Introduction

By 1521, when being feted by admiring colleagues on his journey through the Netherlands, Albrecht Dürer had good cause to think of himself as a bit of a superstar in the European art world. A century later, when Peter Paul Rubens was bargaining with a potential client in England over what would be an immensely lucrative deal for him, he had even better reason to be secure in his status as one of Europe's greatest cultural figures. The hundred years that separate these famed artists and their business transactions is a century during which, by most accounts, paintings and prints – the art forms produced by these two – were consolidated in the status of being products for a market. Although an urban art market in which pictures were treated as ordinary commodities can certainly be found earlier than this, it is really in the course of the sixteenth century that the market grows to such proportions that it affects the very status of art itself.