.”
In addition to the monastic and mendicant orders, and the various splinter groups they spawned, Goldthwaite says that lay religious organizations called confraternities exploded in number during the fifteenth century and quickly emerged as important players in civic life and important new consumers in the market for religious artwork, as well as large and costly banners displayed during public processions.
Goldthwaite uses the example of Florence to articulate how extreme this proliferation of religious institutions was. In 1550, Florence had a population of just over 70,000 and 427 religious institutions: 140 churches, 29 monasteries, 48 convents, 35 hospices, 156 confraternities, and 19 monastic houses. All of these institutions demanded at least some form of artwork. Most of them also competed with one another, with each commission setting new standards for consumption and expenditure.
Goldthwaite next highlights a shift in artistic patronage from predominantly religious institutions in the early fourteenth century to private, secular patrons by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Wealthy families, merchants, and urban elites became major art buyers, commissioning works for both public display and private enjoyment. This shift contributed to the diversification of artistic themes and styles, including the rise of secular and humanist subjects alongside traditional religious art. As demand for art grew, so did the complexity of its production and distribution. This led to a stunning privatization of the church during the fifteenth century. Not only were commemorative masses said for those lying at rest in tombs inside the church, but there was a veritable explosion of family chapels constructed as well, including those built within their own home. Goldthwaite writes that there were over 600 personal chapels in Florence alone, not including the innumerable side-chapels that were constructed in churches that could not accommodate the reconstruction required to build proper chapels. All of these could be bought and sold like any other piece of personal property.
Goldthwaite also considers the assimilation of the nobility into urban life. The Italian nobility had often aped the feudal-chivalric model of northern Europe, but urban life eroded much of its relevance and practicality. With the rise of the city and their transition from a knightly military class to large-scale commercial and financial entrepreneurs, the aristocracy searched for new ways to signal their power and importance. Spending habits marked one major way that the new Italian merchant elite redefined the traditional concept of nobility. “Magnificance” is the word Renaissance humanists used to justify extravagant luxury, which was usually condemned as sinful and unnatural. Magnificent was synonymous with magnanimity and a rationalization of luxury. It was also directly connected with a greatness in spirit and tied to the Christian concept of nobility.
Architecture was the “chief luxury” the Italian nobility spent their money on, Goldthwaite says. More than anything else, building was the proper expression of one’s inner qualities and by far the most effective way to create something “magnificent” that could be appreciated and admired by the public. The author says that it was Cosimo de Medici who established the connection between great, private architecture with civic greatness. Goldthwaite says that this obsession with architecture and urban renewal “was directed to expressing the power and glory of the city-state, to strengthening the regime, and to providing political and ethical instruction to its citizens … Italian princes transformed the symbol of their physical presence from a detached fortification to the city itself.”
The fifteenth century also witnessed a dramatic increase in the cost and elaborateness of home furnishings and decorations, which Goldthwaite calls “the first manifestation of a new kind of consumption of durable goods in the economic history of the West.” These significant domestic expenditures tended to be directed toward durable goods rather than large service staff, which were common in northern Europe but rare on the Italian peninsula. Moreover, he says, it was the painted picture that was the highest form of any of the household objects that evolved during the Renaissance. Thus, it was consumption that demonstrated power, values, and taste more than mere wealth itself. The splendor of the home testified to the intelligence, civility, and manners of the owner.
Another tangible manifestation of the Italian merging of northern European feudal nobility with Renaissance obsession with wealth was the display of coats of arms, more often than not a completely fabricated design. These coats of arms were often prominently displayed on fabulous new buildings as domestic architecture emerged as a distinctive art form. Once again, Goldthwaite says, it was the city and the effects of urbanization that accounts for much of what is distinctive about Italian Renaissance culture and behavior.
“The world of consumer goods the Italians created – the material culture of the Renaissance – was thus much richer in variety and more open to dynamic change than that of any of the earlier Mediterranean civilizations,” Goldthwaite writes. It was an entirely new consumer culture that was generated by things, much of them were what we today consider works of art. The Renaissance was more than a mere change in style, Goldthwaite says, “it marked the very discovery of art and the imperial expansion of the realm of art into new worlds.”
In summary, Goldthwaite demonstrates that the flourishing of art during the Renaissance was not merely a result of cultural revival but was deeply rooted in the economic transformations of the period. The interaction between wealth, social aspirations, and artistic production created a dynamic environment that shaped the art of Renaissance Italy. “With the discovery of things,” Goldthwaite writes, “modern civilization was born.”
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