The Rubens House appointed Bert Watteeuw as the museum’s new director. Watteeuw is known for his innovative research into Flemish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He succeeds Ben van Beneden, who retired earlier this month.

Dr. Bert Watteeuw (b. 1981) studied art history and social and cultural anthropology at the Catholic University of Leuven. After a PhD fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders, his job took him to Antwerp where he joined the Rubenianum as a researcher in 2011. Since 2015, he has also been working for the Rubens House, combining scientific research with museum work. In 2018, he was appointed project coordinator of the architectural master plan for the Rubens House site.

He has published extensively on Flemish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, in addition to contributing to Belgian and international exhibitions. His main interests are the cultural history of the human body, archival research on Rubens and ‘the little things’ or ‘the other’ in the works of the great masters of Antwerp art. He wrote a dissertation titled Capita Selecta. Interdisciplinary perspectives on the culture of portraiture in early modern Flanders.

Watteeuw has been a member of CODART since 2011 and attended several meetings. At last year’s CODART online congress he delivered a Speakers’ Corner talk on the presentation of disability in museums.