Evelyn Welch’s fascinating Shopping in the Renaissance, now in its second printing, has garnered glowing reviews and awards in the five years since its first appearance. I will not go against this well-deserved tide of opinion; instead (and at the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned), I want to consider how the book intersects with art history and where it might be most useful to students of art. Although Shopping in the Renaissance is beautifully illustrated with images of paintings, prints, and other crafted objects, its subject encompasses shopping for all sorts of things. Indeed, it is striking how little of this activity was directed toward objects traditionally classified as art. Like individuals today, people in Renaissance Italy bought food, clothing, medicines, and household goods, as well as luxury items like perfumes and furs; even the wealthiest rarely purchased or sold paintings, sculpture, or other fine decorative items. This certainly has to do with the fact that so many of the works that have been studied as art were custom-made, and Welch characterizes commissioned paintings in public places as the means by which a painter’s reputation was made. Only on page 160 do readers learn about a shop in Venice where paintings are displayed for sale (the contemporary visitor was particularly entranced by a painting of a hind quarter of veal and a portrait of a woman whose eyes seemed to move up and down). Welch speculates that the rare mention of painters’ shops in documents suggests that the venue for sales of paintings was more often the workshop. There are hints that some artists took entrepreneurial approaches—the aptly named Lorenzo Lotto offered a group of his paintings and cartoons in a lottery—but more often artists appear as consumers of materials used for their work or as consultants, particularly when antiquities came on the market.

The interpretation of paintings, prints, and sculpture comes into play in the first part of the book, where Welch explores the moral associations of wealth, abundance, and scarcity. Examples range from the famous Good Government frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti to the less well-known murals at the castle of Issogne, where the placement of particular shop scenes conveys subtle messages about morality and the social order. In other paintings and prints, shopping is linked with prostitution; even the urban fabric reflects this association, since brothels were often located at marketplaces. Sellers seem always to be suspect—“caveat emptor” is, after all, a phrase that pre-dates the Renaissance—but Welch provides interesting discussions of how that suspicion was magnified when the sellers were women. There were constant attempts to control women who roamed the marketplaces reselling goods and to differentiate them from the more “honest” women who tended their husband’s shops.

The places where shopping took place is the focus of the book’s second part. Welch draws from a variety of visual and written sources to determine how market areas were controlled (within the city plan and in their daily operations). The physical appearance of shops and their displays is revealed through details of paintings, manuscript illuminations, and architectural prints. The regular incorporation of shops into palace designs leads to a discussion of the permeability of class boundaries when it came to acquiring goods and capitalizing on available space.

The third part, entitled “Acquisition and Excitement,” covers fairs, pawnshops, and lotteries. The regulations and logistics involved in fairs as well as the way they connected merchants, communities, and regions are fascinating aspects of Renaissance life that are worth bearing in mind when considering the movement of goods of any sort. Auctions were a regular part of Renaissance life. Although Welch makes the point that they were quite different from today’s auctions, those who study the development of art auctions would find many intriguing precedents here. The excitement generated by lotteries—with their mix of charitable purpose and gambling—will sound familiar to modern readers, but Welch’s specificity in describing the manner in which lotteries were run and the types of items that a person could or could not take a chance on (dowries, the creation of cardinals) reminds readers of how different a time it was.

Welch’s real interest is how objects, exchanged in various ways, served to cement or disrupt social relations. Discussions of gender and class are woven throughout the book, and they become particularly pronounced in the fourth part, on Renaissance consumers. Well-to-do men did more shopping than one might expect; respectable women were somewhat more restricted (there are variations between cities), but even so, the marketplace was a place where classes and genders mixed. Welch gives due credit to the variety of people who serve as go-betweens in acquiring goods—from agents to servants and delivery boys. Although Welch admirably weaves together evidence from many smaller communities, the wealth of surviving account books from Florence and Venice allows her to present two case studies at the end of this section. The first traces the fortunes of the Castellani family in Florence, whose need to maintain appearances gradually eroded the family’s resources. Within this section, Welch summarizes Carole Frick’s research (Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) on the commissioning of a dress for Francesco Castellani’s new wife—surely as complex a commission as any painting, with the patron attending to design, symbolism, and appropriate materials, and employing four types of artisans along with a special accountant to keep track of things. The case of the Priuli family of Venice presents a picture of more mundane expenses for everyday supplies as well as the costs associated with unexpected events like illness and an infant’s death. The account books also give evidence of the Priuli’s network of suppliers and intermediaries, and of the wife’s freedom to move about the city.

A separate chapter on Isabella d’Este can be thought of as a third case study. Isabella is here described not as a patron of art (Welch avoids this well-traveled path), but rather as discerning buyer of various types of goods who was keenly aware of the social importance of personal display and gift-giving. Welch makes the point that Isabella’s concern for quality and authenticity was not limited to paintings and antiquities, but rather extended to all her purchases; the implication is that she used a similar set of criteria in her assessment of works of art, although this is not fully explored. This chapter also offers a remarkable view of what court life was like as seen through account books—the need to provide food, housing, and clothing for as many as five hundred individuals and more than six hundred horses meant that acquiring provisions was a massive undertaking.

Although Welch considers many sorts of objects and provisions, I never received the impression from her book that she considered things like fresco cycles and monumental sculpture as being just so many commodities. Indeed, in the concluding chapter, titled “Priceless,” she acknowledges that some things are valued in ways that go far beyond their monetary worth. Manuscripts, antiquities, and relics could of course be bought or sold, and their owners could do this with a crass disregard for their cultural or religious significance. However, a strong sense of honor counterbalanced the need for ready cash. If the reputation of an individual, family, or church could be damaged by selling treasured items, the objects could be protected in libraries, galleries, or church treasuries, effectively removing them from the marketplace. Often wills stipulated that heirs could not sell or otherwise dispose of particular items in order to pay debts. There is an obvious comparison to be made here between the value given to these sorts of objects and the value we presume was given to works of art. But Welch leaves it to others to make this comparison.

In Shopping in the Renaissance Welch never says she is writing art history, and clearly her intent is to examine the social and material complexity of markets for all sorts of things. This is certainly not because she has no interest in the realm of art—a quick look at the bibliography will lead readers to her extensive publications on art markets and patronage. Shopping in the Renaissance might be considered a way of filling in the background for the study of patronage and the art market; it asks how the purchase of the rarified objects we call art is similar to or different from other types of shopping. In the course of answering this question, Welch provides all readers—art historians or not—with a rich and boisterous image of life in Renaissance Italy.