Art and Appropriability in Renaissance Italy and The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century: The Role of the Academy

The concepts selection systems and appropriability are used to discuss the developments of the competitive process between painters and the strategic choices open to them in Renaissance Italy and The Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The presence or absence of an academy, an institution such as the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, is seen to be a crucial factor with respect to safeguarding appropriability in the new selection system that replaced market selection.