Beyond the Fringe
Beyond the Fringe:
Painting for the Market in 17th-Century Italy
NICHOLAS HALL
17 East 76th Street, New York
23 April – 24 May 2025
Scholar’s Day
25 April 2025
The Italian Academy
at Columbia University
1161 Amsterdam Avenue, New York
Nicholas Hall is delighted to present Beyond the Fringe: Painting for the Market in 17th-Century Italy, an exhibition held at its gallery at 17 East 76th Street in New York between 23 April and 24 May 2025. The exhibition will delve into the ‘popular taste’ of the Seicento in an unprecedented study of the artists, collectors and middlemen creating a vibrant art market in Rome, and by extension, Naples, Florence and Genoa. The exhibition brings together around 30 painted examples drawn from international private and public collections. Notably, a mesmerising Head of a Boy lent by the Wadsworth Atheneum Musuem of Art, who had acquired the picture around 100 years ago as an authentic Caravaggio, will be shown for the first time since its recent conservation.
While the production, marketing and collecting of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art—well researched through historic inventories and sales records—have translated to several exhibitions in recent years, the same is far from true for the Italian counterpart. Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (1963), a seminal study of art and elite patronage in 17th and 18th-century Italy, continues to shape the general perception of seicento Italian art as being dominated by prestigious commissions and lackluster, compared to the Low Countries, in the production of independent work. It has only come to light in the last 20 years, driven by Patrizia Cavazzini’s seminal research using historic court cases and other written records, that a flourishing primary and secondary art market existed in Italy. While the transactions between painters and collectors were complicated and somewhat underground, works painted on spec still made their way, typically through an intermediary dealer, into prominent collections, such as that of Cardinal del Monte, Scipione Borghese, and Olimpia Pamphilj. This aspect of the art market is less familiar to the English-speaking general audience due to the sparse number of studies and absence of exhibitions.