ABSTRACT
The history of the art market, however, offers a promising field for collaboration between economic historians and art historians. Before the upsurge of interest in cultural history in the late 1980s, debates in this area were mainly focused on the changing relationship between the arts and the state of the economy. It was this rather generalised theme which dominated the C-Session on 'Economic History and the Arts' at the Eleventh International Economic History Congress in Milan, although the organiser, Michael North, expressed the hope that future research would develop on three specific aspects of the economic and social history of art:2
It is one thing, however, to suggest a research agenda in the search for common ground between disciplines, and quite another to find appropriate intellectual frameworks within which to pursue it. Jan de Vries has emphasised that art history and economic history are specialisations which are not readily integrated into general history, but has suggested that the most promising milieu is the nouvelle histoire of the Annalistes, especially Fernand Braudel. Here, de Vries places the emphasis on a periodisation which involves long cycles of historical change, a new periodisation which challenges the earlier emphasis on the Renaissance and Reformation as the twin axes of modernity.'
