Vertrauen durch Recht

The book is dedicated to the question of how trust in the art trade, which is all too often undermined by the careless handling of art forgeries, can be strengthened again. While first discussing if and in what way law can generate and stabilize trust in a market, the legal and intellectual-historical framework of the emerging art trade in the Burgundian and Spanish Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is then analyzed on the basis of original guild statutes, court documents and contracts in order to trace the reasons for the deregulation of the art trade and for the emergence of uncertainty that has characterized it ever since. Finally, a way is shown to banish uncertainty and to restore trust in the art market.