Gift exchange and art collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta's drawing albums

"The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the means they use to acquire it." So wrote Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, in his Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1663), reflecting an aristocratic preoccupation with the methods of achieving reputation. His words elucidate why early modern Europeans perceived all transactions, including economic ones, as negotiated through a network of social relations, and thus as expressions of status. Nowhere was this more so than in the elite world of art collecting, where not only the size and quality of the collection but also the methods of its acquisition were understood to embody social rank. The genteel manner of acquiring a collection was through the exchange of gifts with friends and fellowcollectors. Thus, the acquisition of art was not a means to an end but an end in itself.

Although a widespread phenomenon throughout the history of art patronage, gift exchange nonetheless has been neglected by art historians.(1) Scholarly examination of giftgiving economies originates in anthropological literature with Marcel Mauss's justly celebrated book of 1925, Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l'gchange.(2) Under the powerful impact of Mauss's study, not only anthropologists and sociologists but also historians have taken up the theory of the gift. By contrast, art historians working with economic data on patronage and collecting have largely confined their analysis to the statistical. Through examination of gift exchange within art patronage, this paper seeks to move the economics of collecting beyond prices and purchases to a consideration of its social characteristics. The network of human relations through which art is exchanged, in any period, has much to tell about how audiences perceive and receive art objects. Thus, my study of gift giving also reconfigures art historians' understanding of the history of reception, examining issues of audience response by looking through the prism of exchange.

Central to my analysis is a case study that epitomizes the social characteristics of gift exchange as an economic system in early modern Europe. Padre Sebastiano Resta, from Milan, but based in Rome between 1665 and his death in 1714, was one of the most discerning and ambitious collectors of artists' drawings in his day, amassing some 3,500 sheets collated into thirty albums ranging from the primi lumi to the late seventeenth century. His work as a collector is commemorated in various portrait drawings by artist friends from his circle of acquaintances. The Artist Carlo Maratta, for example, depicted Resta before an open album as if discussing a drawing with the viewer [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(3) He inspired the English architect and agent John Talman to describe his work as follows:

I have lately seen a collection of Drawings the finest without doubt in Europe, for the method and number of rare designs . . . they are books that ought to be in the Q[uee]n's Library. . . . They were at first collected by the famous Father Resta, a Milanese, of the oratory of Philippo Neri at Rome; a person so well known in Rome, and all over Italy, for his skill in drawings, that it would be needless to say any more of him, than that these collections were made by him. . . .(4)

Thanks to the rich archival sources concerning the formation of his collection, the case of Resta is particularly informative on his methods of making acquisitions, providing a rare window onto early modern collecting practices. Resta's extensive notes on the drawings in his collection often detail how he acquired individual sheets, and his correspondence with collectors up and down the peninsula includes long discussions of acquisitions. His letters reveal that his sources included figures such as Queen Christina of Sweden, the Spanish viceroy in Naples, the Marquis del Carpio, art critics Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia, and artists such as Maratta, Giuseppe Ghezzi, and Giuseppe Passeri.(5) These collectors typically acquired objects through a system of gift giving.

Resta's collecting practice may seem paradoxical to us today, for his ambition was to sell his albums at a profit and donate the proceeds to charity. As an Oratorian at S. Maria in Vallicella,(6) his collecting was a form of "good work" for the Catholic Church in raising alms for the poor. In the name of charity, he solicited gifts of drawings through his wide network of correspondence. He then collated the drawings into luxurious leather-bound albums and presented them to the highest echelons of European patronage: the Spanish king Philip V, Pope Innocent XII, and members of the Italian nobility, such as his fellow citizens from Milan, Cardinal Giberto Borromeo and Don Livio Odescalchi, and a Tuscan aristocrat and ecclesiastic, Cavalier Giovanni Matteo Marchetti, bishop of Arezzo. In return, the recipients were expected to give generously to Resta's charitable trust, which he termed his opera pia.(7)

While Resta's intention to give away his albums from their inception in aid of church charity was perhaps unusual among early modern art collectors, his gift-giving practice was not. Giorgio Vasari had acquired many of the drawings in his collection as gifts from artists who in return hoped for commemoration in his Vite de'pittori. . . . (8) Across Europe, art objects commonly served as diplomatic gifts. Typically, gift giving was associated with issues of honor. Giulio Mancini's guide to collectors, written in 1621 for the Barberini court, recommended gift giving as the preferred mode of exchange for princely collectors and others who aspired to noble status. Magnanimous gift giving, he wrote, "is for those who do not wish to be surpassed in courtesy."(9) Seventeenth-century biographies of artists constantly refer to this type of artistpatron transaction; for example, Malvasia described Guido Reni as abhorring the mention of prices, preferring to offer his work as gifts to great princes who would send magnanimous gifts in response. Filippo Baldinucci described such an exchange between Charles I and Bernini, who, in return for his portrait of the monarch, received a diamond ring from the king's own hand.(10)