Il prezzo dei quadri nel mercato fiorentino del Sei e Settecento

This paper focuses on the price of paintings between the seventeenth and eighteenth century Florence art market, through the setting up of a database of over 520 data on prices between 1629 and 1715, based on the analysis of the paintings’ purchases of by three leading Florentine noble households, the Gerini, the Riccardi and the Salviati. Despite the extensive body of data on price of paintings, incomes of artists, markets and sales techniques of artworks in the main Italian and European cities in the early modern times carried out by scholars of various social studies’s branches in the last years, the issue of price of paintings and works of art is still an enigmatic and controversial subject. The reason is twofold: firstly the analyses of paintings’ prices are considered outside the context of the overall economy of the time and, and secondly, the empirical analysis is inevitably based for the uniformity and comparability of data on the prices of the primary market: the direct commission. This study aims to fill this gap and above all answer to the question raised by the subject of the meeting: what was the price and value of paintings in the in the overall economy at the time? The research considers the price of paintings in the context of the overall economy of the age (from salaries to prices of wheat), in order to identify their real value, proposing, finally, comparisons with the data on the price of paintings in some of the principal art markets of that period, such as Amsterdam, Rome and Venice, and, therefore with other sources of data collections.