Façon de Venise

Classical economics has tended to identify value and price, the latter resulting from the free market trade of depersonalized supply and demand. Such a purely theoretical model can quickly become ideological; yet, it has strongly influenced historical reconstructions of price series through the ages. In recent years, this conception has been thoroughly upended. Whether it be the prices of consumer goods or works of art, pricing has revealed itself to be infinitely more complex than was long assumed. ¹ Pre-classical economists, for whom ‘the understanding of price formation presupposes a fragmented approach that relies on the multiplicity of places of determination’, ² are therefore, from this point of view, certainly more useful heuristically to modernist historians. This re-reading once again raises the question of the value of goods, which simultaneously appears as an economic, social, cultural and anthropological construct. This construction clearly intersects with the creation of luxury and the progressive change in how it was defined. Jan De Vries in particular emphasized the twinned birth of new consumers and a ‘new luxury’ in seventeenth-century Europe, a luxury no longer linked to the intrinsic value of raw materials, but to new values such as convenience and constantly renewed design. ³ This revolution would have meant a fundamental change in Western civilization between the late Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century. However, as suggested in the introduction to this volume, breaks were certainly never so abrupt. Different value systems for old and new luxury goods have long co-existed in non-linear evolutionary processes, ⁴ preventing us from succumbing to teleological temptation. Furthermore, exchanges are far too often superficial between the historiography of the Italian Renaissance and that of northwestern Europe. To simplify, some place the birth of the consumer revolution in Renaissance Italy, while others point to the United Provinces and England during the seventeenth century. ⁵ For many, social emulation was the major reason behind the consumer desires of the new social classes as they sought to imitate the courts and aristocracies. For others, new bottom-up forms of consumption were emerging. This is where supply meets demand and production meets consumption. Stimulated by these new social demands, new production techniques created more affordable imitations of the traditional luxury enjoyed by the socially dominant – the former eventually exceeding the latter, before finally subverting it.