Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 (review)

Although they'll rarely confess it, most art historians concern themselves only parenthetically with the provenance of artworks. Exactly how a painting became associated with Watteau despite its tenuous links to the artist's circle, or how another shifted from being a David to a Drouais, are problems generally addressed by museum professionals instead of their university-based colleagues. Yet the reception and distribution of art have important histories, crucially so for understanding their cultural significance over time and the interpretations they supported. For these reasons provenance indices should be a more vital part of the art historian's library, yet books like Thomas Ketelsen and Tilmann von Stockhausen's colossal Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 are precisely the kind that are overlooked. The authors offer a cross-referenced compendium of listings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German auction catalogues with a full critical introduction. Perusing this work yields plentiful insights into the economic dimension of art in eighteenth-century Germany, including how paintings were assessed and evaluated, the marketplaces through which they traveled, notions of taste and value, and how collections correlated with social, political, and cultural developments. The Verzeichnis presents a rich picture of a vibrant artistic world whose extent and complexity will likely surprise many scholars accustomed to thinking of art in Central Europe as strictly second tier.

As Burton Fredericksen notes in his foreword, the art market cannot be defined as easily for German-speaking Europe as it can for England and France. In contrast to Paris and London, where exceptionally concentrated populations enabled a thriving art trade, German-speaking Europe remained too politically disorganized and fragmented to develop a wide-scale, centralized public art discourse. The most vibrant local art markets emerged through trade with and in geographic proximity to major foreign cities; Hamburg's art market, for example, developed through sustained engagement with Amsterdam, while Frankfurt am Main relied heavily on nearby Paris to infuse it with goods. The development of localized proto-marketplaces like these paralleled the rise of the auction as a mode of distribution. Auctions in Germany originally were reserved for books, but by the late seventeenth century came to include diverse luxury objects including paintings. Since auctions generated a paper trail in the form of catalogues, public announcements, and protocols, we are generally better informed about them than other kinds of German artistic practices, an important fact since German artistic culture is comparatively poorly documented. The information assembled by Ketelsen and von Stockhausen is therefore of great interest to scholars of eighteenth-century art, and not just those researching provenances.

The Verzeichnis is a coproduction of the Getty Research Institute's Provenance Index and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, one of Germany's major museums and home to an extensive library of early auction catalogues. It is the latest in a series of provenance publications sponsored by the Getty and the first to focus on Germany; their goal is nothing less than to publish the contents of every known auction catalogue in German-speaking Europe issued between 1600 and 1800. In casting their net this wide, the authors have updated our knowledge of the German art market well beyond that provided by Frits Lugt's four-volume Répertoire des catalogues de ventes (1938), the longtime standard resource for researchers. Their activities have brought to light some 200 additional catalogues, many of them unexamined since the eighteenth century. The authors' decision to concentrate on German-speaking territories has allowed them to include all known auctions that occurred within the modern boundaries of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as a number of auctions in Warsaw and Prague. For reasons of space, however, the authors abandoned their original plan to include Scandinavia, although a fully searchable...