ABSTRACT
We start our history at the beginning of Western Europe’s global economic ascendancy, at the time of the early Renaissance. This chapter will not deal with the art markets of the Classical and Ancient worlds or those that operated in China during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties in particular. In a sense this instalment is a faintly veiled essay on the notion of artistic progress rearticulated in the Renaissance. Gombrich explains that it is an approach that many, notably Alois Riegl in Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) (1893), have questioned (Gombrich 1978). Riegl believed in the existence of kunstwollen – an epoch’s tendency to drive artistic development, rather than a series of inter-connected links in a chain of cultural evolution. Others have offered up an alternative explanation; namely that each work of art is unique, and there is consequently no such thing as art history.
