CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

New imagery and the consumption of images in 16th-century Antwerp

Symposium: 7 November 2008

Information from the organizers

Within the framework of the research program
Arts Markets in Europe 1300-1800: Emergence, Development, Networks
and the Duke University partnership
International Graduate Program in Art Markets and Visual Studies
Université Lille 3 presents a one-day symposium.

Sixteenth-century Antwerp underwent an unprecedented economic growth,
yielding major commercial, social and cultural consequences. The development
of modern economic infrastructures participated in generating new consuming
habits, including a more widely spread interest in painting. The increasing
demand for luxury goods, and especially paintings, was both sustained and
encouraged by the development of new production types, oriented towards
innovation as well as an increasing variety.

Such evolution leads us to ask a number of questions that will feed today’s
debates. Among them :
– Under which conditions and forms did those new consumption models
emerge in Flanders?
– What kind of parallels can we draw between Antwerp!s particular economic
context, and the birth of new pictorial genres and styles, finally leading
to an increasing specialization of the artistic production?
– Does a specific iconography emerge in connection with the Antwerpian
context?
– How were those innovations received, and how did they evolve over time,
given an increasingly controversial political and religious background?
Languages: English, French

Program

10H00: Registration and coffee
10H30: Chair Alain TAPIÉ – Directeur des musées de Lille
Bruno BLONDÉ – Universiteit Antwerpen
The material renaissance? Northern perspectives on the development of a consumer society
Filip VERMEYLEN – Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Broadening the horizon. Joachim Patinir and the sixteenth-century expansion of the Antwerp art market
Discussion

12H30: Lunch break

14H00: Chair Sophie RAUX – Université Lille 3 – IRHiS
Robert MAYHEW – Duke University, Durham (NC)
Novelty, tradition, and hyper-specialization in sixteenth-century Antwerp painting
Koenraad JONCKHEERE – Universiteit van Amsterdam
Nudity on the open market: Antwerp art and its market in the 1540s

Final discussion