'Defenders of the Image. Painted Collectors' Cabinets and the Display of Display in Counter-Reformation Antwerp', Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
This paper deals with the remarkable genre of kunstkammer paintings – that is, paintings of picture galleries – that emerged and enjoyed a short life of fifty-odd years in the first half of the 17th century in Antwerp. These works have prompted a great deal of iconographic analysis, but this paper probes the question of whether there can be a more affective and speculative analysis of how these paintings moved their viewers and how they themselves were objects in motion. Such pictures were only made possible through the early modern development of the portable, mobile easel painting as a commodity. A private picture gallery (and, by extension, a picture of a private picture gallery) is the product of an image that is already moving -- that is, an image in circulation. This mobility of cultural artifacts, I will argue, is intimately related to shifts in the early modern notions of knowledge, virtue, and subjectivity that had far-reaching consequences. While such works may have enabled viewers to fix and confirm their identities as learned, elite, and even virtuous, their mobilization of the categories of the curious and marvelous may have worked in more intense and less predictable ways. I argue that alchemical concepts of sympathy, hybridity and correspondence that guided the formation of encyclopedic wunderkammern were also active in the allegorical, intertextual compositions of gallery paintings, such that meaning was set in motion across and between diverse images and textual sources at the same time as that the allegorical mode attempted to secure and contain those meanings within the framework of a moral message. The affect of these paintings, I would like to suggest, may also have figured larger disturbances in the social fabric; the mobile sign may have been amenable to aspirational burghers keen to demonstrate their aristocratic virtue (and hence their social mobility) through displays of knowledge and judgment, but the internal contradictions of an allegorical conception of knowledge ultimately contributed to a shift away from the form of the encyclopedic collection in actual collecting practices and in their representation in cabinet paintings.
Artists’ and Artisans’ Collections in Early Modern Antwerp. Catalysts of Innovation
2021
Paintings, drawings, prints, maps, jewels, gems, statuettes, medals, exotica, antiquities, dried animals, shells, corals, and scientific instruments. All these objects and more were on display in collectors’ cabinets in Early Modern Antwerp. This book tells the story of the collections of artists and artisans, who stood at the centre of and shaped the city’s cultural life. In their double roles as maker-collectors, they put a strong mark on the culture of collecting. The culture of collecting was inextricably linked to changing conceptions of the material world, which went hand in hand with the emergence of new pictorial genres and the increasing dominance of forms of knowledge based on objects and material evidence. This book traces the important role of Antwerp artists and artisans in this culture of art and knowledge. It is a story about friendship and networks; about new forms of connoisseurship; and about innovation and appreciation.
Loc. cit.: '[…] de oeffening van die konst was in de oude tijden verdeijld tusschen de beldsnijders, de schrijnwerkers en de metzers […]' Loc. cit. C. Van Vlierden, De Antwerpse beeldsnijders en het corporatief stelsel in de late Middeleeuwen, 1979, pp. 32 ff (master's thesis K.U. Leuven) C. Van Cauwenberghs, La corporation des quatre couronnés d'Anvers ou les architectes anversois du moyen age (1324-1542), Antwerp, 1889, p. 6. Members of the Guild of St Luke who produced wooden architectural decorations were obliged in this period to enrol with the Guild of the Four Crowned Saints too, although they only had to pay the annual subscription and not the enrolment fee. Current and prospective St Luke members wishing to make stone statues, by contrast, or architectural decorations in both wood and stone, had to join the Four Crowned Saints and pay the full enrolment fee, since members of their own guild were restricted to making wooden statues. mingling with artless crafts 7 Antwerp, Felixarchief, Gilden & Ambachten, GA 4267, Privilegieboek van het Ambacht der Vier Gekroonden, Part V.: Processen (not foliated) '[…] dat alle degene die van nu voortaene in de voors. stadt cleijnsteken wilde, sullen schuldigh syn te comene in't ambacht van de metsers ende dat gedaen synde, sal jegelycx meester van den cleijnstekeren in 't selve ambacht synde, moghen stellen oft setten eenen onvrijen gezelle constenaere wesende in't cleijnsteken, ende dat op syn gewoonelijck keersgelt, wel verstaende, dat 't selve insetten van eenen onvrijen geselle op syn keersgelt hem nijet voordere en sal verstaen dan op't cleijn steken.[…]' 8 It is worth noting that shifts in corporative organization also occurred in the same period in Utrecht, the de Noles' native city, where the woodcarvers split from the saddlemakers' corporation to form their own Guild of St Luke in conjunction with local painters. M. Casteels, De beeldhouwers de Nole te Kamerijk, te Utrecht en te Antwerpen,
A Story of the Image Thoughts on an Exhibition and on 15th-and 16th-centuries Flemish Painting
epress.nus.edu.sg
A story may be intended in completely other ways. A story of the image in this instance may have to do with what and how an image speaks to us today, as we see this exhibition. In this sense, a story is to be developed in and from the display. So we ask: is there a story in the exhibition, looked at as a collective of images? Is the exhibition as a whole conveying a story? Is the exposition a story? And again, is this a story of the image from Antwerp that is transposed and now seen, told, spoken for and heard in Singapore? What might such a story then be and what might it look like? Here are, in my view, questions that beckon promising answers; questions and answers that could be invaluable additions to essays in the publication which is conspicuous by the absence of such a story of the image as it is received here, in this museum in Singapore.
Medieval art on display, 1750-2010
PhD Thesis, 2013
This thesis asks how the curatorial framing of medieval objects - the processes of selection, classification, display and interpretation - affect how medieval objects are made legible within the museum. It investigates how different collectors and curators have deployed medieval objects over a period of two hundred and fifty years of museological practice. Throughout this history, medieval objects have been appropriated within a range of museological narratives that have positioned them variously as objects of curiosity, utility, scientific analysis, nationalistic interest and as sites of scholarly and popular attention. My purpose is to inquire how the epistemological re-positioning of objects is articulated through their presentation within the framework of the collection, museum or temporary exhibition and to question how the mechanics of display facilitate particular readings of medieval objects. I then consider how certain curatorial approaches may produce unintended effects that render the medieval object illegible or problematic in unexpected ways. I also acknowledge that unforeseen exhibitionary outcomes may not be solely due to the effects of curatorial intervention but may be wrought by the agency of objects themselves. This thesis therefore examines medieval objects as active participants that play a crucial role in influencing the communication of curatorial objectives and in affecting how they may be apprehended through exhibitionary practice. The thesis examines sixteen chronologically presented case studies, beginning in the mid eighteenth century and concluding in the early twenty-first century, that represent important or influential episodes in the history of the display of medieval art. It traces a selective history of the various ways medieval objects have been culturally positioned at particular points in time to reveal how curatorial techniques have worked to reinforce or undermine the perception of medieval objects as carriers of specific meanings. Through the examination of historical approaches to the display of medieval objects I reveal how familiar tropes of display, such as the use of specific lighting techniques and stained glass have characterized the museological staging of medieval objects and how these have endured into the twenty-first century. Drawing on performance theory, material culture theory and sensory theory I identify how the biographical histories, material characteristics and sensory properties of medieval objects have been re-activated or suppressed by curators to encourage audiences to engage with them in specific ways. This theoretical approach reveals a previously unacknowledged sensory cultural history of engagement with the medieval object and highlights how historical approaches that have privileged embodied engagement with objects continue to inform contemporary museological practice. I also draw on Actor-Network theory to illuminate how medieval objects may be understood as active agents within the chain of correspondences that links people, objects and exhibitions at particular points throughout this history. In this way I delineate an exhibitionary landscape through which we can understand medieval objects as multi-authored and polysemic entities but principally as the products of exhibitionary practice.