Artists everywhere and across all time periods have collaborated with one another. Yet in the early modern Low Countries, collaboration was particularly widespread, resulting in a number of distinctive visual forms that have become strongly associated with artistic – and especially painterly – practice in this region. While art historians long glossed over this phenomenon, which appeared to discomfitingly counter nineteenth-century notions of authorship and artistic genius that have long shaped the field, the past few decades have seen increased attention to this rich and complicated subject. The essays in this book together constitute a current state of the question, while at once pointing the way forward. In broadening the art historical lens on this subject, they draw upon economic and social history, current interests in immigration and mobility, print studies, and technical analysis, embracing a range of literary and archival sources along the way. Interdisciplinary in their perspectives and methodologically diverse, these essays present both theoretical reflections on artistic collaboration and in-depth studies of particular artist-partnerships and collaboratively made objects.
Table of Contents
Abigail D. Newman
Introduction: Collaboration in the Early Modern Low Countries
Part I. Theory, beginnings, beyond Antwerp
Chapter 1. Dorien Tamis
The Appreciation and Reception of Painters’ Collaborations in the Low Countries: An Overview, c. 1500–1700
Chapter 2. Bernard Aikema
Collaboration, Connoisseurship, and the Artistic Canon
Chapter 3. Katharine Campbell
Landscapes, Figures, Demons: Collaboration as Canon Formation in Joachim Patinir and Quentin Metsys’s Temptation of St. Anthony
Chapter 4. Julia Lillie
Collaboration in Exile: Crispijn de Passe I and Matthias Quad in Cologne, 1589–1604
Chapter 5. Sophia Quach McCabe
Many Hands, Many Lands: Collaborative Copper Painting by Hans Rottenhammer, Paul Bril, and Jan Brueghel I
Part II. Collaboration in seventeenth-century Antwerp paintings
Chapter 6. Angela Jager and Jørgen Wadum, with contributions by Aoife Daly, David Buti, and Gianluca Pastorelli
The Raid by Jan Brueghel I and Sebastiaen Vrancx: Prime Version and Autograph Replica
Chapter 7. Arnout Balis
Many Hands in Rubens’s Workshop: An Exploration
Chapter 8. Filip Vermeylen
Antwerp as a Center of Artistic Collaboration: A Unique Selling Point?
Chapter 9. Elizabeth Alice Honig
Additive Painting and the Social Self
Chapter 10. Anne T. Woollett
Considering Collaboration: Then and Now
Publication
Abigail D. Newman and Lieneke Nijkamp (eds.)
Many Antwerp Hands : Collaborations in Netherlandish Art
London: Harvey Miller, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-912554-73-7
242 p., ill.
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