Page History

Christina Chaplin

In the art market commissioning game, the patrons (often referred to as principals in game theory) were the party with the request for work who contracted a second party (the artist a.k.a. the agent) because of the artist's or architect's extensive knowledge of the venue through which the patron hoped to gain benefit.  It seems that the patrons were commonly men, and sometimes women, who could afford the financial cost of the commissioning and were willing to take on the financial and social risks associated with failure. 

Yet we may wonder why anyone would take on overwhelming financial and even social risks, without a guarantee of success.  It is also worthy here to note that even if success was acquired, it would not necessarily represent a monetary compensation.  Therefore the benefits to the patrons are measured subjectively.  Each patron must have weighed the social status benefits of the commission against their own fortunes and made the choice to risk it all based merely on a hope that the benefits available to the agents would be incentive enough for quality work, and the cost of humiliation would be enough to prevent incomplete assignments.  Who would take such risks and why? 

The answer seems to lie in the nature of the elite status of the times and a desire for ever expanding power and prestige.  Patrons in Renaissance Italy were both private patrons such as individual aristocrats like Cosimo de'Medici, Popes like Pope Clement VII, and even merchants such as Giovanni Tornabuoni, and also corporate patrons such as governmental bodies and religious orders like the Dominican order.  Often it could be seen that individual patrons would commission works as private patrons, but still represent the order or family to which they belonged.  These individuals and groups of great wealth were desirous of ever increasing power through perceived social status, financial stability, and magnificence.  They were willing to go to great lengths to find venues which would, in a sense, advertise these qualities to the public.  So, much like corporations today who all reach out to the same ends, they attempted to use the very best of means to compete with each other for the limited positions of distinction. 

Each needed to prove that he was not like the others, but instead better in one way or another.  The initial costs of such a thrust begin where all projects of great effort must begin, with financial outlay.  Patrons would weigh the cost of construction or creation against perceived benefits.  If the project was successful, then the benefits would outweigh the cost which would hopefully be merely monetary.  If the project were to fail, then there were be the risk of incurring social costs with implications of bad taste, poor financial stability, or even religious rejection.  These social costs could have additional financial costs should the reputation of the aristocrat be spoiled, cutting them off from necessary alliances or lines of credit within society. 

On the other hand, the benefits sought by patrons were numerous.  By utilizing the art to convey messages about oneself, one's family, one's piety, one's status, one's wealth,  or one's history, the patron could hope to gain recognition and acceptance from the audiences as contemporary, future, and Heavenly.  If one could convey the right subtle messages, in the appropriate decorum of the time, he could hope to increase his social standing among peers, form important alliances, and increase the availability of credit lines to himself and his family.  If the monument were to be a lasting beacon it could serve to launch that individual or group into future fame and rememberance, a desire of many elite of the time.  And if the monument were pious enough, crafted well enough to inspire a contemporary or future audience, the patron could hope to shorten his stay in purgatory by pleasing the heavenly audience. 

While art and architecture were the main avenues described in our reading for displaying messages, there were not by any means the only ways.  The principals of the game could also hope to show wealth through other types of conspicuous consumption such as grand processions and funerals with an emphasis on final resting places, residential and personal décor such as tapestries, furniture, and clothing, or even the varieties of food they could be seen buying or eating.  Like the first Medici Popes, the final resting place of a patron could signal his importance, wealth, power, etc.  If the place were to be an estate or plot unavailable to others, this alone would signal his prestige without the additional need for decoration, exaltation, and the like.  In this mode, each form of conspicuous consumption employed a variety of strategies for conveying messages to audiences, with the messages in art and architecture being the most "readable" due to their lasting nature and visual forms. 

Signaling was the method of prominently displaying and object or piece of information which would appreciate the value of the patron.  Much like a college degree signals quality in a potential employee, the signature of Michelangelo could signal a huge monetary output and thus the vast wealth of the principal.  In Carafa's chapel in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, his inclusion of St. Thomas Aquinas was a signal to his fellow Dominican brotherhood of his piety, knowledge, and dedication to their cause.  A commission could achieve a greater value as a signal if it could effectively distinguish its patron.  "Being distinguished" was a primary goal for many of the Italian Renaissance.  Through portrayals of magnificence and strong signals, patrons could differentiate themselves from their peers.  Magnificence is not merely based on the amount of money spent, but also upon the ways in which the expenses were utilized to represent virtuous spending for the public good and increased prestige of the patron himself.  Strong signals, in this sense, gave the audience the impression that the patron was of rare quality through the costs of the signal (which would constrain other patrons), the signal's appropriateness in the informal rules of decorum, or an erudite quality which excluded some of the audience to give a feel of prestige to the work. 

Similarly, sign-posting was about giving pieces of information to appreciate the value of the patron, but differs  from signaling in the efforts of sign-posting to include only specific information while discarding other, less desirable, facts.  Sign-posting was used in this way by the artist Leone Leoni.  Being of a less desirable profession, Leoni left the source of his fortune out of the façade he commissioned for his home while he included his ties to the emperor of the time and reference his learning. 

The final strategy of stretching is a fairly straightforward one in which the patron would have a quality or point of history exaggerated in order to increase his prestige.  Stretching was the most risky of these three strategies as it is the only one to use potentially false information to portray status.  Should a patron be caught stretching himself too far in one direction or another, it would be unseemly in the eyes of his audience and he could potentially be shunned or discredited for his exaggerations.  Like the commission of Francesco Gonzaga, it was safer to merely imply a sort of victory than to show the winning of a battle unwon.