Michael Baxandall's Study Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy opens with the useful reminder that a “painting is the deposit of a social relationship,” that is, a relationship between patron and client. When Baxandall and other historians of Renaissance art use the term patronage, they generally do so in a restricted sense to indicate the relationship that existed when an individual or an institution such as a guild, confraternity, or monastic establishment commissioned a specific work of art from an artist or artisan. Often formalized through a contract, the relationship between patron and client was essentially a legal one in which the artist agreed to render a specific service in return for a preestablished or a negotiable sum of money. With the completion of the commission, the relationship essentially ended, unless succeeded by another commission.
