PROGRAMME
15 Decembre 2015
Venue: Het Pand Zaal Rector Vermeylen Onderbergen 1 9000 Ghent
10.00-12.15: Session 1 – Collecting in the Southern Netherlands
Session chair: Koenraad Jonckheere
Marlise Rijks, The epistemology of collecting. Artists’ and artisans’ collections in seventeenth-century Antwerp
Nadia Baadj, Early Modern Cabinets as Catalysts of Knowledge
Jan Muylle, The Furniture of Count Anthony of Arenberg (Brussels, 1617)
12.15-13.45: Lunch
13.45-15.05: Session 2 – Noble and bourgeois collectors
Session chair: Christine Göttler
Nuno Senos, Science and Empire in the collection of the Duke of Bragança
Renata Ago, Bourgeois collectors and their supporters (Rome, XVII century)
15.05-15.45: Coffee/tea
15.45-17.05: Session 3 – The global world
Session chair: Sven Dupré
Claudia Swan, Rariteyten and other specimens: VOC goods, liefhebbers, and Dutch collections 1600-1650
Christine Göttler, A Javanese Dagger in a constcamer painting by Frans Francken the Younger: Collecting Idols and Weapons in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
17.05-17.45: Wijnand Mijnhardt, Concluding remarks
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The history of collecting in Early Modern Europe has received a lot of interest in recent years. Most existing research focuses either on art collections in relation to the art market and connoisseurship or on the role of scholarly collections in relation to global trade networks and new scientific knowledge. Largely ignored however, are the collections of practitioners such as merchants, artists, and artisans. Often avid collectors themselves, these practitioners played a vital role in early modern knowledge economies characterized by an increasing market for material objects that were considered to be transmitters of knowledge. Also, practitioners frequently played an important part in the formation and conservation of princely and scholarly collections. Central to this workshop is the role of practitioners in the culture of collecting in early modern Europe. Of particular interest are the processes through which collected objects became sources of artisanal, artistic, or scientific knowledge and innovation. Users and beholders of collections were invited to observe, investigate, depict, and question individual objects and their interrelationships, and as such, collections became ‘catalysts of knowledge’.
This workshop aims to bring together approaches from the domains of art history, the history of science, and material culture studies. Histories of collections are particularly suitable to integrate methods from different disciplines. The material-based approach that is inextricably linked to the history of collecting also opens new vistas about the relationship between material objects and theory. Research on collections can shed new light on both art theory and knowledge theory. How can the culture of collecting be related to the striving for and trust in objective knowledge? How did the display of art and other objects in collections relate to the (religious) image debates? What was the role of visualization in relation to collecting, art theory, and knowledge practices? Can collections be understood in a culture of question?
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Informations pratiques
Workshop is free of charge, but places are limited, so please register here / L’entrée est libre et gratuite, mais les places sont limitées, inscription obligatoire : registration.
Contact:
Marlise Rijks, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Ghent
marlise.rijks@ugent.be
+32 9 264 79 58