A contract price was rarely a single number handed over on delivery. The typical Italian commission — for a panel, an altarpiece, a fresco cycle — split payment into at least three moments: an advance at signing, an interim sum at some defined midpoint, and a final settlement when the work was approved and installed. Each stage was tied to something physical: timber delivered, ground laid, figures roughed in, gilding begun.
The advance, usually a fraction of the agreed total, served two functions at once. For the patron, it bound the painter to the job — a man who had taken money was harder to replace. For the painter, it covered materials before the work could generate any return. Lapis lazuli, gold leaf, quality panel timber: none of these could wait for a patron's eventual satisfaction. The advance was working capital, not a gesture of trust.
Interim payments followed physical milestones rather than calendar dates. A fresco contract might release the second tranche when the arriccio — the rough undercoat — was complete across the whole wall. A panel commission might key the middle payment to the moment the carpenter's work was signed off and priming had begun. This structure meant the painter had to sequence his own work with payment logic in mind: delay one phase and the next instalment stalled.
The final payment was almost always contingent on approval. Patrons reserved the right to withhold settlement, bring in arbiters, or negotiate a deduction if the work fell short of specification. A painter who had accepted the commission could not simply declare himself finished; somebody else had to agree. That dependency gave patrons real leverage at the moment when the painter most needed to be paid — and it kept quality clauses in contracts from being purely decorative.
What this structure actually shaped was sequencing. A painter working toward a staged release had strong reasons to complete whole, approvable units rather than carry several things forward in parallel. Finish the carpentry, collect the interim; lay the gold, collect the next. The payment rhythm pressed the work into discrete, inspectable phases — and that pressure is visible in how the objects were made.
The sum itself was often negotiated against an estimate of days, materials and the level of finish the patron demanded. Whether the master painted everything himself, or delegated drapery and background to workshop hands, affected the price — and sometimes that division was written into the contract too. Money and method were the same negotiation.
The sum itself was often negotiated against an estimate of days, materials and the level of finish the patron demanded.