ABSTRACT
We start our history at the beginning of the West’s (uninterrupted) global ascendancy. For that reason this chapter will not deal with the art markets of the Classical and Ancient worlds. Why then have the wealthy Tuscan city states, the Flemish and Dutch trading entrepôts and the financial powerhouses of London and New York nurtured the most expensive and enduring art? It can be explained as a happy conflation of Hobbes’s ‘Naturall’ and ‘instrumentall’ powers, a fully functional Leviathan (1651, Ch. 10), a coming together at a particular time in a particular place of educational attainment, artistic skill, entrepreneurship, conceptual money, probability and international trade and empire. The story of the art market is one of the eventual triumph of commerce over the spirit and over craft.
