Window on the world. The international market for prints in eighteenth-century Livorno

For centuries, the free port of Livorno has played a key role in the European and Mediterranean art market. Indeed, the city has been a hub for the trade of artistic and handicraft items and wares that from the Grand Duchy , and the whole of central Italy would reach England, Russia, or America. At the same time, artworks from a diversity of places – like Liverpool, Marseilles, Izmir and Canton– have reached this port before their final destinations. In time, a whole city developed beside the port and its trade: its merchants, emporiums, artists and brokers created a network of artistic production and trade. Historians have long noticed the global reach of this crucial centre of Tuscan and European economy; art historians, however – with the exception of a few pioneer studies – haven’t still tackled the role of the city as a cradle of artistic tendencies throughout Europe during the ancien régime. The volume focusses inparticular on the activities of the local stakeholders — publishers, merchants, collectors — in the national and international markets for engravings. The 1789 and 1793 printed catalogues of the store of Giacinto Micali and Son, one of the main shops in Leghorn brimming with English mezzotint engravings printed in London by John Boydell, cast a first light on the open and vibrant Livorno market. The city was a true window on the world and contributed to the dissemination and establishment of the visual element in the society and culture of the eighteenth century