Art As Baxandall points out, "a fifteenth century painting is a product of a social relationship," (p. 1). That social relationship was carefully forged and affected by a confluence of interests including those that are commercial, cultural, religious, and perceptual or aesthetic in nature. The relationship between client and artist was one constrained by social convention, legal tradition, and also the expedience of broader interests. Money has played a long-underestimated role in the history of art, notes Baxandall. For this reason, it helps to examine fifteenth century paintings in terms of not only their aesthetic values and symbolism but also in terms of how financial or class-based issues impacted issues like the materials used, how the artist was paid, and the size of the piece. Painting, Baxandall states, was "too important to be left to the painters," (p. 3). Two of the most important conventional characteristics of fifteenth century paintings that illustrate the "market ordering" transactions of art include the grouping of human figures in the composition and also the use of color -- what Baxandall refers to as the "splendor of hues," (82).

Grouping of human figures imparted meaning relative to gender norms and even cosmologies. Painters imbued their human groupings with an internal logic that reflected social conventions and proscribed norms. Botticelli's work is replete with examples of the use of human groupings to reflect "market ordering" transactions in art of the fifteenth century. For example, "The Liberal Arts Receiving a Young Man" depicts a tightly woven group of people in a distinctly secular setting. Here, gestures that used to be squarely within the province of religious hierarchy had become secularized in symbolic ways. The "straightforward form" welcomes the youth, highlighting the impending triumph of reason and science over religion that the Renaissance would come to represent throughout Europe (Baxandall 68). The shift of power and wealth from ecclesiastical sources to capitalist ones plays itself out meaningfully in frescoes and canvases like these.

Likewise, the resurgence of ancient Greco-Roman sensibilities, styles, and symbols represented a shifting "marketing ordering" of art and corresponded with the layout of human forms in linear composition....

In Botticelli's "Primavera," for example, the central figure is that of Venus. The client-artist relationship had shifted because the source of wealth and power had shifted. Moreover, the viewer starts to play a more central role in composition during the fifteenth century. Figures like Venus in "Primavera" beckon or otherwise directly engage the viewer via eye contact and other means. Organizing the human forms on the canvas was a primary conventional characteristic that illustrated the "market ordering" transactions of art in meaningful ways.
Paintings depicting fewer figures than "Primavera" or "The Liberal Arts Receiving a Young Man" can be even more telling of the "market ordering" transactions of art. For example, two figures and their interactions with one another, even without the viewer's intervention, "can be so richly evocative of an intellectual or emotional relationship," (Baxandall 74). The grouping of forms would have also symbolized paintings from prior generations in which the client-artist relationship shifted, always denoting hierarchy, social status, and relative power. There is an internal and structural logic to compositions, including not only the arrangement of human forms but also of architectural elements as in Domenico Veneziano's The Annunciation.

In addition to groupings of forms, color and hue became a powerful conventional characteristic in fifteenth century paintings to illustrate the "market ordering" of art. Some colors were clearly and often exorbitantly more expensive than others, as many were derived from semiprecious stones or precious metals. Although gold had largely fallen out of favor, especially in the arts of Flanders, the use of ostentatious colors would have conveyed important signs relative to the power and wealth of the client and patron of the art. Color was essentially political. Use of black, white, and all the colors of the spectrum including metals would send signals not only about the subject of the painting but of the underlying meaning and social status of the client commissioning the work and willing to pay the price.

The viewer perceived himself or herself as possessing a great responsibility to the arts during the Renaissance. There was, as Baxendall puts it, "an expectation that cultivated people should…