On Friday 24 April, Charlotte Rulkens (CODART member since 2016) successfully defended her PhD dissertation, Rembrandt and Rubens Revisited: Towards more Transparent and Replicable Attributions, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

The research by Rulkens explores how art-historical attributions can be made more transparent and better open to scrutiny. Drawing on methods from replication research, she examined paintings associated with Rembrandt van Rijn (Mauritshuis, The Hague, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg) and Peter Paul Rubens (KMSKA, Antwerp).

As part of the project, Rulkens developed the Attribution Expert Consensus Meeting (A-ECM), a structured method that helps document not only experts’ conclusions but also their reasoning, levels of certainty, and areas of disagreement. Her research contributes to ongoing discussions about transparency, expertise, and Open Science in art history.

The dissertation is available open access through Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Rulkens also recently discussed her research in an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC.