“Not too much stress should be laid on the fact that the Curia had been moved to Avignon in 1309, not to return to Rome until 1377. […] It is safe to assume that the history of fourteenth-century painting would not have been much changed if the Popes continued to reside in the Lateran.”
With this famous statement, Erwin Panofsky raised the issue of how paintings and culture circulated between Italy and Provence in the 14th century. His view has since been questioned, especially by Enrico Castelnuovo and Michel Laclotte and Dominique Thiébaut. But perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the assumption underlying Panofsky’s opinion: that art history is an autonomous field and that matters of displacement and exchange, aesthetically as well as economically and socially, have no place in it. 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 install...