The relocation of the Papal Court from Italy to France at the beginning of the 14th century and its installation in Avignon for several decades from gives the opportunity to reflect on the practices of consumption of Italian paintings outside the peninsula. We are first dealing with the construction of an artistic labor market based on the mobility of artists, and then with the construction of a market for works of art, very gradually established, thanks to the new mobility of paintings.
Avignon thus played the role of a laboratory for the diffusion of Italian painting in late medieval Europe, both from an aesthetic and economic point of view. The article was translated from French by Nicolas Bock. On the contrary, I would like to reflect here on the opposite approach, that is, placing the history of Italian painting into a material history of consumption, and questioning how the installation of the papacy in Provence, as well as the changes this provoked in artistic circulation, provide an example for thinking, more generally, about the evolution of consumption models in Europe during the late Middle Ages, starting in Italy.
A new visual, spatial and realistic culture was enacted, together with a new technical culture, with highly hierarchical and professionalized workshops. These workshops mastered complex production processes in various trades. However, these upheavals in the history of painting were, at the beginning of the 14th century, limited to central Italy and only rarely crossed the Alps 5. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that most of the artworks only circulated with great difficulty, as in the case of large altarpieces, or not at all, as in the case of frescoes.
This evolution, which is familiar to us in retrospect, was not evident at the beginning of the 14th century. Paintings were far from being a common consumer good, as it was for the most part reserved for public and monumental uses, religious or noble. Mural painting, large-scale paintings such as altarpieces and small panels have different dynamics of production and circulation. They need to be analysed separately, before being able to question a global coherence of consumption in this field.
Production was almost entirely made to order, according to the artisanal model of the botteghe 7. At the end of the 13th century, the main consumers of paintings in Italy were the Papacy, the Cardinals and the Curia, as well as the mendicant orders, that is two Christianity-wide institutions without specific territorial associations.
