Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual Culture. - Review - book review

JEAN C WILSON Painting in Bruge at the shut of the Middle Ages: Studies in Society and Visual tillage University Park: Pennsylvania State University Pres 1998 xvi, 256 pp; 79 b/w ills.

LYNN F JACOBS Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces 1380-1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing of recent origin York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 xv 352 pp; 91 b/w ills.

ELIZABETH HONIG Painting and the Market in Early present Antwerp New Haven: Yale University Pres 1998 xi, 308 pp; 24 color ills., 100 b/w

Forging connections among economics, social history, and art history is not a novel project. [1] However, earlier attempts to incorporate social and economic history into art history usually focused upon macrosocial and macroeconomic issues. many times grand schemes were deployed and a broadly unrestrained and anonymous market assumed. All this has now been abandoned to make place for analytically focused studies upon workshop practices, urban or courtly patronage, competition, speculation, value, and price formation. Research today also turn rounds around how exchange occurs in particular markets, and around the sequential historical exhibition of institutions (e.g., stock exchanges or commodity exchanges), regulatory environments (including urban and guild regulations), practices (sales and marketing techniques), parts (relationships between dealers and their agents, interlopers, and with equal reason on), and how fruitful connections can be established between markets, or aspects of market mentalities, and visual culture(s) [2]

a certain number of of the new and better economically informed art historical inquiry has aligned itself with new research in economic and social history that present the appearances to have returned to the close attention of material culture. Histories of art markets are among the greatest in quantity promising fields of collaboration between the humanities and the social sciences. Economists, however, have always struggl with the dynamics of the art market, not least notions of value, art as commodity, and sensuality consumption. Jean Wilson, Lynn Jacobs, and Elizabeth Honig have not circumvented these issues. In fact, each has mov significantly beyond traditional formalist and iconographical approaches toward a more insinuating exploration of economic issues related to the production, marketing, consumption, and reception of early recent Netherlandish art.

Jean Wilson is clearly indebted to Michael Baxandall's particular brand of contextualism, as the subtitle "studies in society and visual culture" indicates. Her starting point is not trouble-free especially since studies upon demand for art and effeminacy consumption in 15th-century Bruges (or Flanders) are in short endow In fact, Lorne Campbell was among the first to make sum of two units relatively short, though successful, attempts in that direction. [3] These have informed Wilson's line of inquiry, which can be summarized as follows: (1) when did demand for paintings in Bruge become noticeable and in what manner were identities expressed in commissioning them? (2) what, if any, were the socioeconomic motivations for the complexity of workshop practices? (3) in what manner and where were paintings marketed at the shut up of the Middle Ages in Bruges? greatest in quantity questions have arisen logically without of the author's earlier research upon Adriaen Isenbrant and the Bruge Pandt, the pair of which have a hardy historical and archival component.

The first chapter upon "Vivre Noblement in Medieval Bruges" unrolls within a conceptual frame borrowed from Norbert Elias, namely the idea of "prestige consumption" as outlined in his volume The Court Society (1983). Wilson readily articulates her allegiance to him, as well as to Marc Bloch's Histoire de mentalites, to Lucien Febre to Georges Duby's "code of conduct" and to Robert Mandrou's "historical psychology" She also--and explicitly--follows the lead of Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans, who in their volume De Bourgondische Nederlanden (1986) join the representational practices of the Burgundian nobility and their desire for luxuriousness goods to fashionable image consumption by the agency of the patriciate upper class in Bruge Here she also echoe Johan Huizinga's Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, with its bias toward the highest social strata and the urban aristocracy.

notwithstanding that there is indeed something to be said about the rise of conspicuous consumption by means of the Bruges urban middle class in following the example of the aristocracy, Wilson also makes a serious effort to stir beyond an all-consuming interest in the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. "Living nobly" also have the appearances to have been a somewhat broadly defined preoccupation of the merchant middle class in Bruge This desire combustiblesed the appropriation and adaptation of lifestyles and visual tillages inspired in various degrees by the agency of those of the aristocracy. An ever-widening image of society was indeed acquiring paintings that became increasingly smaller. Demand for panel painting in Bruge have the appearances to have changed throughout the 15th hundred though we are still upon very thin ice with this presumption. It extremitys further analytical research, especially hard archival data upon economic behavior and consumption patterns.