Michelle O'Malley

Quality, demand, and the pressures of reputation: rethinking Perugino

What is the economic meaning of reputation? The associations that existed among reputation, demand, production, and price in the careers of popular Renaissance painters are complex. A body of written, visual, and analytic material from about 1500 concerning the painter Pietro Perugino makes it possible to investigate these interrelations and to explore the strategies that arose to deal with the demand that resulted from fame. Reputation and demand together exerted immense force on production practices, and this pressure had significant effects on the quality of works of art, regardless of price.