The Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe

This is an examination of the collection of art works through an anthropological study of modes of exchange and the social roles of material culture. Focusing on the figure of Sebastiano Resta, Genevieve Warwick brings to light a shadowy, yet crucial chapter in the history of collecting, that of the great migration of art objects out of Italy to northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Her study pins the history of collecting to broader changes in European economic history and analyzes the epistemological frameworks for viewing that accompanied this transfer of artistic wealth. Warwick also demonstrates how early modern art collecting was shaped by the social mores of elite ‘arts of love’.

• The book examines art collecting as a form of material culture using methods pioneered in the social sciences • It focuses on the collection of drawings in Europe circa 1700

Introduction: towards a historical anthropology of collecting; Padre Sabastiano Resta and the collection of drawing in Early Modern Europe; 1. Markets for drawings; 2. Chivalrous gifts; 3. Connoisseurial culture; 4. Mnemonic collecting; Epilogue: the drawing and the amateur.

‘… an outstandingly original examination of the collecting of old master drawings, inspired above all by the author’s study of anthropology’. Apollo

‘Dr Warwick’s erudite study brings together the fragments of Resta’s oeuvre, and does justice to his ‘love and delight’.’ Aura Satz, Art Newspaper

‘There is no doubt that this is a very significant addition indeed to the literature on the history of collecting …’. Renaisssance Studies