In the section of Lives of the Artists dedicated to Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari tells a bewildering story surrounding the Doni Tondo (ca. 1506). Agnolo Doni, a friend of Michelangelo and lover of all things beautiful, had commissioned the painting and had negotiated with the artist on a price of seventy scudi. We do not know whether this price included the frame, or the gold and blue and other raw materials as would have been normal at the time, but when Agnolo received the finished work, he decided to pay only forty scudi. Again Vasari omits the reasons why, only stating that Agnolo was careful with his money and found seventy scudi an exaggerated fee. But Agnolo also knew in his soul of souls that the painting was worth a higher price.

The reduced payment set off Michelangelo’s temper; he demanded the return of the tondo or one hundred scudi. After some haggling, Agnolo, on whom the painting had grown in the meantime, decided to keep it; he finally paid the artist twice the originally agreed upon fee. Hence we learn how complicated price formation for artistic commissions could be, that the worth of a work of art did not necessarily have much to do with the price it fetched, that the patron paid for the fame of an artist as well as for the quality of the work, and that the “rarity” of an object could be manipulated, provided the prospective owner regarded the work of art as a must-have.

According to Vasari, by the time the tondo was commissioned Michelangelo had risen to some fame by sculpting his giant David (1501–4) after his return from Rome. He and Agnolo were friends. Agnolo loved art but was also not financially extravagant. Although he knew well that the tondo was priceless, he was also afraid to pay more than an average amount of money.

The story may well be apocryphal, since the narrative is reminiscent of other such accounts, for example the tale concerning the purchase of the Sibylline books by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus. It also lacks important detail on the original contract as well as on the price the artist would have advanced for raw materials. But it shows vividly and impressively that markets and the prices fetched by works of art relied on more than just supply and demand, important though this factor was and continued to be in an increasingly princely Italy of the courts.

As some of us have perhaps suspected and may now find discussed by Guido Guerzoni in his Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700, at least part of the true history of early modern art markets (in Italy and elsewhere) is not necessarily hidden in Vasari’s oeuvre but in the inventories and account books that in recent decades have become preferred quarries for information exploited by historians and art historians, as well as by social and economic historians. With his present book, Guerzoni publishes the English translation of his earlier Apollo e Vulcano: I mercati artistici in Italia 1400–1700 (Venice: Marsilio, 2006) with its fruit of over fifteen years of investigation. His research interests and publications, along with the courses he teaches at Bocconi University, show that Guerzoni brings together essential skills and experiences needed for an examination of the socio-economic history of the art markets, as this is no easy task to fulfill.

In fact, over the course of seven chapters, we learn why economic history is still such a young discipline. The reader also discovers why conspicuous consumption became so important in fifteenth-century Italy, how princely families spent their money and what kind of return they expected for their expenditures (chapters 3 and 4), the factors of price formation, and, finally, the reasons that eventually led to the birth of cultural heritage centers and to the establishment of preservation laws. Thus, Guerzoni sets the scene via an investigation into the diverse historiographical aspects serving as the foundation stones of his enquiry and via a substantial discussion of the Aristotelian principles of liberality, magnificence, and splendor underpinning the art consumption of princely courts in early modern Europe (chapters 1 and 2).

The challenge is in the collecting and processing of the available data, for it is difficult to harvest the necessary information from contracts and inventories. Every region of Italy had its own customs and conventions, and the markets differed between republics and duchies. A range of currencies contribute to the confusion. While philosophical treatises based on Aristotle and Aquinas discussed the respective merits of magnificence and splendor, they also debated whether the display of one or the other related more efficiently to the nobility of the patron (29–43). The discussion was started in classical antiquity and continued into early modern times. The Black Death of 1348 substantially dampened rising levels of conspicuous consumption and even managed to rein in patronal hubris in a religious context, something that sumptuary laws were not always able to do. Nonetheless, this economic setback was no more than an episode as competition and a culture of gift-giving soon pushed liberal spending to new degrees of generosity (135–38).

If it is indeed possible to gather comparable data for an artistic shopping basket, these need to be constantly double-checked by the application of social, economic, societal, political, and religious factors in the context of a wider European market setting, in which kings failed to pay back their debts, wars might happen at any given moment, and crops could fail from one season to the next. This is not to forget the continuous drain on available data by the destruction of archival documents sold to be pulped by the ton well into the twentieth century.

So, if the history of the art markets is so difficult to write and economical historiography so beset with problems, why do it? What reasons could compel one to engage in a type of research that requires considerable preparation, knowledge, and connoisseurship to undertake an investigation that is bound to bring frustration at every step of the way? For one thing, the history of the art markets is not simply a fashionable academic subject; the markets are alive if not always well, and the recent economic and banking crisis has given them an additional boost. Secondly, with hindsight—dangerous though that is—we live with the consequences of the early modern art markets Guerzoni describes so vividly for the period 1400 to 1700. And although we like to think of our own times as the first true age of globalization, the markets have always been international: patrons, artists, and works of art have long been itinerant; war booty and the second-hand market also added an extra dimension of internationality.

What becomes apparent in the book (chapter 6) is that there is no single price system that fits all works of art. They were not necessarily priced by square feet nor were the raw materials, their pricing as well as their quality, solely responsible for the value accorded to art. The artist’s genius, the level of competition with other patrons, and the buyer’s perceived net worth were also recognized elements to be factored into the object’s price tag (123–31). In the case of collections that had been amassed, say, in the sixteenth century and were sold—occasionally in their entirety—in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, also to be considered was the level of completeness and the collection’s state of preservation.

While certain categories of works of art were readily available across Europe, others such as Greek and Roman antiquities could only be found in specific parts of the continent; some of the richest areas of supply had been cut off by Muslim conquests. In the sixteenth century the market was further reduced by the use of this non-renewable commodity on building sites such as St. Peter’s in Rome. Such reuse in conjunction with the continuous exports of ancient remains to princely collectors in Italy and abroad created a situation in which protection laws were seen as necessary measures to save one’s own ancient heritage (139–61). This legal protection, as discussed in chapter 7, had occasionally been afforded to antiquities from late antiquity onwards, but it was never enough nor did it protect every category of ancient material culture. When Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione wrote their famous letter to encourage papal protection of Roman antiquities, a preference was still given to those objects that carried an inscription. Such pieces were likely to be useful to studies of ancient history and Roman law, which formed the foundations of the European legal system.

Guerzoni’s book, while occasionally frustrating due to its data overload and difficult tables, provides much food for thought for anyone interested in material culture studies and in the ephemera of festival culture (chapter 5, 107–15). Moreover, the period analyzed concerns not only a Europe of the courts developing their respective cultures and markets but also constitutes a turning point in the social status of artists and their modes of employ. In particular the fourth chapter’s socio-economical discussion of supply and labor markets provides detailed insights into the management of the workforce, the status and turnover of workers, as well as the relative cost of labor versus materials. It also throws light on the prices paid per day (opera) to different categories of workmen and artisans and the frequency and speed with which wages were paid out and spent, thus recycling them back into the economy (85–98). Here the reader encounters one of the sections of the book in which the economy is most closely related to living human beings—the other one, ironically, can be found toward the end of the book in the discussion of the rise of heritage laws and of the many instances and diverse ways of breaking them.