Looking Class

It would be hard on the face of it to find dustier-sounding topics in art than those suggested by Peter Burke’s The Connoisseur: A Cultural History and Shira Brisman’s The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art. And yet the questions lurking at the heart of both books could hardly be more timely: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect that value, and for whose benefit?The stories told by Burke and Brisman are both rooted in the swirl of ideas and adaptive behaviors that animated early modern Europe (the era formerly known as the Renaissance), as people worked to square humanistic ideals about individual creativity with new technologies and new ways of accumulating wealth and power. Sound familiar?The goldsmith of Brisman’s title is Christoph Jamnitzer, a maker of ornate tableware and madcap ornamental prints in Nuremberg at the turn of the seventeenth century. Christoph’s grandfather was the famous Wenzel Jamnitzer, goldsmith to the stars (in the form of four Holy Roman Emperors) and best known today as the designer of the eloquent, cosmologically profound engravings of Platonic solids collected in the Perspectiva Corporum...