Knowledge and practice pictured in the artists studio. The 'art lover' in the seventeenth-century Netherlands (original) (raw)
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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.
Eighteenth-Century Studies
"During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pioneering books on art theory— by Richardson, Piles, Lairesse, and many others—formulated benchmark criteria to assess the quality of paintings and shaped a canon of favorite masters, schools, and subjects. Less is known about the actual appropriation of this high-brow canon by laymen art lovers, amateurs, and connoisseurs. Flemish and Dutch travel diaries are used in this article to unveil more details about these middlebrow art observations. Was a long and expensive Grand Tour the sole vehicle for close encounters with the arts? How did laymen's interest and discourse about the arts evolve over the long run? Finally, the study attempts to reconstruct the Netherlandish "common" taste for individual masters, schools, genres, and periods. "
Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art vol. 65: Arts of Display , 2015
This article considers the collections of painters and the invention of the genre of the gallery picture in Antwerp. It zooms in on gallery paintings from the Francken workshop with details of so-called 'iconoclastic donkeys'. These pictures were a ‘defence of the image’ and must be understood in Antwerp’s Counter Reformation context, in the aftermath of the iconoclastic furies of the sixteenth century. Quintessential to both iconoclasm and the culture of collecting were issues of display and materiality. The paintings of cabinets suggest that some Antwerp artists were defenders of the image in a time when images and other man-made objects were at the forefront of intellectual debate. The gallery paintings can be related to a widespread debate on materiality that, implicitly or explicitly, extended from scholarly publications to workshops and collectors’ rooms. https://doi.org/10.1163/22145966-06501004
Pro-Creativity. Art, Love and Conjugal Virtue in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artists' Self-portraits
Dutch Crossing, Journal of Low Countries Studies, 2004
This article explores the close conceptual and often practical relationship between art and love and its relevance for seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Focusing on pictures signalling that the subject is an artist, it considers the depiction of the artist as husband and as family man for whom love is an inspiration, as conjugal love is accompanied by the love of art. Special attention is paid to paintings in which the productive, pro-creative power of love is portrayed.