ABSTRACT
In 1976, or 1977, a manuscript was submitted to the editors of Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, entitled “The Guild of St. Luke in Seventeenth-Century Delft and the Economic Status of Artists and Artisans.” The author, Michael Montias, was an American economist we did not know, and we read the manuscript with an extra measure of care. Quickly, we all realized that this was not the work of an amateur whose enthusiasm exceeded his knowledge. This was the work of a master researcher and scholar, and he was telling us things about our own field that we never knew, or suspected. That article, which appeared in volume 9 (1977), number 2 (published however in 1978), competed with an article on Vermeer in the 1977 volume of Oud Holland, Michael’s first published contribution on Dutch art history. We did not know then how many readers would be interested in the economic status of artists. If art historians had been content for seventy years to cite Hanns Floerke’s dissertation of 1905, which Davaco had reprinted unchanged in 1972, would they share our opinion that the economics of art mattered? Well, they did.
