In my book Picturing Art History. The Rise of the Illustrated History of Art in the Eighteenth Century (AUP 2010) I studied the ways in which pictures such as prints, drawings and book illustrations assembled in collections became indispensable tools to study the artistic past. In cosmopolitan Rome such collections provided direct motives for scholars of different nationalities such as Giovanni Bottari to propose the illustration of Giorgio Vasari’s seminal Vite (1759-60), for Johann Joachim Winckelmann to comparatively explore artistic progress in ancient and early modern times (1767) and for Jean-Baptist Seroux d’Agincourt to study and illustrate the first history of medieval art (1810-23). Because they all emphaticallly endorsed the value of observation and connoisseurship – both in practice and in theory – they accorded a key role to the appearance of art works as evidence of the artistic past, and thus fundamentally changed the history of artists into the history of art.
In a range of subsequent articles I explored further case studies from different perspectives such as the reception of art and artists, the mediatization of art-historical ideas and the reproduction of art. For example, they comprise the Rembrandt album in the collection of Michel de Marolles in Paris, the print collection of Pieter Cornelis Baron van Leyden which would become the founding collection of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum print room, the various collections of early Italian art in the Uffizi in Florence and the print collection of Leiden University under the directorship of Humbert de Superville in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recently I have developed an interst for the sometimes biassed national motives that underscored much art-historical research in Enlightenment Europe. With the help of an NWO Aspasia fund and in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam I am now developing this research under the title of The Artistic Taste of Nations.
Much of my research would not have been possible without the invaluable facilities and support of the KNIR Rome, the NIKI Florence and the Fondation Custodia Paris.
Links:
- Clue+: http://www.clue.vu.nl/en/projects/current-projects/The-Artistic-Taste-of-Nations/index.aspx
- AUP: http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089640314-picturing-art-history.html (research)
- KNIR: http://knir.it/nl/
- NIKI: http://www.niki-florence.org
- Fondation Custodia: https://www.fondationcustodia.fr/English
