CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Speakers

Heike Stege

Speaker
Heike Stege is Head of the Scientific Department of the Doerner Institut and has been working as an analytical chemist at the Munich Pinakotheken since 2002. Her special research field is the analytical identification and history of pigments used by historical and modern artists in their paintings. She and her team are regularly involed in manifold art-technological research and publication projects dedicated to specific artists or painting schools, such as recently on Emil Nolde.

Lecture abstract: Nature Imprint and Prussian Blue. Recent Findings in Works by Rachel Ruysch and Otto Marseus van Schrieck
The four paintings by Rachel Ruysch from the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich, and one from the State Art Collections of the Museums of Augsburg were subjects of technological, imaging, and analytical examinations (and partly conservation treatment) prior to the exhibition Nature into Art. Their period of creation, between 1682 and 1708-1715, allows for a comparison of an early still life with works from Ruysch’s years as Court painter of Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz in DĂŒsseldorf. The study also included a work by Marseus van Schrieck dating from 1672 as one of Ruysch’s influential predecessors.

The lecture will address the artist’s choice and preparation of canvases, findings of chalk-based underdrawings, and examples of local colored undermodelling to define the shapes and positions of flower petals. Her meticulous painting of flowers, fruits, insects, and reptiles will be illustrated along with specific techniques such as nature prints using butterfly wings or the depiction of structured moss surfaces. An overview of Ruysch’s pigment palette will be given, with a focus on her comparably early use of the newly invented Prussian Blue.

Simone Ebert

Speaker
Simone Ebert completed her studies in art history, medieval and modern history at the universities of Marburg, Aachen, and Bonn and received her doctorate from the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her dissertation, titled Botticelli – Signorelli – Michelangelo. On the Art Politics of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, was published by Deutscher Kunstverlag. As a member of staff at various institutions, she was involved in inventorying collections, conceiving exhibitions and educational programs, and contributing to the preparation of the catalogue raisonnĂ© of the Dutch painter Frans Post. Since 2013, she has initiated numerous programs for the Bavarian State Painting Collections. In May 2024, she assumed the position of Head of the Department of Education and Learning / Information and Service.

Lecture abstract: Exploring Old Masters with All Senses. New Ways of Audience Development, Participation and Education
How can we create new approaches to the Old Masters that benefit both individuals and society? How can we encourage broader participation? Works of art, such as the paintings of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), are intended to provoke questions, stimulate thought, and open up new avenues of understanding. But how can we facilitate a deeper understanding of Rachel Ruysch’s working methods, her selection of motifs, and their arrangement within the composition?

Innovative approaches have made it possible to translate the wondrous world of this still life painter—bridging art and natural sciences—into three dimensions. These resulting educational experiences offer fresh perspectives on the works of this particular “Old Master,” making them more accessible—and, quite literally, tangible—to a wider audience

Lizzie Marx

Speaker
Dr Lizzie Marx is the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Marx received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge with the thesis Visualising, Perceiving, and Interpreting Smell in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. She has worked on exhibition projects in the Netherlands, the UK, and Ireland, including Fleeting – Scents in Colour (2021) at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer (2024) and Vermeer Visits (2024) at the National Gallery of Ireland. In 2023 she worked on securing the acquisition of Rachel Ruysch’s Vase of Flowers with an Ear of Corn (1742), the first painting by a woman artist to enter the collection of Dutch art at the National Gallery of Ireland.

Lecture abstract: Preserving the Perishable in the Work of Frederik Ruysch and Rachel Ruysch
Rachel Ruysch’s fascination for the natural world likely began at an early age thanks to her father, the physician and anatomist Frederik Ruysch. Among his accolades, he is credited as being an innovator of preserving the perishable, through his wet preparations of specimens suspended in a solution of so-called liquor balsamicus. The achievements speak for themselves, as the more than three hundred-year-old preservations are virtually unchanged since the day they were bottled, a selection of which are on display in the Ruysch exhibition. However, Ruysch’s inventive and unorthodox approach to lifelike preservations raised questions about the role of the anatomist and their death-defying capabilities. This presentation will discuss Frederik Ruysch’s contributions to science and art, and the consequent tensions that resulted from his work. It will also illustrate how his ideas were adopted by Rachel Ruysch, as demonstrated in her approach to preserve life through exceptionally naturalistic paintings.

Bernd Ebert

Bernd Ebert works as Chief Curator for Dutch and German Baroque Painting at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich since 2013. He has co-curated various exhibitions and edited catalogues such as Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe with the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and Jacobus Vrel with the Mauritshuis and the Fondation Custodia in Paris. He started his career at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in 2005, co-curating the exhibition Circle Sphere Cosmos at the Pergamon Museum.

Antien Knaap

Antien Knaap, Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Curator, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is a native of the Netherlands and a specialist in Dutch and Flemish Art. Her publications include Art, Music and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens: The Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, co-edited with Michael Putnam in 2013. At the MFA, she was part of the curatorial team for the reinstallation of the Dutch and Flemish galleries that opened in 2021. Her exhibitions include Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum (2023-2025) and Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art (2025), co-organized with the Toledo Museum of Art and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Robert Schindler

Robert Schindler earned his MA in Art History and Business Administration as well as his PhD in Art History from the Freie UniversitĂ€t in Berlin in 2010. He then served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. From 2012-2013, Schindler was the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He was subsequently appointed to the position of Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2013 to 2022, he served as the Fariss Gambrill Lynn and Henry Sharpe Lynn Curator of European Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. In 2022, he joined the Toledo Museum of Art as William Hutton Curator of European Art where he oversees the Museum’s acclaimed collection of European art.

Gabriel Dette

Gabriel Dette has been Chief Curator of Early German and Early Netherlandish Painting at the Alte Pinakothek since 2023. Prior to this, he served as an assistant curator at the StĂ€del Museum in Frankfurt am Main (2006-2010) and the Kunstmuseum Basel (2017-2022). He also held the position of research associate at the Institute of History of Architecture and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt (2011-2016). He has been involved in numerous exhibitions as an (assistant) curator. These include Botticelli (2009-10), Rembrandt’s Orient. West Meets East in Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century (2020-21), and Picasso-El Greco (2022).

Mirjam Neumeister

Mirjam Neumeister has been Chief Curator of Flemish Baroque Painting at the Bayerische StaatsgemÀldesammlungen/Alte Pinakothek, Munich since November 2007. Together with the Doerner Institut, she has led mayor research projects on Jan Brueghel the Elder and Anthony van Dyck and curated the related exhibitions at the Alte Pinakothek. Most recently, she was responsible for the reorganization of the Staatsgalerie Aschaffenburg. From 1999 to 2007 she was a curatorial fellow, a research fellow and a curatorial assistant at the StÀdel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, where she worked on the scholarly catalogue of Dutch Baroque paintings from 1550 to 1800 (volumes 1 and 3) as well as various exhibition projects.