Trade in Artists' Materials

This publication addresses questions that sound simple but are notoriously difficult to answer: Where did artists buy their materials? Who prepared them? What did they cost? Where did they come from, and how? It uses an interdisciplinary approach to address these questions, incorporating contributions by art historians, conservators, scientists, economic historians and historians of trade. The authors draw on documentary material and these sources are combined with technical evidence from the objects themselves so as to explore the movements of pigments, dyes, panels, canvases, alabaster, parchment and paper from their point of origin to their purchase by the consumer in the major European centres of trade. The contributions range from specific case histories to more general views of the mechanisms and actuality of trading. Questions of terminology that have dogged the study of this topic are addressed and clarified, and new evidence concerning the nature of the materials traded and their identification is presented.