The Contract Specified the Blue

A surviving fifteenth-century commission for an altarpiece is not a romantic document. It names the subject, the saints and their positions. It gives the dimensions. It sets the delivery date and the penalty for missing it. It specifies the gold and the grade of ultramarine by price per ounce. And it states how much of the painting the named master must execute with his own hands.

That last clause exists because everyone knew the answer would otherwise be 'some'.

A workshop was a small firm. A master, several assistants, apprentices taken on as children who ground pigment and prepared panels for years before touching a brush. Work was divided: backgrounds, drapery, secondary figures, sometimes whole sections by the most capable assistant. The master designed, painted the parts that mattered, and signed for the shop.

This is why attribution is such a mess, and why auction catalogues have a vocabulary for it: 'studio of', 'workshop of', 'circle of', 'follower of', each a coded statement about how far from the master's hand the object is thought to be. We apply an expectation of single authorship to an industry that did not share it.

The guilds sat above the workshops. They controlled training, restricted who could sell in a city, enforced standards on materials and settled disputes. Painters in Florence belonged to the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild of doctors and apothecaries, because apothecaries sold pigment. These were trade bodies with economic interests, and their rules shaped what was made at least as much as any theory of art did.

The patron chose the subject, and often more than the subject. Contracts sometimes reproduce a theological programme supplied by an adviser, specify which donor appears where and at what size, and require the work to be shown to named assessors before payment. The painter's invention operates inside that brief, and is none the worse for it. A great many undisputed masterpieces are executions of somebody else's specification.

The idea that choosing what to paint is part of being an artist is younger than nearly everything in a room of Italian panels.

And the blue is genuinely a budget line. Ultramarine was ground lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, at times dearer than gold by weight, and the cheaper azurite passes for it until it degrades. Writing 'ultramarine of the value of four florins the ounce' into a contract is quality control with a remedy attached. The Virgin's robe is blue for symbolic reasons and because the most expensive substance in the shop should be visible on the most important figure in the picture.

The system changed where the institutions changed. The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was Protestant, so there were no church commissions, and it was commercially wealthy, so there were thousands of households with walls. Painters made small pictures on speculation and sold them through dealers, shops, fairs and lotteries. Inventories show modest homes owning dozens.

An open market does what open markets do: it specialises. Painters became known for winter scenes, or church interiors, or breakfast pieces, or dead game, or ships, because a buyer choosing off a wall benefits from knowing what a name delivers, and a painter who paints the same thing repeatedly gets faster and better at it. The Dutch genres are a product of distribution, and the prices were low enough that many painters kept a second trade. Vermeer dealt in art, Hals was chronically in debt, Steen ran a tavern.

Two systems, then, and neither of them is the one implied by a modern gallery label. In one, an institution specifies an object and a firm builds it. In the other, small producers make goods on spec for an open market and compete on brand. The solitary artist expressing a private vision arrives later, and when it does, it arrives as a marketing proposition as much as a philosophy, which is the subject of the next chapter.