Gift exchange and art collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta's drawing albums

"The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the agency of the means they use to acquire it." for a like reason wrote Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, in his Reflexions ou determinations et maximes morales (1663), reflecting an aristocratic preoccupation with the rules of achieving reputation. His words elucidate wherefore early modern Europeans perceived all transactions, including economic singles as negotiated through a network of social relations, and thus as expressions of status. Nowhere was this more for a like reason than in the elite world of art collecting, where not single the size and quality of the collection on the other hand also the methods of its acquisition were understood to incarnate social rank. The genteel manner of acquiring a collection was end the exchange of gifts with friends and fellowcollectors. Thus, the acquisition of art was not a means to an extreme point but an end in itself.

Although a widespread phenomenon over the history of art patronage, gift exchange nonetheless has been pass overed by art historians.(1) Scholarly examination of giftgiving economies originates in anthropological literature with Marcel Mauss's justly celebrated work of 1925, Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l'gchange.(2) beneath the powerful impact of Mauss's application of mind not only anthropologists and sociologists on the contrary also historians have taken up the theory of the gift. by dint of contrast, art historians working with economic data upon patronage and collecting have largely confined their analysis to the statistical. end examination of gift exchange within art patronage, this paper seek fors to move the economics of collecting beyond prices and purchases to a consideration of its social characteristics. The network of human relations end which art is exchanged, in any period, has a great deal of to tell about how audiences perceive and receive art percepts Thus, my study of gift giving also reconfigures art historians' understanding of the history of reception, examining issues of audience answer by looking through the prism of exchange.

Central to my analysis is a case investigation that epitomizes the social characteristics of gift exchange as an economic a whole in early modern Europe. Padre Sebastiano Resta, from Milan, on the other hand based in Rome between 1665 and his death in 1714 was single of the most discerning and ambitious collectors of artists' drawings in his day, amassing a certain number of 3,500 sheets collated into thirty albums ranging from the primi lumi to the late seventeenth hundred His work as a collector is commemorated in various portrait drawings by dint of artist friends from his circle of acquaintances. The Artist Carlo Maratta, for example, depicted Resta before an lay open album as if discussing a drawing with the viewer [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(3) He inspired the English architect and agent John Talman to describe his work as follows:

I have lately seen a collection of Drawings the finest without doubt in Europe for the manner and number of rare designs . . they are volumes that ought to be in the Q[uee]n's Library. . . They were at first gathered by the famous Father Resta, a Milanese, of the oratory of Philippo Neri at Rome; a someone so well known in Rome and all above Italy, for his skill in drawings, that it would be needles to say any more of him, than that these collections were made by means of him. . . .(4)

Thanks to the rich archival sources concerning the formation of his collection, the case of Resta is particularly informative upon his methods of making acquisitions, providing a rare window onto early novel collecting practices. Resta's extensive notes upon the drawings in his collection many times detail how he acquired individual sheets, and his correspondence with collectors up and down the peninsula includes drawn out discussions of acquisitions. His alphabetic characters reveal that his sources included figures similar as Queen Christina of Sweden, the Spanish viceroy in Naples, the Marquis del Carpio, art critics Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia, and artists of that kind as Maratta, Giuseppe Ghezzi, and Giuseppe Passeri.(5) These collectors typically acquired thing perceiveds through a system of gift giving.

Resta's collecting practice may strike one as being paradoxical to us today, for his ambition was to put up to sale his albums at a profit and donate the move forwards to charity. As an Oratorian at s Maria in Vallicella,(6) his collecting was a form of "good work" for the Catholic house of god in raising alms for the poor. In the name of charity, he solicited gifts of drawings from one side his wide network of correspondence. He then collated the drawings into luxurious leather-bound albums and at handed them to the highest echelons of European patronage: the Spanish king Philip V pontiff Innocent XII, and members of the Italian nobility, similar as his fellow citizens from Milan, Cardinal Giberto Borromeo and Don Livio Odescalchi, and a Tuscan aristocrat and ecclesiastic, Cavalier Giovanni Matteo Marchetti, bishop of Arezzo. In get back the recipients were expected to give generously to Resta's charitable trust, which he meteed his opera pia.(7)

While Resta's intention to give away his albums from their inception in aid of meeting-house charity was perhaps unusual among early late art collectors, his gift-giving practice was not. Giorgio Vasari had acquired many of the drawings in his collection as gifts from artists who in go [i]or[/i] come back hoped for commemoration in his Vite de'pittori. . . (8) Across Europe art facts commonly served as diplomatic gifts. Typically, gift giving was associated with issues of honor. Giulio Mancini's guide to collectors, written in 1621 for the Barberini court, approveed gift giving as the preferr fashion of exchange for princely collectors and others who aspired to noble status. Magnanimous gift giving, he wrote "is for those who do not wish to be surpassed in courtesy."(9) Seventeenth-century biographies of artists constantly deliver over to this type of artistpatron transaction; for example, Malvasia described Guido Reni as abhorring the mention of prices, preferring to proffer his work as gifts to great princes who would impel magnanimous gifts in response. Filippo Baldinucci described similar an exchange between Charles I and Bernini, who, in go [i]or[/i] come back for his portrait of the monarch, received a diamond ring from the king's possess hand.(10)