Jan de Beer: Gothic Renewal in Renaissance Antwerp. Dan Ewing. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 386 pp. €150.
painters, generally on low-paying day rates, and would order from them copies after famous originals that they would then resell fraudulently on the European market. The biographer Bernardo De Dominici identifies both Aniello Falcone and Bernardo Cavallino as commencing their careers in this way, painting first in the workshops of Piazza Carità, in a neighborhood where the major part of the local Neapolitan painters lived as well as worked. So, too, the early paintings of Salvator Rosa would be sold for a pittance under difficult social and economic circumstances. Marshall justly underlines that, particularly at the beginning of the Seciento, when the activity of art dealing had not yet been consolidated, painters of the caliber of Carlo Sellitto, Giacomo Recco, and Paolo Finoglio also carried out a trade in paintings without the least scruple of conscience. The profession of art dealing nevertheless grew over time to gain for itself a certain level of prominence and respectability, particularly in the second half of the century when Neapolitan painting was also gaining a concomitant sense of higher cultural value and prestige in both a local and international context. In these years, the painter/restorer Giacomo de Castro, for example, was able to operate as an art merchant at the very highest social and cultural levels. In the third and final section of the book, the author analyzes with insight the impact of the principal public and private commissions on the local artistic and social scene. One of the last sections is dedicated to the early Neapolitan public exhibitions, the most celebrated of which was that mounted under the auspices of the Marchese del Carpio, on the occasion of the festa del Corpus Domini of 1684. Much is still unclear about this fundamental chapter in the development of Neapolitan Baroque culture, and only new documentary research will shed new light on the event. The volume concludes with an appendix containing six useful tables. These document the key moments in the public reception of Neapolitan Baroque painting (table 1), as well as listing in a comparative manner the prices paid by patrons to Neapolitan painters in different phases of their careers (tables 2–6). This monograph, published to a high typographical and editorial standard, is to be recognized as an important new benchmark for any future study of the topic: it has revealed, for the first time, the market for art in seventeenth-century Naples in all its scope and complexity.