Elite Viewing and Artistic Engagement in Early Modern Antwerp

Iain MacKay | Elite Viewing and Artistic Engagement in Early Modern Antwerp | Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Department of Historical Dutch Literature) and Emory University (Department of Art History) | B.A.M. Ramakers and Walter S. Melion at RUG and Emory, respectively | August 2024-May 2028 | i.c.mackay@rug.nl

This project aims to examine the functional interplay and reformative power of the artworks, objects, and texts that were often assembled in collections known as kunstkamers and depicted in a new type of picture pioneered in Antwerp—the kunstkamerstuk—that describes such collections, either actual or fictive. These collectors’ spaces and kunstkamerstukken feature artworks and other types of collectible objects that were acquired and displayed to call attention to kinds and degrees of artifice and to showcase variety. Kunstkamers and kunstkamerstukken will thus serve as valuable context for understanding how and why collections and collecting came to be seen as a pictorial subject category capable of encompassing a wide range of epistemological and hermeneutic functions, as the collectible objects were intended to be deeply dialogic with both each other and in their negotiation with a viewer. The copia of images and objects assembled in kunstkamers and depicted in kunstkamerstukken was thus seen as a valuable catalyst for cultivating patterns of thought that, it was hoped, would lead to behavioral changes. Elite citizens, through their often communal practices of viewing and thinking about art in the setting of a collector’s cabinet, used the kunstkamer and kunstkamerstuk as complementary sites for reforming the self, spurring the development of moral and religious habits, and conforming the mind, heart, and spirit to canons of virtue.