New consumer desires : consumption in fifteenth century Catalonia. The cases of Barcelona, Vic and Amer

Abstract

In 1952, at the Symposium on the Renaissance held at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roberto Lopez claimed that, after a long period of economic expansion, the Italian economy experienced a ‘great depression’ starting in the third decade of the fourteenth century and lasting until 1530. During this period, the Italian economy experienced a contraction in the aggregate output of all its economic activities and wealth was increasingly concentrated into fewer hands. According to the Genovese scholar, the economic difficulties of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have encouraged the Renaissance elites to invest in land, art and culture. This kind of ‘investment in culture’ was aimed at obtaining social status at a time when business opportunities and profits were declining. His claims challenged the conventional belief that art and culture could only flourish in prosperous times, by linking the artistic splendor of the Renaissance to an economic depression. However, Roberto Lopez went even further and declared that the pursuit of cultural activities would have led the Renaissance elite to neglect their economic affairs, which would have ultimately resulted in the ruin and bankruptcy of many businesses and, above all, the Medici bank. The idea that the Renaissance was a period of economic decline was soon challenged by Carlo Cipolla. While Roberto Lopez has seen a steep decline of the per capita trading volume and a reduction of the total cloth output which surpassed the fall of the European population, Carlo Cipolla believed that the decline of certain industries in traditional manufacturing regions was the result of the industrial development of peripheral European regions.