Art History question: Was 'modeling' a profession or was there a modeling industry pre-19th century in the Middle, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo eras? Were there famous, sought after models who commanded higher prices? Were there agents and managers?

by StanzinTheScribe
charmingnotsincere

pauses

This is actually a lot trickier than my initial "no". Mostly no. There were "allegorical" portraits. Elisabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, commissioned a few of these. One was to showcase the plight and what she saw as inevitable triumph of her dispossessed children. Agnes Sorel, one of the earliest known mistress of the King of France, was painted as the Virgin Mary. Wedding paintings could also be allegorical.

Which in turn leads to Botticelli and the great debates of model attribution. Simonetta Vespucci is one of the more persistent names to be a model in both Primavera, which was probably commissioned for a wedding, and Birth of Venus. This is a bit doubtful, but we can blame Ruskin. (Ruskin was awful to his wife, I don't feel bad about this.)

But it also points to a massive problem- you can't always tell who a model is. Famous subjects are probably more likely to have a definite answer for this. Even then, it can be doubtful. Read any biography of Anne Boleyn, and they should include a lot of the very different paintings that "might" be her. Even the famous portrait is a later copy of an original.

But for the most part, artist's models were usually... not considered all that respectable. The hired models were usually sex workers of some kind, and are patchily known. Usually, better known subjects were women who were well off, had relationships with the artist, or mistresses of well off men. Even then, the attribution issue will haunt them. Emma Hamilton is probably something a bit closer to what you wanted- the subject of a number of portraits by George Romney, but he was commissioned to paint by her then-lover, so not quite. You need to get to the 19th century before you can start getting more information.

So it's less famous model than "I really like this person, so I'll paint her when I have a chance"/"I am paid to paint this person".

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/heritage_floor/agnes_sorel

Ettle, Ross Brooke. “THE VENUS DILEMMA: NOTES ON BOTTICELLI AND SIMONETTA CATTANEO VESPUCCI.” Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 27, no. 4, 2008, pp. 3–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23207901.

Daughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caravaggio