The Business of Art

Contracts and the Comissioning Process in Renaissance Italy

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by Michelle O'Malley

Yale University Press

Due/Published October 2005, 360 pages, cloth

ISBN 0300104383

One of the distinctions of this book lies in its quantifying of contractual information. It focuses attention away from individual commissions and emphasises the patterns and procedures that characterised the activity of commissioning and its development over time. Michelle O'Malley structures her inquiry around a trio of fundamental questions concerning the language that framed contract terms, the ramifications of contract stipulations for production and finance, and the means used to transmit information, particularly visual information, between a painter and his client. At the heart of the book is an analysis of the implications of the monetary decisions made by contracting parties. Set against a consideration of the background of the economic life of the period, the study widens the focus on commissions undertaken in Central Italy - which has been the subject of most of the research on contracts - to include in the analysis commissions from Venice and the Veneto, Lombardy and Rome and the Papal States. It considers some of the most well-known works of the Renaissance, as well as little-studied and lost altarpieces and frescoes.