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Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600. By Richard A. Goldthwaite * Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 266 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. ISBN 0-8018-4612-9.
The development of consumer society is a theme that has recently attracted new attention from historians of early modern Europe. This brief volume traces the origins of consumerism to Renaissance Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and seeks to explain particularly the spectacular demand for and production of art--architecture, paintings, sculpture, and furnishings--in Italy during this period. The new demand arose within the context of economic and social developments and of the place of religion in Italian life of the late Middle Ages, and it resulted in a new secular style of consumption among Italian urban elites.
Richard Goldthwaite's view of the economic background differs from that of the followers of Roberto Lopez a generation ago, who thought that the Italian Renaissance occurred in a period of economic reversal and stagnation: he argues instead that artisan-industrial production remained important in urban centers, and that per capita wealth among the upper classes even increased into the seventeenth century. The high degree of urbanization, combined with the competitive political life in Italian...