A World of Materials in a Cabinet without Drawers: Re-framing Jan van Kessel’s The Four Parts of the World (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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.
E M Kavaler -- Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Sculpture. A Recovery NKJ 67.pdf
Netherlanders produced enormously rich and varied sculpture in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Low Countries sculpture likely enjoyed a higher reputation than painting for most of the century, especially in other lands. 1 There were remarkable individuals involved in its production. Jacques Dubroeucq , court artist to Mary of Hungary, carved the statues and reliefs for the jubé of St. Waudru at Mons -notable examples of narrative design, the vogue for Roman antiquity, and the awareness of artistic developments in other regions of Europe (fig. 1). 2 The tomb sculpture of Cornelis Floris (1514-1575) became paradigmatic for funerary monuments across much of northern Europe (fig. ). 3 As Kristoffer Neville and Cynthia Osiecki discuss in this volume, his manner was so widely emulated that the term 'Floris style' has become something of a cliché in discussions of art around the Baltic.
In recent decades, the historical significance of the panel paintings by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and the Flémalle group has been subject to debate. This essay analyses the shifts in gilding practices that accompanied the introduction of the fifteenth-century ars nova, arguing that the new panel painting marked a self-conscious departure from the luxury arts by asserting its value through representation alone, rather than through material worth. From the 1420s-30s onwards, Netherlandish panel paintings rejected gold-leaf backgrounds, and they also increasingly either relegated gilding to small details such as halos and heavenly rays, or incorporated it into pictorial representation. In addition, these paintings display a particularly intensive visual dialogue with contemporary sculpture and brocaded textiles, as a means of exploring painting’s superior capacity to depict persuasive surfaces in spatial depth. In establishing its independence from other contemporary art forms, and in promoting the intrinsic value of representation, early Netherlandish panel painting presaged the high status of painting in the ensuing centuries of the western canon, even though, in other respects, these works remained firmly rooted in earlier tradition. The rise of early Netherlandish painting thus sheds important light on the role of periodization within art-historical interpretation. Where a number of recent studies have perceived temporal instability within the content of medieval and Renaissance images, this essay proposes that historiographical assessment should take into account the specific material and conceptual qualities of different artistic media, and weigh the relative importance of their perceived references forwards and back in time. The research for this project developed over many years and eventually coalesced into a size and shape in between a typical book and a typical journal article. Digital publication on the University of York’s History of Art Research Portal enables this essay to be presented at its full length, incorporating far more material—especially a greater number of detailed illustrations—than is possible in traditional printed journals. Publication at full length also enables it to combine typically disparate methodologies and sub-fields: historiography, methodological reflection, technical analysis, and close looking at artworks in different media, from luxury objects and sculpture to panel painting. Most critically, the visual apparatus of digital publication supports this essay’s emphasis on the importance of contingent looking within particular lighting circumstances, a feature rarely considered in art-historical studies.