Going South: The Space for Flemish Art Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Northern Italy

The essay tracks the traces of Netherlandish art dealers in early modern Northern Italy and questions the hypothesis that such dealers made affairs at all. By the sixteenth century paintings from Flemish artists were desiderable objects and painters from Southern Netherlands began to travel to Italy. In seventeenth century, when both demand and offer for paintings of all kind were stabilized and growing, new waves of Flemish artists were attracted by the lively Italian primary markets for paintings emerging everywhere; this raises the question whether and how these immigrant artists, capable perhaps of generating their own surplus of paintings might have been connected, along with Italian colleagues, to buyers back in Flanders. Trade routes were to be used extensively.