The market reception of ‘new connoisseurship’: The impact of recent advances in art scholarship on the selling and buying of early Flemish paintings

This paper empirically investigates the economics of the new connoisseurship and its market reception over the past decades. Auction prices of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Flemish paintings sold between 1946-2015 are used to assess the buyer willingness to pay for each attribution qualifier. Data are extracted from the Hislop’s Art Sales Index and analyzed through statistical methods and in the light of art historical evidence. The first part of the paper retraces the evolution of the market for Flemish paintings, with a special focus on attributions, to demonstrate how salesrooms rapidly r... Mehr ...