Marketing Venetian Painting in the Sixteenth Century

All the great Venetian painters of the Cinquecento, as well as their lesser rivals and colleagues, maintained workshops, which customers could visit to place orders. If you wanted an altarpiece or a Madonna from Giovanni Bellini, or a portrait from Titian, or a Last Supper by Veronese, you could come to the shop and discuss your requirements with the master, and perhaps make up your mind with the help of existing designs. An image of the Virgin and Child would have been a desirable asset for any prosperous home, for aesthetic as well as for devotional reasons, and many of Bellini’s Madonnas are known in several versions, of variable quality, and sometimes with the addition of accompanying saints. The quality presumably depended in a large part on the size of the client’s purse, and therefore the extent to which a design by the master might be actually executed by his assistants; while the choice of saints was determined by the client’s particular devotional interests. The image could be further customised by the inclusion of the client’s portrait, as in the Virgin and Child with Saints of ca. 1490/95 in the Louvre (fig. 2). In the case of a similar composition in a private collection in New York, infrared reflectography has revealed that here, too, a kneeling donor portrait was originally present, but was then painted out (figs. 3a, 3b). One can only guess the reason for the elimination of so important a feature of the design, but perhaps the original client failed to take delivery, and Bellini had de-personalise the image before offering it to another customer.

Significantly, several of the paintings left in his studio at the time of Titian’s death in 1576 were versions of his most sought-after compositions, including the Salvator Mundi (fig. 4) and the Penitent Magdalen (fig. 5) (both now State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), and had presumably been kept by him to display as prototypes to potential buyers. Several of the larger, leading Venetian workshops were family businesses (Bellini, Titian, the Palmas and Bonifacio, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bassano), and their premises must also have served as showrooms. Other Venetian painters ran smaller operations, but some of these—Giorgione, for example—evidently succeeded in creating a taste for highly unusual subjects among a narrow but highly refined circle of patrons and collectors.

Others again, especially perhaps painters at the beginning of their careers, or perhaps those whose careers had run into difficulties, sought to sell their work on a more open market. It is known from written sources that this might involve exhibiting it on stalls in the Piazza San Marco or at Rialto, or in shops in the linking Mercerie—although unfortunately, there does not survive any visual evidence for this practice in the sixteenth century, of a kind provided by Canaletto’s painting of the Ducal Procession in the Campo San Rocco of 1735 (The National Gallery, London; detail see fig. 6), in which paintings being exhibited for sale outside the Scuola can be seen in the background. Sales might also be by auction. In 1550 Lorenzo Lotto, by then in dire financial straits, was forced to present for sale sixteen of his paintings, together with thirty of the coloured cartoons he had designed for the choirstalls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, at the Loggia dei Mercanti in Ancona. Humiliatingly for him, only seven of these were sold, for the very low sum of thirty-nine scudi.

It is probably true that within the 16th century a majority of the painters’ clients came from within Venice: from representatives of the Venetian government, and of other institutions such as the local clergy and lay confraternities, as well as from wealthy individual patricians and members of the citizen class. The metropolis, however, also attracted customers from much further afield, and when seeking to commission a large and prestigious work such as an altarpiece, it was natural for religious institutions as far as Bergamo in the west, or Puglia in the south, to send their representatives to Venice to negotiate with a master of repute.

A probably typical case is that of the Franciscan convent of Sant’Anna in Capodistria (present-day Koper in Slovenia), which in 1513 sent its lay procurator, one Alvise Grisoni, across the Adriatic, presumably aboard a Venetian galley, to commission a polyptych from Cima, as well its elaborately carved and gilded frame from a wood-carver (fig. 7).

A couple of decades earlier, Martin Mladošić, canon of the cathedral in Zara (present-day Zadar in Croatia), must similarly have sailed to Venice to commission a polypych from Carpaccio, since his kneeling portrait is included in one of the panels (fig. 8). Recommendations to foreign customers of suitable Venetian masters could have been made from within international organisations such as the religious orders, or perhaps from members of the many expatriate communities living in the city. The only one of Bellini’s Madonnas for which there is any evidence about an original owner is the masterly Madonna of the Pear (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), which was probably commissioned by the Bergamask architect and engineer Alessio Agliardi during a visit to the metropolis in 1484 (fig. 9).

But mercantile traffic could carry works of art over much greater distances. By the early years of the sixteenth century painted panels imported from Flanders were much favoured by collectors, as is amply documented by the notes on Venetian collections compiled by Marcantonio Michiel between about 1520 and 1540. In his description of the house of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, for example, dated 1521, Michiel records paintings by Memling, Gossart and Patinir, as well as the triptychs by Bosch left by the owner to the Venetian state on his death in 1523 (fig. 13). Unfortunately, the circumstances of such acquisitions are rarely known, but some are likely to have been commissioned or bought by Venetian diplomats or merchants when in Flanders, while vice versa, others were imported by Flemish merchants for sale to Venetian customers.

By the mid-century painters had become by no means merely passive recipients of commissions, and Titian in particular, helped by his publicity agent Pietro Aretino, was highly proactive in his dealings with princely patrons, often presenting them with paintings as diplomatic gifts, in the confidence that he would be rewarded not only with commissions but with lucrative pensions and other perquisites.

As yet there was no such thing as a dealer exclusively in pictures. But it is likely that some artists, as in later centuries, bought and sold paintings other than their own work. In 1549 the sculptor-architect Jacopo Sansovino undertook (unsuccessfully) to sell six of Lotto’s paintings on his behalf; and it is difficult to believe that Giulio Licinio, court painter to the Emperor Maximilian II, did not buy paintings on behalf of his imperial employer on one of his many return trips to Venice.

Better documented is the emergence in the second half of the century of a new breed of agent who specialised in exporting works of art and luxury artefacts—classical antiquities, jewellery and goldsmith work, as well as paintings—to princely patrons in Germany or elsewhere in Italy. For example, David Ott and his two sons, originally from Augsburg but residing for many years in Venice, worked both for the Fugger family, and for the emperor’s brother-in-law, Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. Hans Jakob König, who had family ties with the Otts, worked for the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Medici of Florence and the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague; and in his portrait by Veronese of ca. 1575, he is shown offering, as if to the spectator, a huge emerald (fig. 14).

This gesture was probably inspired by Titian’s portrait slightly earlier portrait of the most flamboyant of these expert agents, antiquarians and dealers, the Mantuan-born Jacopo Strada (fig. 15). A goldsmith by training, Strada was also employed by Hans Jakob Fugger, Albrecht V and Maximilian II, and in 1567–8 he visited Venice with the purpose of negotiating the purchase of two major Venetian collections: of antique sculpture, belonging to Andrea Loredan; and mostly of paintings, belonging to Gabriele Vendramin. Strada had become wealthy, and is known to have dressed in the finest clothes; and in Titian’s portrait he resembles a courtier rather than a merchant or artisan. According to another agent, Niccolò Stoppio, the painter held his sitter in low regard, claiming that despite his ability to deceive the unsuspecting Germans, he understood nothing about art. In the light of these comments, critics have often interpreted the portrait as the very image of a rascally dealer, attempting to press a marble statuette on to some even more ignorant client. Since, however, Stoppio was one of Strada’s principal rivals, his report of the painters’s opinion may have been no more than malicious invention. In any case, the wily Titian, ever alert to sale of his own work to high-ranking customers, used the opportunity of Strada’s presence in Venice to offer a set of mythologies, largely the work of his assistants, both to the emperor and the Duke of Bavaria. On the same occasion, Tintoretto—or perhaps his daughter, Marietta—painted the portrait of Jacopo’s son, likewise an antiquarian and dealer (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) (fig. 16).