Artists and their economic context. A comparison of payments to painters Caravaggio and Luca Giordano at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in seventeenth-century Naples

ABSTRACT

Catholic confraternities in early modern Europe adopted detailed accounting practices which reveal their social context. This study applies an accounting [in] history approach to the creative industries. We argue that confraternities' accounting books can help better appreciate prices paid to famous masters by contrasting them with payments to lesser-known artists and skilled craftsmen. After analysing 1118 payments related to a construction project at the Pio Monte della Misericordia (1659–1679), a Catholic confraternity in Naples, we focus on the contemporary acquisition of an altarpiece by the painter Luca Giordano. The analysis shows that its purchase accounted for a minor share of the expenses for the construction project, and that the main contribution of the Pio Monte to the creative industries was the cumulative payments to skilled craftsmen. Nonetheless, the value of Giordano's painting was significantly higher than unitary payments to minor artists. We then make a comparison with the price paid by the Pio Monte in 1606–1607 to Caravaggio for a similar painting, showing that payments to Giordano and Caravaggio were in line with both artists' market rates and those of similar painters in Naples and Rome. The study thus discusses how accounting sources situate artists within the creative industries of the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting history
• arts market
• construction wages
• charitable institutions
• early modern Italy
• economic history

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Pio Monte della Misericordia and particularly its past Superintendent Alessandro Pasca di Magliano. We are also especially grateful to the Pio Monte’s archivist, Mario Quarantiello, who provided invaluable consulting work on the archival sources and retrieved and digitised for us the accounts of the construction of the new church contained in the special ledgers. We wish also to thank two anonymous referees for suggestions and the editor, Cheryl S. McWatters, for her advice and support throughout the review process. A previous preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 6th International Conference on Luca Pacioli in Accounting History, Naples 7^th–9^th November 2019. We thank participants at the conference for comments and suggestions. We remain solely responsible for the article and any remaining inaccuracies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data from the special ledgers for the construction of the new church and premises of the Pio Monte della Misericordia have been digitised specifically for this article and can be obtained by contacting the authors. The data on paintings’ prices in Rome in the seventeenth century have been extracted from the Payments to Artists Database produced by Richard Spear (see text and references for attribution) and available at the Getty Provenance Index®, https://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/pi/servlet.starweb?path = pi/pi.web. The Getty Provenance Index® is a registered trademark of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Robert Allen’s data on the consumer price index in Naples is available for download from Allen’s personal webpage at https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/allen-research-pages/ under the heading Data – Age and Price History (Naples), accessed January 2024. For sources and methods, see Allen (2001), Appendix and Text. All other data presented in the article have been digitised from tables reported in secondary sources, as acknowledged in the text and captions.

Notes

1 In fact, until the 1630s, Neapolitan painters belonged with the same corporation as ‘gilders, playing-card decorators, miniaturists and rotellari (either wheelwrights or painters of wheels)’ (Marshall 2000, 16).

2 It is important here to note that the Pio Monte was exempted from the ordinary supervision of the diocesan bishop thanks a special concession by the Pope (Gazzara 2003, 51–52).

3 For a recent assessment of research on medieval and early modern confraternities see Eisenbichler (2019), especially part 3. On confraternities in Southern Italy specifically, see contributions in D’Andrea and Marino (2022).

4 ASPMM, ‘Fondo Antico’ series, Ld/5, fol. 203, quoted in Gazzara (2019).

5 ASPMM, ‘Governo del Monte’ cat. H – ‘Conclusioni’ rubr. b, vol. 5, 1650-1658, folio 249. On 23 July 1656 the Governors of the Monte decided to ‘establish the new factory and to lay the first blessed stone’. Here and in the rest of the text, translations from the Italian sources are our own.

6 For a recent comprehensive overview on the evolution of the charge-and-discharge system, see Llibrer Escrig and Villaluenga de Gracia (2023). On the difference with the double-entry system, see also Lemarchand (1994).

7 ASPMM, cat. A Fondazione – rubr. a Fondazione, n. V, vol. 9, registro 1 e 2 dei ‘Conti di spese di fabbrica della Chiesa e locale del Pio Monte.’

8 The retrieval and digitisation of the sources into an electronic dataset was carried out on our request by the Pio Monte’s archivist, Mario Quarantiello, to whom we express our deepest gratitude (see Acknowledgments). We have performed checks on a random sample of entries from photos of the sources to establish the accuracy of the digitisation work.

9 At times, expenses were also reported in tarì. One tarì was equivalent to two carlini.

10 Velde (2018, 41) shows that prices remained largely stable in Naples between the 1660s and the 1670s, both in absolute terms and relative to the previous decades.

11 ASPMM, cat. A Fondazione – rubr. a Fondazione, n. V, vol. 9, registro 1, folio 79r.

12 Getty Provenance Index®, https://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/pi/servlet.starweb?path=pi/pi.web, accessed November 2019. The Getty Provenance Index® is a registered trademark of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

13 ASPMM, cat. A Fondazione – rubr. a Fondazione, n. V, vol. 9, registro 2 dei ‘Conti di spese di fabbrica della Chiesa e locale del Pio Monte,’ 121.

14 Ibid., registro 1, folio 86r.

15 Ibid., registro 1, folio 60r.

16 In his reconstruction, Alessandro Corona reported a slightly lower figure (50 ducats), in reference to both the Virgin Mary as a Child and Saint Anne and to other minor paintings (Corona 1743, 52).

17 From Allen’s dataset we use the ‘new CPI’ expressed in local currency (carlini), setting the benchmark year to 1645. The data are available for download from Robert Allen’s personal webpage at https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/allen-research-pages/ under the heading Data – Age and Price History (Naples), accessed January 2024. For sources and methods, see Allen (2001).

18 These include The Raising of Lazarus by Caravaggio, whose price of 1000 scudi has been often contested.