Why should economic historians care about the art market? This is the question that Richard A. Goldthwaite asks in his penultimate and superb essay in Painting for Profit. After all, artistic production pales in comparison with other industries, today and in the seventeenth century. Goldthwaite's answer is that the role culture plays in the marketplace of premodern economies differs from our own, that we cannot use contemporary economic models exclusively to understand societies with different cultures and economies, and that there is much to be discovered about how culture and economic behavior are interwoven. However, Painting for Profit's primary contributors are not economic historians, but art historians. So perhaps we should reverse Goldthwaite's question and ask: why should art historians care about the art market or about the economic behavior of artists? The answers to these questions are perhaps more difficult to tease out from the art historians' essays in the volume than from Goldthwaite's, yet such answers ought to be the primary justification for this impressively researched compendium of essays on the material lives of Italian artists during the seventeenth century.

Although a mere 300 pages long, the small print and double columns of Painting for Profit add up to a much larger book, containing substantial contributions by the lead authors and five other scholars, offering both a general economic and cultural overview of the period and individual studies of artists' economic conditions in five art centers: Rome, Venice, Florence, Bologna, and Naples. Painting for Profit is also lavishly illustrated, signaling that this is an art history monograph; yet in fact, the authors rarely concern themselves with individual works of art, except when describing the economic circumstances contributing to their creation. Beware, unless one is very familiar with seventeenth-century Italian art, the number of artists discussed and the anecdotes told about them in Painting for Profit may be bewildering.

Most of the authors in Painting for Profit's favor a descriptive over an analytic approach, which is to say they tend not to ask specific questions to be answered through their quantitative data, but rather they accumulate a remarkable amount of data that generally conform to descriptive questions, such as what did works sell for, how were artists paid, what were the costs of living, and so on. There are exceptions: Philip Sohm's essay on Venetian artists is organized around the question why Venetian art declined in importance during the seventeenth century. His interesting conclusion is that in Venice the size of the work was the primary determinant of a painting's value. Because Venice's humid climate was not conducive to fresco painting and perhaps because of the general decline in the Venetian economy during the seventeenth century, local artists found few large scale commissions, which led to external emigration or to internal migration into Venice's thriving resale art market as appraisers, dealers, and agents, with, however, much lower financial benefits attached.

Make no mistake, all these essays represent considerable erudition and while only a few make easy reading together, they offer a goldmine of information. They take us deep inside the respective Italian artist communities of these five cities. And if description dominates analysis in the art historians' essays, they nonetheless have my sympathies. During the three centuries that art history developed as an intellectual discipline, all its methodologies have revolved around qualitative, often comparative judgments of individual works of art. Art history has consequently been a hierarchical discipline, with the vast majority of publications devoted to a small body of artists. By comparison, quantitative approaches are still in their infancy. Art historians struggle to reconcile the broad and largely anonymous base of artists and artisans in any given culture with the few exceptional artists that art history remembers.

Spear, Sohm, and their art historian colleagues suggest that they are only at the beginning of what should be a much larger effort to quantify aspects of the discipline. In his introductory essay, Sohm suggests that art historians should begin to analyze such data sets as the sizes, subjects, and number of figures in works of art in ratio to their prices. He also recommends that art historians begin quantifying such geographic and demographic phenomena as changes within artist populations in a community, changes in family size, in career longevity, in social background, and changes in patterns of artists' emigration to other art centers. These are all worthy research agendas, but it is striking how few of these are addressed in the essays comprising Painting for Profit. What perhaps might have made a better book of Painting for Profit would be if the data had been published in articles, leaving the contributors to concentrate on general conclusions about Italian artists' economic behavior. Then perhaps it would have been clearer how knowledge of their commercial behavior deepens our understanding of seventeenth-century Italian painting, of the changing status of Italian art within a wider European art world, of the competitive relationships between Italian artists and foreign artists residing in their midst, or of the competition arising between the retail market for contemporary Italian art and the resale market of now “old master” Italian artists from the previous century.

My recommendation for readers of Painting for Profit who are not scholars of seventeenth-century Italian painting is that they begin reading the volume in reverse order, starting with Goldthwaite's masterful survey of the economics of Italian art from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then Renate Ago's insightful comparative survey of the economies of the five art centers, followed by Sohm's essay on Venice. At that point, I would return to the beginning to read Sohm's introduction and the remaining essays by Richard Spear, Christopher Marshall, Raffaella Morselli, and Elena Fumagalli on Rome, Naples, Bologna, and Florence respectively. With the general historical and economic overviews offered by the broader and more analytical essays, the other essays devoted to the individual cities will make more sense.