ABSTRACT
Title of dissertation: MODELING THE NETWORK OF
DUTCH AND FLEMISH PRINT
PRODUCTION, 1550-1750
Matthew David Lincoln, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016
Dissertation directed by: Professor Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.
Department of Art History & Archaeology
The production of artistic prints in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryNether-
lands was an inherently social process. Turning out prints at any reasonable scale
depended on the fluid coordination between designers, platecutters, and publishers;
roles that, by the sixteenth century, were considered distinguished enough to merit
distinct credits engraved on the plates themselves: invenit, fecit/sculpsit, and excudit.
While any one designer, plate cutter, and publisher could potentially exercise a great
deal of influence over the production of a single print, their individual decisions (Whom
to select as an engraver? What subjects to create for a print design? What market to
sell to?) would have been variously constrained or encouraged by their position in this
larger network (Who do they already know? Andwho, in turn, do their contacts know?)
This dissertation addresses the impact of these constraints and afordances through
the novel application of computational social network analysis to major databases
of surviving prints from this period. This approach is used to evaluate several
questions about trends in early modern print production practices that have not been
satisfactorily addressed by traditional literature based on case studies alone: Did
the social capital demanded by print production result in centralized, or distributed
production of prints? When, and to what extent, did printmakers and publishers
in the Low countries favor international versus domestic collaborators? And were
printmakers under the same pressure as painters to specialize in particular artistic
genres?
This dissertation ultimately suggests how simple professional incentives endemic to
the practice of printmakingmay, at large scales, have resulted in quite complex patterns
of collaboration and production. The framework of network analysis surfaces the role
of certain printmakers who tend to be neglected in aesthetically-focused histories of
art. This approach also highlights important issues concerning art historians’ balancing
of individual influence versus the impact of longue durée trends. Finally, this dissertation
also raises questions about the current limitations and future possibilities of combining
computational methods with cultural heritage datasets in the pursuit of historical
research.
MODELING THE NETWORK OF DUTCH AND
FLEMISH PRINT PRODUCTION, 1550-1750
by
MATTHEWDAVID LINCOLN
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2016
Advisory Committee:
Professor Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Chair
Professor Renée Ater
Professor Anthony Colantuono
Professor Meredith Gill
Professor Jennifer Golbeck
©Copyright by
Matthew David Lincoln
2016
Dedication
To my family, and to Chong.
ii
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Arthur Wheelock for his constant guidance during all my time at
Maryland. He welcomed this novel dissertation with an open-minded skepticism that
not only made this project stronger, but strengthened my own confidence as a scholar.
Meredith Gill, Anthony Colantuono, Renée Ater, and Jennifer Golbeck also ofered
crucial insight and critique as part of my dissertation committee, and I ofer my sincere
thanks for all the time they devoted to it.
I gratefully acknowledge the Smith Family, without whose funding I would never
have been able to develop the premise for this project, much less follow through on it.
Their generosity not only fundedmy graduate fellowship at theUniversity ofMaryland,
but also established the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Arts, a physical and
intellectual space that aforded me the latitude to explore computation in the study of
the art history in a way that could never have happened through traditional graduate
seminars alone.
Travel and research grants from the University of Maryland Graduate School, the
Oice of the President, the College of Arts and Humanities, and the Department
of Art History and Archaeology have provided crucial support for this dissertation.
External grants from the Kress Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Association for
Computing and the Humanities, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
also facilitated the development of my research. I would also like to thank the libraries
staf at the University of Maryland and the National Gallery of Art for all their
assistance. I owe a special thanks as well to Ellen Prokop and the Frick Art Reference
iii
Library for providing me with access to the Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch
Art Inventories, which were essential to the fourth chapter of this dissertation.
There is the oicial dissertation committee that comes with every dissertation, and
then there is the shadow committee: those friends and colleagues who don’t appear
on any paperwork, but who provided ever-present sounding boards for ideas, sources
of thoughtful advice, and fonts of moral support. Paul Jaskot has shared his time
and intellect freely. I owe him my immense gratitude for all our lengthy, searching,
and genial discussions about the future of art history. Members of the Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities have also promoted this work unceasingly,
and provided helpful advice in this an other endeavors. Among their number, I owe
particular thanks to Ed Summers, Neil Fraistat, and Matt Kirschenbaum. I also want
to express my special gratitude to Quint Gregory, whose provocative ideas, sage advice,
and infectious enthusiasm for all things experimental and untested provided a constant
source of encouragement not only for this dissertation, but for all my years atMaryland.
Finally, I owe more thanks than I can say to Qiongyu Huang for tirelessly reading
proposals, shooting down bad arguments, and being a continual source of support
throughout.
iv
Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables vii
List of Figures viii
Introduction 1
Chapter Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
“Modeling” History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1 Networks in Art History and Beyond: A Methodological Background 17
1.1 Network Analysis in the Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2 Art Historical Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.3 Formalizing Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.4 A Case for Network Models in Printmaking History . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2 Print Production Centralization in the Low Countries 44
2.1 Background: Why Centralization Mattered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.2 Data on Artistic Prints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.3 Methodology: Inferring Print Production Networks . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.4 Results: A Mixed Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.4.1 Random Networks: Distinguishing the Exceptional from the
Expected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.5 Case Studies in Centrality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.5.1 Hendrick Goltzius and His Studio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
2.5.2 Hendrick Hondius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.5.3 Jonas Suyderhoef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.5.4 Flemish Printmaking Dynasties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
2.6 Conclusion: Simple Rules for a Complex System . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3 The European Context: The Netherlands and International Printmaking
Collaboration 97
3.1 Background: Dutch and Flemish Print Production Across Europe . . . 98
v
3.2 Methodology: Measuring International Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.3 Results: Catalysts and Sudden Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.3.1 Random Networks Revisited: Identifying Disruptive Events . . 120
3.4 Case Studies of Traveling Printmakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.4.1 The Sadelers’ International Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.4.2 Cornelis Bloemaert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
3.4.3 Abraham Blooteling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3.4.4 Turning Away from the Low Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.5 Conclusion: Tipping Points in International Print Production . . . . . . 143
4 Diversity, Specialization, and the Uses of Prints 145
4.1 Background: Why Specialize? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
4.2 Data on Subject Matter in Painting and Prints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
4.2.1 The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories . 157
4.2.2 RKDimages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
4.2.3 Subjects in the Print Data of the RKM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
4.3 Methodology: Characterizing Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.4 Results: Specialist Painters, Generalist Printmakers . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4.4.1 Specialist Printmakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
4.4.2 Generalist Printmakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
4.4.3 Rudolf II, Aegidius Sadeler, and the Use of Prints . . . . . . . . 184
4.4.4 The Luyken Family’s Diverse Book Illustrations . . . . . . . . . 196
4.5 Conclusion: The Encyclopedic Printmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Conclusion 200
Future Work: Art Historical Data Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Digital Scholarship And the Two Art Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Appendix A Network Construction Methodology 212
A.1 Unknown Creators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
A.2 Production Roles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
A.3 Link Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
A.4 Link Weight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Bibliography 216
vi
List of Tables
1 Count, by nationality, of artists born between 1500 and 1750 as repre-
sented in the BM and RKM databases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2 Number of artists and (in parentheses) number of dated, attributed, and
described artworks in each the Montias, RKD, and RKM databases,
partitioned by artist birth year. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
3 Number of artworks (and their percent of the total) broken down by
attribution and subject description. Only attributed records with an
identified subject (around 13% of the total number of object records)
can be used for characterizing artist specialization. . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
4 The most productive Dutch and Flemish specialist printmakers (those
falling above the 80th percentile of works produced, and below the 45th
diversity percentile) arranged in order of decreasing diversity. Note that
the count of “works” treats print series as a single work (see section 4.2.3). 171
5 The most generalist Dutch and Flemish printmakers (those falling
above the 85th diversity percentile) arranged in order of decreasing
diveristy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
vii
List of Figures
1 Jan Collaert I after Johannes Stradanus, “The Invention of Copperplate
Engraving”, in Nova reperta, published by Philips Galle, c. 1600.
Engraving, 27 x 20 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha
Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949. . . . . . . . . 2
2 Counts of artworks in the British Museum, by type. . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Diagram of Stylistic Evolution ͒om 1830 until 1935, in
Cubism and Abstract Art [1936], reprint (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1966). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4 Theodoor van Thulden, after Peter Paul Rubens, Porticus Caesaro Aus-
triaca in Pompa introitus honori fferdinandi… by Jean Gaspard Gevaerts,
published by Joannes Meursius, Antwerp, 1641. London, British Library. 30
5 Stanisław Karłowski, “A graph of influences on Peter Paul Rubens”, in
Juliusz A. Chrościcki and Vladimir P. Odinec, “On Directed Graph
Models on Influences in Art Theory,” Artibus et flistoriae 2, no. 3
(January, 1981), fig. 19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
6 Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (1708, Paris: Jacques Estienne) 38
7 The number of participants (artists, printmakers, and publishers) in the
Dutch and Flemish print production networks between 1550–1750, as
measured from the British Museum dataset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
8 Proportional populations of diferent European regions. Over this
period, France and England increased their share of the European urban
population, while the population share of Italian and German cities
decreased. The Dutch share of the European urban population peaked
in 1650. (“Other” regions include Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland, and
eastern Europe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
viii
9 Network centralization examples. (a) is a highly-centralized “star”
graph, where one actor receives all the connections. (b) is a relatively
centralized graph, where a few nodes receive most of the connections.
(c) is a relatively decentralized graph, where most nodes have the same
number of connections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
10 Visualizing the method for creating time slices of the historical print
production network. Each node in the graph is an artist, engraver, or
publisher, and links are formed when two artists both worked on the
same print. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
11 Visualizations of the core components of two Dutch network time
slices, with some of the most central figures labeled. . . . . . . . . . . . 60
12 Comparison of the changing centralization of the Dutch and Flemish
print production network between 1550–1750with the changing number
of participants in the network (nodes) and the changing number of
connections between them (edges) over the same period. . . . . . . . . 62
13 A visualization of random graph generation. (a) is the network gen-
erated from the BM data between 1640–1650. (b-f) are five randomly
generated networks with the same number of nodes and edges as (a). . . 67
14 Comparing observed results with random graph results. . . . . . . . . . 68
15 The top most central members of the Dutch printmaking network in
the years 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, and 1715, ranked by their degree
centrality (BM Dataset) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
16 Jan Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, Evening, c. 1595. Engraving,
21.1 x 15.1 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy
National Gallery of Art, Washington.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
17 Andries Stock after David Vinckboons,Autumn, published byHendrick
Hondius, 1618. Engraving, 38.5.x 50 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . 77
18 Simon Frisius after David Vinckboons, Winter, published by Hendrick
Hondius, 1618. Engraving, 38.3.x 50 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . 78
19 Jonas Suyderhoef, after Peter Paul Rubens, ffa͜ of the Damned, published
by Pieter Soutman, 1642. Engraving, 74.5 x 56.6 cm. National Gallery of
Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.) 84
ix
20 Jonas Suyderhoef after Adriaen vanOstade, ThreeCrones or “Dutch ffates”,
(left) published by Dancker Danckerts; (right) published by Nicolaes
Visscher. 29.8 x 22 cm. British Museum, London. (Images © Trustees
of the British Museum.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
21 Jonas Suyderhoef after Pieter Soutman, flendrick fioltzius, (left) pub-
lished by Pieter Soutman; (right) published by Cornelis Visscher. En-
graving and etching, 40.9 x 27.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton. (Images courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.) . . . . . . 86
22 The top tenmost central members of the Flemish printmaking network
in the years 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, and 1715, raked by their degree
centrality (BM dataset) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
23 Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Philips fia͜e, 1582. Engraving, 22.3 x 14.5
cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
24 CornelisGalle, after Peter PaulRubens,Ecceflomo, published byTheodoor
Galle, after 1612. Engraving, 37 x 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . 93
25 (left) Lucas van Leyden designed and engraved, Mohammed and the
Monk Sergius, 1508. Engraving. British Museum, London. (Image ©
Trustees of the British Museum.) (right) Marcantonio Raimondi after
Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Climbers, 1510–1520. Engraving, British
Museum, London. (Image © Trustees of the British Museum.) . . . . . 100
26 Cornelis Cort, after Titian’s altarpiece in S. Salvatore, Venice, published
by Antonio Lafréri, Annunciation, c. 1566. Engraving, 41.5 x 47.6 cm.
British Museum, London. (Image © Trustees of the British Museum.) . 103
27 Bartholomeus Spranger, TheWedding ffeast of Cupid and Psyche, 1575–1587.
Pen in brown, brush in grey, heightened with white gouache over a
sketch in black chalk on paper coated with a light grey preparation,
indented for transfer, 39.7 cm. x 83.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam . . 105
28 Hendrick Goltzius, after Bartholomeus Spranger, The Wedding ffeast of
Cupid and Psyche, 1587. Engraving, 43.5 cm. x 86.1 cm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
29 Johannes and Lucas van Doetecum after the Master of the Small
Landscapes, Vi͜age Road with DrawWe͜, published 1559/1561. Etching,
retouched with engraving, 13.3 x 19.5 cm. National Gallery of Art,
Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.) . . 107
x
30 Esaias van de Velde, ffort with defenses at Tholen on the Scheldt, 1615–1616.
Etching, 8.3 x 16.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
31 Jan van de Velde II, Winter Landscape, c. 1615–1646. Etching. National
Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art,
Washington.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
32 Jan van deVelde II,October from the seriesTwelveMonths, 1616. Etching.
National Gallery of Art,Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery
of Art, Washington.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
33 A network with three groups of 20 nodes each. Group A is densely
interconnected, so while its members do make some external connec-
tions, by in large they connect to each other. Therefore, that group
has a negative EI index. Nodes in group B, on the other hand, make a
slimmajority of their connections externa͜y, giving that group a positive
index. Nodes in group C connect exclusively to each other, and so that
group has the lowest possible EI index of -1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
34 The EI Index for Dutch, Flemish, French, British, German, and Italian
printmaking communities between 1550–1750. At 1, all connections
made by an actor are to actors outside their national group. At 0, they
have an equal number of internal and external connections. At -1, all
their connections are to actors within their national group. . . . . . . . 115
35 A visualization of the two-stage simulation of international print net-
work interconnection. (a) shows the first stage of the simulation, in
which several regional communities are created. (b) shows the result of
the second stage, in which additional links (here shown as dotted lines)
are added both within and between these regional clusters based on a
probability distribution that favors well-connected nodes. . . . . . . . . 121
36 Random graph EI indices. The black lines show the EI indices observed
in the BM and RKM data, while the gray ribbons show the range of
results returned by the simulated networks. Some areas with diverging
results are highlighted and annotated with some possible explanations. . 123
37 The individual EI scores of highly-central Flemish printmakers and
publishers in 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, 1715 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
38 Aegidius Sadeler after Roelandt Savery, Man and four goats before a
waterfa͜, from a series of six landscapes, 1597–1629. Engraving and
etching, 22.2 x 28.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
xi
39 Aegidius Sadeler, Charity, orMaternal Love, c. 1620. Engraving, 30 x 21.4
cm. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
40 The individual EI indices of highly-central Dutch printmakers and
publishers in 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, 1715 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
41 Cornelis Bloemaert II after Abraham Bloemaert, title page for Otia
delectant, c. 1625. Engraving, 10.8 x 15.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . 133
42 Cornelis Bloemaert II after a drawing by Giovanni Citosibio Guidi,
River fiod from fia͜eria fiiustiniana del Marchese Vincenzo fiiustiniani
(Rome, 1636). Engraving, 23.1 x 21.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . 134
43 Abraham Blooteling, Portrait of Rupert, Prince of the Rhine, 1673. Engrav-
ing, 39 x 29 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
44 AbrahamBlooteling, after Sir Anthony vanDyck, TheApostle Paul, 1652–
1690. Mezzotint, 35.2 x 27.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . 139
45 AbrahamBlooteling, after Jacob van Ruisdael,View of theMarinaOutside
the Blaubrug, from the series Amstelgezichten, 1655–1690. Etching, 16.5 x
21.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
46 Nicolaes de Bruyn after Gillis van Coninxloo (II), Moses found by the
daughter of the pharoh, 1601. Engraving, 65.5 x 41.5 cm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
47 Ratio of genres in the Montias inventories broken down by paintings
with an attributed artist versus those without. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
48 Illustrating Shannon’s measurement of diversity (Ds) on sample data.
Having made only landscapes, artist A has a D
s
of 0. Note that,
although artist B and C each painted at least one painting with from
each category, artist B has a more even distribution of works across
those categories, and so has a higher Ds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
xii
49 Boxplots showing the distribution and skew of oeuvre diversity for
artists born between 1500 and 1700, based on the MDI, RKD, and
RKM datasets. Higher boxes indicate that more artists born in that
period tended to have diverse oeuvres, while lower boxes indicate a
greater number of specializing artists. Longer boxes indicate that there
was a wide range of artistic strategy (many specialists and many general-
ists) while shorter boxes indicate that more artists’ oeuvre diversity fell
within a small range of values. (This is a Tukey boxplot, in which the the
middle line showing the median diversity value, and the top and bottom
of the box mark the 75th and 25th percentiles. The ends of the whiskers
mark the values within 1.5 times the interquartile range beyond the box.
Outlier values beyond that range are marked with dots.) . . . . . . . . . 167
50 Comparing the subjects treated by the top 25%most specialized painters
from the MDI dataset and the top 25% most specialized printmakers
from RKM dataset. Specialist painters overwhelmingly favored land-
scapes, while specialist printmakers were just as likely to produce genre
prints, landscapes, biblical illustrations, or renditions of historical or
current events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
51 Allaert van Everdingen, Seascapewith sailing ships, 1631–1675. Etching, 7.4
x 11.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
52 Allaert van Everdingen, Landscapewith buildings at night, 1631–1675. Etch-
ing and mezzotint, 12.5 x 16.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . 173
53 Anthonie Waterloo, View of a vi͜age with a water mi͜, 1630–1633. Etch-
ing, 9.8 x 14.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
54 Anthonie Waterloo, fleiligewegspoort, Amsterdam, 1636–1664. Brush in
gray, with black chalk, 40.2 x 64.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . 175
55 Reinier Nooms, The ffour Elements, published by Clement de Jonghe,
1651–1662. Etchings, Air: 8.7 x 20.4 cm.; Earth: 8.3 x 20.5 cm.; Water:
8.3 x 20.7 cm.; ffire: 8.7 x 20.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . 176
56 Reinier Nooms, Zaagmolenpoort, from Nieuwe en Eygentlycke A͍eelbeeld-
ingheDer Stadts-Poorten vanAmsterdam, published by Cornelis Danckerts
(I), 1652–1656. Etching and drypoint, 17.8 x 30.2 cm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
57 Cornelis Dusart, The ffamous Shoemaker, published by Pierre François
Basan, 1695. Etching, 25.1 x 17.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . 179
xiii
58 Isaac Vincentsz van der Vinne, trademark for Jan van Wesbusch, 1686.
Woodcut, 7.6 x 5.5 cm. Haarlem Municipal Archives. (flo͜stein 36:102,
no. 140) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
59 Abraham Dircksz van Santvoort, Siege and Capture of flulst by ffrederick
flendrick, 1645, 1646. Etching and textblock, 100 x 122 cm. Rijksmu-
seum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
60 Detail of Siege and Capture of flulst showing the publisher’s credit to
Abraham van Santvoort in cooperation with Cornelis Danckerts. . . . . 182
61 Aegidius Sadeler after Bartholomeus Spranger, The Triumph of Wisdom,
c. 1600. Engraving, 49.5 x 35 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . 189
62 Aegidius Sadeler after AlbrechtDürer,flead of theTwelve-Year-OldChrist,
1598. Engraving, 35.7 x 22.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . 190
63 Three versions of Virgin Among a Multitude of Animals. (Top) Albrecht
Dürer, 1503. Pen and ink and watercolor on paper, 32.1 x 24.3 cm.
Albertina, Vienna. (Lower left) Jan Brueghel I after Albrecht Dürer,
1604. Oil on panel, 24 x 26 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphilij, Rome. (Lower
right) Aegidius Sadeler after Albrecht Dürer, after 1597. Engraving, 34.3
x 24.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
64 Hendrick Goltzius, Dune landscape near flaarlem, 1603. Pen and brown
ink, 9.1 x 15.4 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam . . . . 195
65 Hendrick Goltzius, A ffoxglove in Bloom, 1592. Pen and brown ink on
laid paper, 17.5 x 9.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image
courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
66 Caspar Luyken after Jan Luyken, De Pastiebakker, in Spiegel van het
menselyk bedryf: vertoonende honderd verscheiden ambachten, konstig afgebeeld
en met godlyke spreuken en stichtelyke verzen verryke, published by Kornelis
van der Sys, Amsterdam, 1730. Emory University, Pitts Theology
Library, Atlanta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
67 Schematic diagram for a hypothetical “Digital Hollstein” Linked Open
Data authority, and its relationship to museum databases. While muse-
ums would still maintain their own separate collections databases, they
would be able to reference their individual entries on print impressions
and other related objects to the unique records for prints and their states
maintained by the central database. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
xiv
68 (Left): Cornelis Visscher (II) after Gerrit van Honthorst, published by
Pieter Claesz Soutman. Portrait of Charles ffiffi, 1650. Engraving, 41.6 x
30.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Right): Anonymous printmaker,
published byHugoAllard. Portrait ofWi͜iam ffiffiffi, 1670–1684. Engraving,
41.2 x 30.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The reused plate was
detected via automated image matching by Baumann 2015. . . . . . . . 208
xv
Introduction
In 1567, the wood block cutter Willem van Parys was put on trial at an Antwerp court
for producing, on behalf the publisher Hans van Bauhuysen, a print that was critical
of the Spanish Inquisition. Van Parys and Van Bauhuysen were not the only parties
summoned; the print’s designer, Hans Van Schille, as well as the printer Gilles Coppens
vanDiest were also to be put on trial. Being the onlymember of the group to respond to
the summons, Van Parys defended himself by turning on his colleagues. He argued that
he did not even know the nature of the blocks he was cutting. The designs, according
to Van Parys, were always partial sections of an image; no sooner would he return one
completed wood block to Van Bauhuysen, than the publisher would send new partial
designs for him to cut. In other words, his labor was so compartmentalized from that
of the designer, printer, and publisher, that he could not be held responsible for the
ofending prints.1
This anecdote is a striking reminder that many prints in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries were produced within an interconnected and highly professionalized
system. If this was not always a system of intimate collaboration, it was, at least, one
of interdependence. Johannes Stradanus’ 1588 image of a copperplate printing shop
underlines the diverse types of specialized labor required to produce artistic prints and
1. Guido Marnef, “Repressie en censuur in het Antwerps boekbedrijf,” De zeventiende eeuw 8 (1992):
222, 228; Jan van der Stock, Printing ffimages in Antwerp: The ffintroduction of Printmaking in a City: ffi͓eenth
Century to 1585, Studies in Prints and Printmaking 2 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1998), 143–
144.
1
illustrations.2 (Figure 1) Turning out prints at any reasonable scale depended on the fluid
coordination between designers, platecutters, and publishers. By the sixteenth century,
these roles were considered distinguished enough to merit distinct credits engraved on
the plates themselves: invenit, fecit/sculpsit, and excudit. It is the long-term evolution
of these patterns of coordination between 1550 and 1750, and the motivators for that
evolution, that comprise the subject of this dissertation.
Figure 1: Jan Collaert I after Johannes Stradanus, “The Invention of Copperplate
Engraving”, in Nova reperta, published by Philips Galle, c. 1600. Engraving, 27 x 20
cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha
Whittelsey Fund, 1949.
2. For detail on the specific printmaking equipment and actions Stradanus depicts here, see
Ad Stijnman, “Stradanus’ Print Shop,” Print Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2010): 11–28.
2
Research on the long-neglected logistics of print publication and distribution in the
early modern Low Countries has blossomed over the past two decades, a flourishing
that Ger Luijten outlined in a 2011 review of trends in the study of printmaking
in the Low Countries.3 Luijten concluded this same review with a brief gesture to
the vast digitization eforts by two premier print collecting institutions: the British
Museum in London and the Rijksmuseum inAmsterdam.4 He remarked that these new
digital resources had the potential to revolutionize print research, if only researchers
could devise inventive methods for using them. Though Luijten did not explicitly
connect these two trends, this dissertation will demonstrate that the recent surge in
digitization of prints (both photographic images as well as their contextual information,
or “metadata”) enables new, macro-scale perspectives on these structures of print
production.
These advances may help address the persistent challenge that scale presents to
authors of artistic print history. Like many museums, the vast majority of the
British Museum’s artistic holdings (counted object for object) are prints. (Figure 2)
This illustrates the di culty that scholars face when attempting to make overarching
conclusions about the printmaking industry. How can one author hope to cogently
synthesize this wealth of evidence? In the face of this wealth of objects, scholarship on
artistic prints has generally followed one of two general tracks:
1. Catalogue raisonné projects such as the flo͜stein and New flo͜stein series, which
index individual printmakers’ oeuvres in relative isolation.
3. Ger Luijten, “Où en sommes-nous? L’évolution des questions d’étude sur l’estampe néerlandaise,”
trans. RaoulMendegarque, Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art, no. 2 (December 31, 2011): 793–795, https:
//perspective.revues.org/785.
4. Ibid., 796–797.
3
 26,205
 57,907
 67,034
 29,866  24,767
 11,129
401,190
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
print drawing book−illustration medal album other painting
Figure 2: Counts of artworks in the British Museum, by type.
4
2. Synthetic narratives (frequently in the form of exhibitions; more rarely as full
scholarly monographs) that use case studies to build larger claims about the
history of prints.5
The enormous number of surviving prints inhibit traditional methods of art his-
torical scholarship that would result in products of the second, synthetic type, instead
encouraging print scholars to focus on cataloguing projects. Quantitative, computer-
assisted approaches may ofer new paths forward by harnessing these indices. These
particular large-scale resources and computational methods are novel to the study of
printmaking, and have only rarely been used in the study of art history in general.6
“More”, of course, does not necessarily mean “better”. That is why I would
underline the fact that large-scale evidence can support research that is diferent
in kind, not just in degree.7 What types of research become feasible when we can
incorporate evidence concerning thousands of artists, rather than the dozen or less that
might be considered in a traditional scholarlymonograph or exhibition? Is it possible to
break out of the traditional tracks of print scholarship that choose between individual
catalogues or case-study-driven argumentation? Can we create a longue durée history
of printmaking in this period that enhances the usual search for single key artists and
significant historical events?
5. Examples of this literature are discussed in section 1.4.
6. There are some important exceptions to this claim. On early precursors to data-driven art history
or digital art history avant la lettre, see section 1.3; also see my contribution in Johanna Drucker et al.,
“Digital Art History: The American Scene,” Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art, no. 2 (December 5,
2015), http://perspective.revues.org/6021.
7. These debates have recently been foregrounded in the context of computationally-aided literary
study, such as in the conference Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary flistory held at the
University of Chicago, May 15–16, 2015 (http://scaleandvalue.tumblr.com).
5
These approaches touch on longstanding debates about the most appropriate
scale for the writing of history.8 Jan De Vries, an historian of the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Netherlands, articulated these debates within an art historical
context in a 1991 essay for the Getty volume Art in flistory/flistory in Art.9 De Vries
contrasts art historians’ preference for micro-histories and a focus on the close analysis
of individual objects, against the mid-century “New History” typified by Fernand
Braudel’s focus on the longue durée. Braudel and theAnnales school of French historians
famously advocated for a history focused on the slow-moving forces of geography
and demographics that operate below or beneath the short-term history (or histoire
événementie͜e) of single individuals and political events.10 While this historical model
might appear antithetical to a history of art, De Vries argued that such long-scale
forces as demographics, or even physical terrain, must be considered when dealing with
a subject that is so afected by the forces of economics and the market.11
8. Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The flistory Manifesto (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press, 2014) argue that recent historians have begun to focus too closely onmicro-histories and
short time spans, and ought to return to a focus on longue durée history in order to reclaim their declining
influence on policy. Though their normative observations have been challenged (e.g. Deborah Cohen
and Peter Mandler, “The flistory Manifesto: A Critique,” The American flistorical Review 120, no. 2 (April
2015): 530–542, doi:10.1093/ahr/120.2.530), more relevant to this dissertation is the argument by Guldi
and Armitage that the availability of computationally-tractable sources and methods for analyzing them
must be connected to the work of the Annales school.
9. Jan De Vries, “Art History,” in Art in flistory, flistory in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch
Culture, ed. David Freedberg and Jan De Vries (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art &
The Humanities, 1991), 249–271.
10. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et Sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales. flistoire, Sciences sociales
13, no. 4 (Fall 1958): 725–753; translated to English in Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences:
The Longue Durée,” in The Longue Durée andWorld Systems Analysis, ed. Richard E. Lee, trans. Immanuel
Wallerstein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 241–276; see Peter Burke, The ffrench
flistorical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially
chap. 3, for an overview of the Annales school, its precursors, and its successors.
11. More recent writers have also revisited how an Annales-like focus on geography may afect how
we write the history of art, including Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a fieography of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); Elisabeth de Bièvre, Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200-1700 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
6
In the case of prints, it is the gradual spread of printmaking — not just mere
knowledge of its existence, which may spread quickly, but the slow establishment
of production capability at a regional or national scale — that ought to inform our
histories of printmaking. Returning to the print by Stradanus shown at the start
of this introduction will help make this point clear. (Figure 1) The print belongs to
Stradanus’ Nova reperta, or illustrations of “new inventions” that had been unknown to
the ancients.12 While lists of modern inventions had been a subject of discussion even
for fifteenth-century humanists, Stradanus’ series is the first known visual treatment
of this topic, and is distinguished by including artistic inventions like engraving and oil
painting.13 Stradanus highlights the multiplicative aspect of engraving by including an
array of drying prints hung in the rear of the studio. He also depicts young students
learning from an older, bespectacled engraver how to handle the di cult burin.
This inclusion is significant. Just as prints could serve as vessels for spreading both
artistic and scientific knowledge through easily-traded multiples, printmaking itself
was itself a new technology that spread across Europe at the speed of an experienced
master teaching his apprentices.14 Like all technologies, printmaking was thus only
12. Further bibliography on this series can be found in Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of
Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2011), cat. 1.
13. Alex Keller, “A Renaissance Humanist Looks at ‘New’ Inventions: The Article ‘Horologium’ in
Giovanni Tortelli’s De Orthographia,” Technology and Culture 11, no. 3 (July 1970): 345–365.
14. This approach to thinking about the transmission of innovations has been termed diȩusionism. As
articulated by Everett Rogers, difusionism frames cultural change as the result of a process whereby a
new tool, be it a mechanical technology or technique, or a cultural tool such as a visual style or literary
construct, spreads into a community; Everett M. Rogers, Diȩusion of ffinnovations (New York: Free Press,
1983). When overextended, difusionism has come under critique for promulgating a Eurocentric view of
the world that situatedmajor technological innovations like agriculture solely in the European continent,
with all other regions being passive receptors; see in particular James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model
of the World: fieographical Diȩusionism and Eurocentric flistory (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). While
acknowledging the problematic applications of difusionism in prior geographic and anthropological
research, it can still provide a useful model for explaining artistic changes, and has been tacitly adopted
by many art historians; for an overview, see Kaufmann, Toward a fieography of Art, 187–189.
7
adopted gradually, often with many years between its early appearance in a given region
(e.g. Lucas van Leyden’s late-fifteenth-century engravings in the northern Netherlands)
and its fullest flourishing (e.g. mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam as le magasin de
l’univers).15 How this dissemination afected the social structure of print production,
and how this changing structure may have afected the experience of individual artists,
guides the questions that this dissertation will take up.
Chapter Plan
Chapter one addresses the divide between art historian’s colloquial understanding
of the term “network”, and that which is used in computational network analysis.
Networks as a concept would seem to be familiar to art historians, whether in the
study of artistic dynasties, the transmission of styles from one community to another,
or in the history of patronage, collecting, and the art market. However, computational
approaches to networks require strict and precise definitions of the borders of a
network, the identities of its participants (called nodes), and the connections (called
edges) that tie them together. This chapter will outline these diferences, providing
an historiography of computational network analysis in the humanistic disciplines,
including art history, and explaining how a network approach is particularly fitting for
the study of prints from this period.
In chapter two, I focus on the question of printmaking professionalization and its
efect on the relative centralization of print production in the Low Countries in this
period. David Landau and Peter Parshall in The Renaissance Print, and Timothy Riggs
and Larry Silver infiraven ffimages, have both posited that the skills demanded by intaglio
printmaking, and the benefits of production at scale, incentivized the dominance of a
15. On this term, see the eponymous edited volume: Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, ed., Le magasin
de l’univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
8
handful of large sixteenth-century print publishers like Hieronymus Cock who could
virtually monopolize all aspects of artistic print production in a region. However,
neither of these studies examine if the continuing rise in popularity of printmaking
in the seventeenth century would continue to be sustained by a few major houses.
Would the technical and logistical demands of engraving in particular prevent smaller
houses from gaining a foothold in a mature market? Or would a growing availability
of engraving talent in a burgeoning economy allow a more decentralized network of
printmakers and publishers? And how did individual artists react to these changing
dynamics?
Dutch and Flemish printmaking did not occur in isolation from the rest of Europe.
Chapter three takes up the analysis of print production that occurred between artists
across regional and international boundaries. By dint of their light weight and small
size, print designs, print plates, and print impressions could be easily shipped across
Europe. At what points between 1550 and 1750 did Dutch and Flemish artists,
printmakers, and publishers tend to work with collaborators within their own borders,
versus internationally? Were these changes due to specific historical events, or were
they the result of long-term changes in population and printmaking capacity? And
how varied were individuals’ strategies when it came to domestic and international
collaboration? When did individual artists, printmakers, or publishers distinguish
themselves by working predominantly with international or local collaborators?
Finally, chapter four will attend to the issue of genre specialization and diversity in
printmaking. Growing numbers of Dutch and Flemish painters began to specialize in
certain genres (e.g. still life, landscape, portraiture) around the turn of the seventeenth
century. Painters did so, in part, due to an economic incentive to stand out in an
increasingly crowded market. But did the same pattern hold true for printmakers, or
for print publishers? Current case studies ofer conflicting evidence. In this chapter, I
9
will apply a common measure of information diversity (applied to questions as diverse
as measuring ecological diversity, industrial specialization, and racial segregation) to
chart the change in artist oeuvre diversity over time. I will first demonstrate the
efectiveness of the metric for capturing painters’ increasing specialization, before
using the method to gauge the same trend among printmakers. The results are
significant for understanding certain economic incentives that distinguished the output
of professional versus amateur printmakers. But the story goes beyond simple market
forces. I will also suggest how period understandings of the function of prints, and
the ideal model of what a printmaker should be able to do, ultimately shaped how
printmakers defined themselves within in a competitive field.
Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that macro-scale analysis of these artistic
production networks is necessary to understand printmaking in this period. But such
analysis is not, on its own, suicient. To paraphrase Braudel, networks explain much,
but they do not explain all. Individual artists also had a say in the matter. For this
reason, each analytical chapter will include selected case studies alongside each macro-
scale analysis. These studies are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to serve
as tangible examples that connect macro-scale quantitative analyses to the experiences
of individual artists. By doing so, I hope to illustrate how artists may have reacted to
these larger trends, and to highlight exceptional individuals who did not adhere to the
crowd.
While some of these case studies will spotlight well-known names in printmaking
history, such as Aegidius Sadeler or Hendrick Goltzius, they will also feature lesser-
known artists like Cornelis Bloemaert and Jonas Suyderhoef who have been overlooked
by conventional histories and exhibitions that focus on creative aesthetic achievement.
We will find that these unsung artists actually had central or exceptional roles in
the world of print production, at least when viewed through the lens of these novel
10
quantitative analyses. As a consequence of this selectivity, some common landmarks
of Dutch printmaking such as Hercules Segers or Rembrandt van Rijn will not feature
prominently in the following chapters. This is not because they do not fit into this
method of analysis, but because, at least from this particular perspective, they are
often less prominent than unacclaimed figures like Suyderhoef andBloemaert. Far from
rejecting or replacing a “conventional” focus on aesthetics and artistry, I seek to raise
up a concurrent history of long-term trends and long-running incentives that shaped
the medium and the market though which printmakers channeled their creativity. This
history may, at times, feature diferent players than we may be used to.
“Modeling” History
Before addressing any of these questions, however, it is crucial to underline exactly
what the subjects of this study will be, and what they will not; why this dissertation
claims to “model” print production networks, rather than, say, chart a “history” of
them. To paraphrase Christopher Warren’s description of the Six Degrees of ffrancis
Bacon project, what this study claims to ofer is not a portrait of the singular print
production network as it existed historically, but rather an understanding of what kinds
of networks and practices could have produced the artworks that we know today.16 This
is, of course, no diferent than the products of any art historical study, computationally-
aided or not. We always use surviving artworks and archival evidence as proxies
for historical events, and while we may express some claims with greater certainty
than others, our histories are inevitably representations of the past. However, it is
particularly important to keep this epistemic distance in mind when confronted with
tables, charts, and other quantitative results.
16. Christopher Warren et al., “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon,” September 13, 2015, http : / /
sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/.
11
The material evidence that will be used to infer these production networks is
afected by historical filters. This necessarily limits the scope of the claims I will be
able to make. This dissertation will focus on the production of what seventeenth-
century Dutch publishers termed constprenten: fine art prints, generally issued as single
sheets or in series.17 This is, in large part, due to the focus of the two museum
databases from the Rijksmuseum and the British Museum that I will be using for these
analyses.18 Both these museums’ print collections were built based on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century acquisition practices that tended to prefer single sheets or series to
the collection of books that happened to contain intaglio illustrations.19 Unless cut
from their original volumes and collected separately, illustrations bound within books
were (and are) far more likely to have been left to libraries to collect.
From the viewpoint of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century production, this is
an arbitrary distinction, as the same engravers frequently produced both standalone
constprenten as well as book illustrations. Many engraved book illustrations are also
present in these collections, so book illustrations can hardly be said to be missing from
this account.20 However, book illustrations are likely undercounted compared to art
17. On the usage of the term constprenten in print publisher inventories, see section 4.1.
18. See section 2.2 for more detail on these two databases.
19. For a history of the British Museum’s print collections in particular, see David M. Wilson, The
British Museum: Aflistory (London: British Museum Press, 2002), 62–63, 109–111.
20. Often engravers of book illustrations, such as theWierixes and Sadelers, also created independent
fine art prints. Likewise, engravers like Hendrick Goltzius who are primarily known for their standalone
sheets also periodically pursued book illustration projects. In 1586 the Antwerp book publisher
Christoph Plantin approached Goltzius with a commission for more than one hundred and fifty
engravings for an edition of the Natalis Bible to be published in Rome by the Jesuit order, although the
commission eventually went to others; see Huigen Leeflang,flendrick fioltzius 1558-1617: Drawings, Prints,
and Paintings (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2003), 38. Goltzius would later produce fifty-two illustrations
to accompany Ovid’sMetamorphoses, though he had planned a full suite of at least three hundred plates;
see Eric Jan Sluijter, “‘Herscheppingen’ in prenten van Hendrick Goltzius en zijn kring (I),” Delineavit
et Sculpsit, no. 4 (December 1990): 1–23; Eric Jan Sluijter, “‘Herscheppingen’ in prenten van Hendrick
Goltzius en zijn kring (II),” Delineavit et Sculpsit, no. 5 (May 1991): 1–19.
12
prints, so the efects of book illustration on the networks discussed here will be muted.
This dissertation will also, unfortunately, have little to say about the lowest end of
the printmaking market. This is, again, due to historical collecting and preservation
practices. Early evidence of print collecting in the sixteenth century suggests how
artistic prints were more carefully preserved than workmanlike printed images such as
playing cards, calendars, or cheap devotional images that were damaged or destroyed
through use. What copies survived were then largely ignored by early print collectors.21
These present limitations may be addressed by future work in building and uniting
databases from other museums, libraries, and archives.22
I will also be examining just one group of professional relationships among themany
that may have informed and constrained individual artists. A useful metaphor may be
the X-ray image of a painting.23 Like an X-ray image, network analysis flattens and
simplifies our subject. Alone, it ofers only a single, restricted channel of information.
But when interpreted properly in the context of other sources of information, X-ray
images can provide previously-inaccessible insights into an artist’s process. The set
of connections inferred from these prints exists in parallel with a wealth of other
contemporary networks — familial, financial, political, religious — that lie outside
the scope of this dissertation. Although these diferent domains could interact in
complex ways, it can nevertheless be useful to isolate one restricted facet of this
The logistical demands of book illustration were similar in kind, though often magnified in degree; for
example, see the discussion of Plantin’s struggles in section 2.1. The Luyken family of book illustrators
will also be discussed in section 4.4.2.
21. Van der Stock, Printing ffimages in Antwerp, 179–180.
22. See the conclusion (page 200) for discussion of future directions for this research.
23. After arriving at this metaphor with the aid of ArthurWheelock, I discovered that FrancoMoretti
also independently invoked it in Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” Pamphlets of the
Stanford Literary Lab, no. 2 (May 1, 2011): 4. http://litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=255.
13
general social network at a time for close examination, as each facet may have
its own history of structural change.24 For example, even if the print production
network in the Netherlands was highly decentralized in 1650, it is entirely possible that
correspondence networks, or religious ailiations, were becoming more centralized at
this time. To unite all these domains into the same network model could potentially
return meaningless results, with the mutations of one layer of relationships masking
those of another layer. While it is limiting to concentrate on just one class of
interactions, this self-limitation also provides focus. Understanding this restricted
group of professional connections will provide a basis of comparison for future network
models of other domains like artistic studios, or family networks.
It is because of this self-conscious simplification and abstraction that I speak of
“modeling” print production networks. The term model is frequently used in the
sciences to refer to a simplified description of an observable phenomenon. We have
direct interactions with models every day, perhaps most obviously in the form of
the weather forecast: meteorologists have developed complex mathematical formulae
based on past observations; with new observations, the formulae return predictions for
future events. Such formulae are aptly called models because they encode assertions
about how the world works (e.g., that a drop in pressure of n units increases the chance
of precipitation by X percent.)
Because these models often take a mathematical form, and are most visibly applied
to making predictions, one may wonder why they could be relevant to historical
work. HoweverWillardMcCarty argues that humanistic scholars dealing in qualitative
interpretations engage in model building, too, writing that, “traditional [humanistic]
24. Christina Prell, Social Network Analysis: flistory, Theory and Methodology (Los Angeles: Sage,
October 26, 2011), 66–67. Understanding how coexisting networks interact with each other is an
active question in network theory; for a very recent overview problems in multilayer networks, see
Ginestra Bianconi, “Interdisciplinary and Physics Challenges of Network Theory,” September 1, 2015,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.00345.
14
scholarship typically approaches the transcendence of artifacts by classification and
categorization, then by studying how the individual work inflects or even violates the
categories to which it has been assigned.”25 Joshua Epstein has likewise pointed out
that modeling is a common tool used by anyone who ventures a guiding structure or
phenomenon to explain observed facts — something that humanities scholars do all
the time, albeit usually implicitly, rather than explicitly.26
Data-driven, computational analysis and modeling can improve our histories in two
ways. Firstly, it can introduce new perspectives through a larger scale of evidence.
These widened perspectives are crucial to better describing the existing evidence of what
happened in the past. After all, it is di cult to profer explanations for a phenomenon
whose efects we have not adequately comprehended.
Secondly, computing allows us to more quickly evaluate our historical explanations
for why such evidence exists today. Reconstructing such a story from fragmentary
evidence is tempting for art historians. We are trained, perhaps all too well, to derive
explanatory theories from the slightest of material clues. An yet, a theory explaining
why the past unfolded in the way that it did is, by itself, merely a “just-so” story.27
Comparing the attributes of the networks constructed from evidence in the British
Museum and Rijksmuseum to those patterns found in other networks of the same
size and shape can help us begin to sort out the diferences between the efects of
25. WillardMcCarty, “Being Reborn: TheHumanities, Computing and Styles of Scientific Reasoning,”
inNewTechnologies andRenaissance Studies, ed.WilliamRoyBowen andRaymondGeorge Siemens (Tempe:
Iter in collaboration with ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies), 2007).
26. Joshua M. Epstein, “WhyModel?,” Journal of ArtiȪcial Societies and Social Simulation 11, no. 4 (2008):
1.2, http : / / jasss . soc . surrey .ac .uk/11 /4 / 12 .html; also see Patrick Grim, “Computational Modeling as
a Philosophical Methodology,” in The Blackwe͜ fiuide to the Philosophy of Computing and ffinformation, ed.
Luciano Floridi (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 337–349.
27. This is all the more true when interpreting historical networks; see Shawn Graham and Scott B.
Weingart, “The Equifinality of Archaeological Networks: An Agent-Based Exploratory Lab Approach,”
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, December 28, 2014, 1–27, doi:10.1007/s10816-014-9230-y.
15
exceptional historical events and individuals on print production (that is, the efects of
an histoire événementie͜e) versus the efects of longue durée trends in the slow spread of
printmaking capacity throughout Europe.
16
1 Networks in Art History and Beyond: AMethodological
Background
Scholars of literature and history have begun to adopt computational approaches to
analyzing networks over the last decade.1 In part, this surge has been enabled by a
proliferation of network analysis software suites with relatively easy-to-use graphical
interfaces. Another driver is, admittedly, the prime position of both “networks” and
“data” in the zeitgeist. Popular attention is now devoted not only to the use of internet-
enabled social media, but also to the way in which analysts empowered with large-
scale computing resources controlled by the likes of Facebook and Google, can claim
the ability to discern large-scale social structures from the traces of all these digital
interactions. In light of the rapidly growing list of libraries, archives, andmuseums that
have made available digitized troves of documents and other historical information, it
seems only natural to apply the same computational tools to sift these cultural data in
the search for historical insights.
The rhetoric of networks holds a particular attraction for art historians. After all,
we like to think thatwe are accustomed to studying themultilayeredweb of interactions
between artists and patrons, collectors and dealers, exhibitions and institutions, and
periods and styles. Network analysis would appear to ofer a novel way to take
advantage of accumulated troves of primary and secondary art historical sources and
1. These approaches are an outgrowth of renewed interest in the application of computational
approaches to humanistic inquiry in the last decade; for example, see Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens,
and John Unsworth, eds., Companion to Digital flumanities, Blackwell Companions to Literature and
Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004), http : / / www . digitalhumanities . org /
companion/; Willard McCarty, flumanities Computing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
17
mine them for hidden structures that can advance our understanding of these histories.
However, to do so demands that we adapt analytical frameworks developed in one
group of disciplines and reapply them to our own.2 In doing so, we must grapple
with guidelines for expressing assumptions, formulating hypotheses, and gathering and
testing evidence, that are expressed in a language of network theory and sociology
that can seem alien, if not inimical, to our own. There are wide gaps to be bridged
between the informal or colloquial understandings of networks as they have used in
earlier art historical literature, and the requirements and outputs of computational
network analysis.
Has network analysis proved useful in literary or historical studies? How do these
quantitative methods fit into the larger historiography of art history, specifically? And
how can art historians productively adopt a more formalized approach to thinking
about networks? These are the core questions I will address in this chapter, in order
to build a methodological foundation for the analytical chapters that follow. I will
first briefly chart how this study draws from network analyses in related humanistic
disciplines. I will then explore how these computational approaches diverge from
earlier uses of “network” rhetoric in the art historical literature. My aim is to highlight
the issues that arise as we attempt to map the results of formalized analysis to the
types of art historical knowledge we are accustomed to producing, outlining both the
afordances as well as the restrictions of this approach.
2. These issues are explored further in Willard McCarty, “Becoming Interdisciplinary,” in Proceedings
ofDigitalflumanities 2013 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, July 17, 2013), http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/
ab-107.html.
18
1.1 Network Analysis in the Humanities
Network analysis is a systematic approach to studying the structures, or networks,
that emerge from the interactions of individuals.3 This approach is grounded in the
proposition that analyzing the patterns of relations between actors, whether they
are people, business firms, biological proteins, or computer circuits, can be just as
important as analyzing the individual attributes of those actors.4 By formalizing data
about these relations in a mathematical, and thus computable, model, we can begin to
describe and measure patterns of interaction in ways that are di cult or impossible to
do manually. Originating in theoretical mathematics and computer science, network
analysis was soon adapted by social scientists as a way to bring statistical rigor to
models of social interaction.5 Today, network science comprises a theoretical discipline
in its own right that enjoys widespread application in sociology, political science,
business management, engineering, computer and information science, neurology, and
epidemiology.
When applied to historical subjects, network analysis can recast thewaywe describe
the behaviors of individuals and groups, and alter the narratives we use to explain
historical events.6 Over the past few decades, historians have begun to evaluate earlier,
3. In network analysis, the terms “network” and “graph” are often used interchangeably when referring
to an instance of a formalized network. The term graph is often used in particular to refer to a
visualization of a network. For the sake of consistency, this text will use the term network, however
note that some citations use the term graph instead.
4. Robert A.Hanneman andMark Riddle, ffintroduction to SocialNetworkMethods (Riverside: Univeristy
of California, Riverside, 2005), 15, http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/.
5. For a concise historiography of social network analysis, see Prell, Social Network Analysis, ch. 2.
6. Hanneman and Riddle, ffintroduction to Social NetworkMethods, 45–50.
19
loosely-defined conceptions of networks against mathematical network models con-
structed from historic records.7 A landmark example is John Padgett and Christopher
Ansell’s analysis of the Cosimo de’ Medici’s social and economic network-formation
strategy in Renaissance Florence.8 The authors amassed a database of various types
of ties formed and maintained by the Medici family, including marriages, friendships,
political patronage, and creditor/debtor ties. Computationally-aided analysis of this
dataset revealed a previously unrecognized pattern: instead of making all possible types
of links to the competing family groups of Florence, the Medici carefully segregated
their connections. Families linked to the Medici by marriage, for example, were
not ofered economic ties such as personal loans.9 This strategy produced a group of
marriage-related families that was distinct from a group of business-related families. As
a result, any family in one relationship group, or “block”, attempting to establish ties
with a family in another block would find the Medici family to be a necessary broker
of introductions. The Medici were thus able to establish themselves as gatekeepers
mediating the interactions between Florentine families in these separate economic,
political, or marriage clusters. By segregating their social links strategically, the Medici
were able to stake out a central, and thus influential, position in the Florentine society.
Padgett and Ansell conclude that Cosimo’s careful connection strategy allowed his
family to splinter the Florentine oligarchs, who could otherwise have united against
7. For an historiography of historical social network analysis, see CharlesWetherell, “Historical Social
Network Analysis,” ffinternational Review of Social flistory 43, Supplement S6 (December 1998): 125–144,
doi:10 . 1017 / S0020859000115123; Claire Lemercier, “Formal Network Methods in History: Why and
How?,” in Social Networks, Political ffinstitutions, and Rural Societies, ed. Georg Fertig (Turnhout: Brepols,
2011), https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00521527.
8. John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of theMedici, 1400-1434,”
American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May 1993):
9. Ibid., 1285.
20
the upstartMedici.10 Their paper ofers an ideal example of the possibilities of network
analysis:
1. Formulating a hypothesis that can be evaluated with network metrics (that the
Medici established relationships strategically to contain the political power of
competing family groups)
2. Discrete selection of sources with systematically-described attributes (here:
Florentine banking and marriage records)
3. Constructing a computable network from these sources, and then comparing
the results of various network analysis techniques in order to evaluate the initial
hypothesis.
The archival documents that Padgett and Ansell used to construct their historical
network representation are a common source of evidence for building explicitly-
derived networks, where links are built based on the direct evidence provided by a
document. Correspondence networks are another type of explicit network, where
links are made between individuals based on surviving letters between them.11 Physical
evidence is also a potential source for constructing historical networks. Archaeologists
are increasingly using network analysis to infer community structures and patterns
of evolution from the surviving material record.12 In his 2011 book An Archaeology of
ffinteraction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society, Carl Knappett argued
that network analysis could produce new archaeological knowledge at multiple scales:
10. Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action,” 1309.
11. See, for example: Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign
of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach,” English Literary flistory 82, no. 1 (2015): 1–33, doi:10.1353/elh.2015.
0000.
12. One forerunner to this recent wave of complexity and network theory in an archaeological context
can be found in R. Alexander Bentley and Herbert D. G. Maschner, eds., Complex systems and archaeology,
Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003).
21
the micro-scale (reconstructing the links of pottery production within a single complex
in Bronze Age Crete), the meso-scale (relationships between pottery production
sites across the island), and the macro-scale (the growth of regional trade across the
Aegean).13 At the macro-scale in particular, Knappett rejects the assumption that
geography was the sole determinant of trade patterns and centers in the Bronze Age
Aegean. He instead suggests that phenomena found in many types of networks, such as
path-dependency (the tendency for certain routes between nodes to become inscribed
over time, even in the face of newer, more eicient paths) and “small-world” patterns
of connection (the ability of just a handful of ties between distant nodes to sharply
increase the overall connectivity of the network) may have guided trade history in this
region even more than spatial relationships.14 More recent archaeological scholarship
has begun to build on Knappett’s conceptual structure with computationally-aided
network analysis based on empirical data.15
Network analysis has also been taken up in literary studies, particularly research in
to the history of literary production and dissemination. Research has included looking
at how authors were associated with each other by publishing houses, discerning the
communities that emerge from the reviewing practices of literary journals, and the
13. Carl Knappett, An Archaeology of ffinteraction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
14. Knappett, An Archaeology of ffinteraction, 134–135; on small-world networks, see Duncan J. Watts,
Sma͜ Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
15. Other prominent examples include Fiona Coward, “Grounding the Net: Social Networks, Material
Culture and Geography in the Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic of the Near East ( 21,00-6,00 cal
BCE),” in Network Analysis in Archaeology: New Approaches to Regional ffinteraction, ed. Carl Knappett
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 25, 2013), 247–280; Emma Blake, Social Networks and Regional
ffidentity in Bronze Age ffitaly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). A full accounting of the use
of network analysis in archaeology is well outside the scope of this dissertation; for a recent overview of
such work, see AnnaCollar et al., “Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation,”
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22, no. 1 (March 2015): 1–32, doi:10.1007/s10816-014-9235-6.
22
networks of text republication and copying in antebellum U.S. newspapers.16 Literary
network studies need not be rooted strictly in the facts of historical production;
network analysis has also been applied to questions of literary narrative, character
development, and descriptive imagery.
One compelling example is the work of Stiller et al., who proposed to test the
Aristotelian understanding that efective drama mirrors real human behavior.17 Do
the social networks in Shakespeare’s plays, they asked, have similar properties to
those found in a wide range of social network observed in the real world? The
authors constructed social networks for every play, connecting characters when they
appeared in the same scene. They observed that most of Shakespeare’s plays exhibit
so-called “small-world” characteristics found in many social networks in reality: they
contained multiple tight clusters, but also a few inter-cluster links that reduced the
overall distance between any two characters in the network. They proposed that, by
following the general boundaries of real-world social interactions, Shakespeare made
his complex plots intelligible to his audiences. Outliers to these patterns appear to
prove the rule: Richard ffiffiffi has a large number of minor characters that constitute a
more fragmented social network than those usually observed in the real world. In
16. On publishing networks, see Hoyt Long, “Fog and Steel: Mapping Communities of Literary
Translation in an Information Age,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 281–316, https://muse.
jhu . edu / journals / journal _ of _ japanese _ studies / v041 / 41 . 2 . long . html; Gisèle Sapiro, “Translation
and Symbolic Capital in the Era of Globalization: French Literature in the United States,” Cultural
Sociology 9, no. 3 (September 1, 2015): 320–346, doi:10.1177/1749975515584080; AndrewGoldstone, “Doing
Without Texts: Sapiro on Translation,” Andrew Goldstone, August 23, 2015, http: / /andrewgoldstone.
com / blog / 2015 / 08 / 23 / sapiro/; on reviewers see Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long, “Network
Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism,” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (June 20, 2013): 147–182, doi:10 .
1215 /01903659- 2151839; on newspapers, see Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network
Author in Antebellum Newspapers,” American Literary flistory, June 11, 2015, doi:10 . 1093 / alh / ajv028;
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Abby Mullen, “Computational Methods for Uncovering Reprinted
Texts in AntebellumNewspapers,”AmericanLiteraryflistory, June 12, 2015, ajv029, doi:10.1093/alh/ajv029.
17. James Stiller, Daniel Nettle, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, “The Small World of Shakespeare’s Plays,”
fluman Nature 14, no. 4 (December 2003): doi:10.1007/s12110-003-1013-1.
23
many stagings, however, Richard ffiffiffi’s minor characters are frequently collapsed into
single roles, efectively reducing the network size and bringing it back in to line with
those social networks observed in real life.18
Each of these studies deploys network analysis to investigate larger scale questions
(e.g,. what was the nature of Cosimo de’ Medici’s social strategy?) by identifying a
smaller, testable question (e.g., did theMedici fill a structural hole in the social network
of elite Florentine families?) that can serve as an illuminating proxy. This is the
process of operationalizing, or translating concepts into a series of discrete operations
that returnmeasurements.19 This creative use of structured thinking allows a colloquial
understanding of a network to turn into into a formal one.
1.2 Art Historical Networks
The colloquial concept of the network is not foreign to art history. Indeed, implicit
discussions of networks span a wide spectrum of specialities and methodologies
within the discipline. The flow of both technical know-how and academic theory
from individual to individual is a central subject of discussions about artistic studios,
academies, and kinship networks of artist families. Likewise, the connections between
individual artists, patrons, and viewers, and the network concepts of prestige, influence,
and of reciprocal versus one-way relationships are central to how art historians discuss
18. Other selected examples from literary network analysis include: character networks in comic
books: R. Alberich, J. Miro-Julia, and F. Rossello, “Marvel Universe Looks Almost Like a Real Social
Network,” February 11, 2002, http : / / arxiv . org / abs / cond - mat / 0202174; concept associations:
Peter S. Bearman and Katherine Stovel, “Becoming a Nazi: A Model for Narrative Networks,” Poetics 27,
no. 2–3 (March 2000): 69–90, doi:10.1016/S0304-422X(99)00022-4; plot networks: Moretti, “Network
Theory, Plot Analysis”; and descriptive imagery: Scott B.Weingart and Jeana Jorgensen, “Computational
Analysis of the Body in European Fairy Tales,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 28, no. 3 (January 9, 2013):
404–416, doi:10.1093/llc/fqs015.
19. On operationalization in the humanities, see FrancoMoretti, “‘Operationalizing’: Or, the Function
ofMeasurement inModernLiteraryTheory,”Pamphlets of the StanfordLiteraryLab, no. 6 (December 2013):
1–15, http://litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=255.
24
patronage and gift-giving.20 Trade in material goods in the art market, the strategies of
artists, buyers, and dealers, and the history of collecting also touch on network concepts
of brokerage and community formation. The concept of network has also been
mustered in studies of art historiography to structure narratives about the evolution
and spread of disciplinary methodologies, and of central versus peripheral scholars and
movements.21
Perhaps no art historical project is more enmeshed in network concepts than the
charting of stylistic influence from artist to artist, period to period, and culture to
culture.22 Rare, though, is the art historian who has described these networks in an
explicit and formalized way. The exception that may (infamously) prove the rule is
20. Network rhetoric is particularly frequent in scholarship on patronage in the Italian Renaissance:
F. W. Kent, “Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence,” in Language
and ffimages of Renaissance ffitaly, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Evelyn S. Welch, “Women
as Patrons and Clients in the Courts of Quattrocento Italy,” in Women in ffitalian Renaissance Culture
and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000); on networks
in gift-giving, see Michael Zell, “The Gift Among Friends: Rembrandt’s Art in the Network of His
Patronal and Social Relations,” in Rethinking Rembrandt, ed. Alan Chong and Michael Zell (Boston:
Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum, 2002); Michael Zell, “Rembrandt’s Gifts: A Case Study of Actor-
Network-Theory,” Journal of flistorians of Netherlandish Art 3, no. 2 (2011); Carrie Anderson, “Material
Mediators: JohanMaurits, Textiles, and the Art of Diplomatic Exchange,” Journal of EarlyModernflistory
20, no. 1 (January 26, 2016): 63–85, doi:10.1163/15700658-12342489.
21. See in particular Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art flistory and ffits ffinstitutions: The Nineteenth Century
(Routledge, 2002), part II; network rhetoric has been especially relevant to discussions of feminist
art and art history: Mary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in The
Power of ffeminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, flistory and ffimpact, ed. Norma Broude and
Mary D. Garrard (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994); Michelle Moravec, “Toward a History of Feminism,
Art, and Social Movements in the United States,” ffrontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33, no. 2 (2012):
22–54, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frontiers/v033/33.2.moravec.html.
22. Even Heinrich Wöl in referred to networks of artistic influence in reference to Albrecht Dürer,
albeit in order to argue that Dürer transcended such influences:
Even if the whole network were visible and we could see what influences he came under
we still would not find an answer because genius cannot be explained by an addition of
influences.
HeinrichWöl in,TheArt ofAlbrechtDürer (1905), trans. Alastair Grieve andHeideGrieve (NewYork:
Phaidon, 1971), 41–42.
25
AlfredBarr’sDiagramofStylisticEvolution͒om1830until 1935, a network-like genealogical
visualization generated for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and
Abstract Art.23 (Figure 3) Likely the first image that comes to mind at hearing the term
“art historical network”, Barr’s diagram has proven to be both a trenchant image as well
as an enduring magnet for criticism.24
For all its compelling visual clarity, though, Barr’s Diagram is hardly a network
suitable for mathematical analysis.25 It is unpredictably multimodal, its many “isms”
commingling with named artists (“Cézanne”), media categories (“Japanese Prints”), and
formal schools (“Bauhaus”). This is not to say that the Barr chart or other informal
diagrammatic networks are useless in art historical argument. Indeed, they can be all
too efective at presenting an author’s argument in terms easy to comprehend — and
di cult to refute. It is a network constructed with its final visualization firmly in mind,
useful for illustration and persuasion, but not for exploratory analysis or hypothesis
testing.
The use of formalized, computable networks for the study of art history has been
suggested at least twice in literature predating the current “digital” turn in humanistic
23. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art [1936], Reprint (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1966).
24. MoMA revisited the diagram in digital form (http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/
inventingabstraction) as an online companion for Leah Dickerman and Matthew Afron, ffinventing
Abstraction, 1910-1925: flow a Radical ffidea ChangedModern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012).
On period critique of the Diagram, Barr’s contemporary Meyer Schapiro expressed his disappointment
that Barr approached the genealogy of Cubism and abstraction solely as a question of style, with no
interest in the efects of historical events or social change; Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art
(1937),” inModern Art: 19th & 20th Century: Selected Papers, vol. 2 (1978: George Braziller, 1978), 189. More
recently, Astrit Burkhardt has interrogated how the schematic clarity of the diagram acts as a screen
concealing Barr’s politics: Astrit Schmidt Burkhardt, “Shaping Modernism: Alfred Barr’s Genealogy of
Art,”Word & ffimage 16, no. 4 (October 2000): 387–400, doi:10.1080/02666286.2000.10435694.
25. For one experimental attempt to use formal analysis on the Barr chart, see Yanan Sun, “From
Diagram to Network: A Multi-mode Network Approach to Analyze Diagrams of Art History,” in
Social ffinformatics, ed. Akiyo Nadamoto et al., Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8359 (Springer Berlin
Heidelberg, 2014), 100–109.
26
Figure 3: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Diagram of Stylistic Evolution ͒om 1830 until 1935, in Cubism
and Abstract Art [1936], reprint (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).
27
study. GeorgeKubler invoked both network rhetoric as well as amathematical network
model in his discussion of formal sequences in his 1962 book The Shape of Time. Kubler,
concerned with describing a model for classifying art objects and organizing them in a
narrative history, suggested thinking of objects (or, more precisely, their abstracted
“form classes” like the late French gothic cathedral façade or the Greek rhyton) as
nodes in a sequential, evolutionary networks. Any given form in this network may
have multiple predecessors that informed its generation, and may itself be tied to
any number of descendants. Alongside this discussion, Kubler included an illustrated
commentary by his Yale colleague Oystein Ore, who suggested that such a sequence
might be conceived of in mathematical terms as a formalized directed network.26
Kubler and Ore ofered only a sketchy theoretical suggestion for how networks
could be used to structure histories of art. It was not until 1981 that Julius Chrościcki
and Vladimir Odinec unearthed Ore’s suggestion and attempted to implement it.27
Chrościcki and Odinec proposed a system for systematically measuring the manifold
paths of influence that connect diferent artistic objects. They took as their example
the designs for the entry of cardinal-infante Ferdinand into Antwerp of April 17,
1635. The triumphal arches and other temporary festival decorations, including a 31-
meter-wide Porticus Caesarea-Austriacae, were designed by the workshop of Peter Paul
Rubens. (Figure 4) The initial designs produced by the Rubens workshop went on to
be modified, worked out, and realized by draftsmen, carpenters, sculptors and painters
— their derivative works all sitting “downstream” of the Rubens workshop patterns.
Upstream of Rubens, on the other hand, were the sources that the artist consulted
26. It is little coincidence that Ore was also a major progenitor of graph theory, the mathematical basis
for network analysis as it used today; George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the flistory of Things
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 33–34, note 3.
27. Juliusz A. Chrościcki and Vladimir P. Odinec, “On Directed Graph Models on Influences in Art
Theory,” Artibus et flistoriae 2, no. 3 (January 1981): 113–130, doi:10.2307/1483105.
28
in the course of producing these designs, like the descriptive history Xffiffi Caesarum
Austriacorum vitae et elogiae by Jan Gaspar Gevartius, and Octavius de Strada’s 1615 De
vitis imperatorum et CaesarumRomanorum. Chrościcki and Odinec systematically ranked
the similarities between each artwork and their literary/visual sources, generating
similarity scores based on a clearly-stated (if somewhat arbitrary) formula accounting
for shared medium, shared geographical region, shared visual style, shared iconography,
and so forth. Though Chrościcki and Odinec exhaustively detailed their method, they
ofered little in the way of interpretation, presenting only a synthetic overview of the
wide array of sources tangent tomany artistic projects. Andwhile based on a systematic
method, their visualizations, were, to put it mildly, convoluted. (Figure 5) They would
draw few imitators.28
Only in the past few years have art historians have once again taken up network
analysis methods in order to resolve clearly-stated questions. They are now backed
by more user-friendly computational tools, and much larger datasets. A pioneer-
ing example is Anne Helmreich’s research on the art market networks of the late
nineteenth-century firms Goupil & Cie/Boussod and Valadon & Cie, whose records
have been preserved and digitized in the Getty Provenance Index. It had commonly
been understood that the London art market grew rapidly in size during this period,
but the nature of its importance to the global art market, Helmreich argues, is not
fully evident without considering the art trade as a dynamic network of artists, dealers,
and buyers. Using network visualization techniques to parse the Getty databases,
Helmreich discovered that, by the 1870s, the London branches of each of these firms
were acting as intermediaries between a surprisingly international range of artists and
buyers. The London market had not only grown in size, but had become highly central
28. A variation on Chrościcki’s and Odinec’s work can be found in Günther Korbel, “Eine Typologie
von Portweinflaschen mit Hilfe eines Dreieckdiagramms: der methodologische Aspekt,” Zeitschri͓ für
Archäologie des Mittelalters, no. 11 (1983): 109–114.
29
Figure 4: Theodoor van Thulden, after Peter Paul Rubens, Porticus Caesaro Austriaca
in Pompa introitus honori fferdinandi… by Jean Gaspard Gevaerts, published by Joannes
Meursius, Antwerp, 1641. London, British Library.
30
Figure 5: Stanisław Karłowski, “A graph of influences on Peter Paul Rubens”, in Juliusz
A. Chrościcki and Vladimir P. Odinec, “On Directed Graph Models on Influences in
Art Theory,” Artibus et flistoriae 2, no. 3 (January, 1981), fig. 19.
31
to an international network connecting Britain, continental Europe, and the United
States, uniting these regional markets in a way that no city had done before.29 In
addition to providing much of the foundational data for Helmreich’s study, the Getty
Research Institute’s Provenance Index, headed by Christian Huemer, continues to
explore the dynamics of other art market networks derived from auction and gallery
records maintained by the Getty.30
Textual records have also been productive sources for scholars interested in how
communities of artists have been formed and defined by co-exhibition. One compelling
example isMartin Papenbrock’s and Joachim Scharloth’s work examining the shift from
regionalized to more centralized exhibition patterns in Germany as the Nazis began to
enforce their cultural policies after 1937.31 Maxmilian Schich has demonstrated how
inferencing networks from secondary sources, that is, mining our own troves of past
scholarship, can also produce new insights. At the meso-scale, Schich has analyzed the
1947 Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance as a way of
determining which antique sites and monuments tended to be mentioned together.32
29. See Anne Helmreich, “The Global: Goupil & Cie/Boussod, Valadon & Cie and International
Networks”, in Pamela M. Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century
London’s Art Market,” in collab. with David Israel and Seth Erickson, Nineteenth-Century ArtWorldwide
11, no. 3 (Autumn 2012), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn12/fletcher-helmreich-
mapping-the-london-art-market.
30. ChristianHuemer, “Provenance on Steroids: Or, the Promise of Big Data” (‘New Projects in Digital
Art History’ symposium, Washington, D.C., November 21, 2014); art market networks have also been
suggested to be useful by Sophie Raux, “Visualizing Spaces, Flows, Agents, and Networks of the Art
Markets in the 18th Century: Some Methodological Challenges,” Artl@s Bu͜etin 2, no. 2 (December 12,
2013), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol2/iss2/4; Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris. The
Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches,”
Artl@s Bu͜etin 4, no. 1 (June 11, 2015), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss1/4.
31. Martin Papenbrock and Joachim Scharloth, “Datengeleitete Analyse kunsthistorischer Daten
am Beispiel von Ausstellungskatalogen aus der NS-Zeit: Musteridentifizierung und Visualisierung,”
Kunstgeschichte, May 10, 2011, esp. 17–18. http://www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/248/.
32. Maximilian Schich, “Netzwerke von komplexen Netzwerken in der (Kunst) Wissenschaft,” in Die
Dynamik sozialer und sprachlicherNetzwerkeKonzepte,Methoden und empirischeUntersuchungen anBeispielen des
32
At the large-scale, he has looked at large biographical databases such as the A͜gemeines
Künstlerlexikon and the Getty Union List of Artist Names as proxies for understanding
general properties of human cultural networks. Schich et al. found diferences between
“winner-takes-all” countries such as France, where Paris was far and away the greatest
attractor of notable cultural figures, and more distributed countries like Germany,
where cultural competition is multi-centric.33 Similar work based on secondary sources
is currently being developed as part of the aptly-named Six Degrees of ffrancis Bacon
project.34
It is also worth noting several early-stage projects in the study ofDutch and Flemish
art are presently compiling network data with an eye towards eventual network analysis.
Koenraad Brosens has begun to construct a network model of the seventeenth-century
Brussels tapestry industry. He believes his colloquial understanding of the “network”
of tapestry producers in Brussels is, at present, too fragmentary and ill-defined to
support his contention that the tapestry industry was largely driven and shaped by
patterns of trust and distrust in personal relationships.35 To augment episodic case
studies, Brosens proposes mining the rich archives documenting the layers of kinship,
WWW, ed. Barbara Frank-Job, Alexander Mehler, and Tilmann Sutter (Wiesbaden: Springer, August 4,
2013), 161–178.
33. Maximilian Schich et al., “A Network Framework of Cultural History,” Science 345, no. 6196
(January 8, 2014): 558–562, doi:10 . 1126 / science . 1240064; this paper rightly has come under criticism
for making claims about human culture writ large based on biographical databases restricted largely
to figures from Western history; Mark Byrnes, “What We Can and Can’t Learn From 2,000 Years of
Migration Data for ‘Western Intellectuals’,” The Atlantic: CityLab, August 4, 2014, http://www.citylab.
com/tech/2014/08/what-we-can-and-cant- learn- from-2000-years-of-migration-data- for-western-
intellectuals/375485/.
34. Warren et al., “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.”
35. Koenraad Brosens, “Can Tapesty Research Benefit from Economic Sociology and Socal Network
Analysis?,” in ffamily Ties: Art Production and Kinship Patterns in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed.
Koenraad Brosens, Leen Kelchtermans, and Katlijne van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 43–
51.
33
artistic, and financial ties that connected tapestry makers in this period. Marten Jan
Bok andHarmNijboer are also currently developing a database of kinship, professional,
and geographic relationships between Dutch painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.36 Their database is part of a larger umbrella research group dedicated to
compiling a wide array of network-like data on early modern northern Europe.37
1.3 Formalizing Networks
Despite these early precedents for the use of network analysis in art history, virtually no
studies analyze relationship data derived directly from artworks themselves, preferring
instead the evidence of textual documents like sales records or exhibition catalogs.38
Moreover, none have yet drawn on the large datasets that have been published by
a growing number of museums, which represent a rich and relatively untapped vein
for historical research.39 This reluctance may be, in part, because analyzing collections
will generally tell you more about the history of that particular collecting institution
than about the broader historical framework form which its objects came.40 (Though
36. Marten Jan Bok andHarmNijboer, “ECARTICO: Linking Cultural Industries in the EarlyModern
Low Countries, ca. 1475-ca. 1725,” 2014, http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/.
37. Charles van den Heuvel and Leonor Álvarez Francés, Report Knaw Project: Mapping Notes and Nodes
in Networks (November 1, 2014), https : / / www . huygens . knaw . nl / wp - content / uploads / 2015 / 05 /
EndReportMNN.pdf.
38. Portions of this section have been adapted from my contribution to Drucker et al., “Digital Art
History: The American Scene.”
39. Dominic Oldman et al., “Realizing Lessons of the Last 20 Years: AManifesto for Data Provisioning
and Aggregation Services for the Digital Humanities (A Position Paper),” D-Lib Magazine 20, nos. 7/8
(July 2014), doi:10.1045/july2014-oldman; Melissa Terras, “Opening Access to Collections: The Making
and Using of Open Digitised Cultural Content,”Online ffinformation Review 39, no. 5 (September 14, 2015):
733–752, doi:10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0193.
40. Jeferson Bailey and Lily Pregill, “Speak to the Eyes: The History and Practice of Information
Visualization,”ArtDocumentation: Journal of theArtLibraries Society ofNorthAmerica 33, no. 2 (September 1,
2014): 185–190, doi:10.1086/678525.
34
I argue in chapter 2 that a justifiable, albeit provisional exception may be made for the
study of prints.) Part of this discomfort may stem from the explicit distancing from
the individual object that network analysis, or any other kind of quantitative analysis,
enforces. Kubler voiced this concern in The Shape of Time:
It is disturbing to those who value the individuality of a thing to have
that individuality diminished by classifications and generalizations. We
are caught between di culties: single things are extremely complicated
entities, so complicated that we can pretend to understand them only by
generalizing about them. Oneway out is frankly to accept the complexity of
single things. Once their di culty is conceded, it is possible to find aspects
that can be used in comparisons. No such trait now known is unitary or
fundamental: every trait of a thing is both a cluster of subordinate traits as
well as a subordinate part of another cluster.41
Kubler’s sentiments are hardly revolutionary. Yet it is still necessary to acknowledge
this inevitable distancing in the context of computationally-aided studies, which
are often challenged (sometimes fairly; often not) as un-nuanced.42 It is true that
objects, artistic ones particularly so, resist both the structured description and the
abstraction that computational methods rely upon. Compared to structured data for
libraries’ generally homogeneous collections of books, for example, museums do not yet
have interoperable standards for describing their heterogeneous collections of unique
objects. While library data is generally produced through broad consensus about the
facts of a book’s publication and classification, knowledge about historical objects
tends to be advanced through iterative and conflicting scholarly argumentation — a
di cult (though not impossible) process to represent in a database.43 Moreover, the
41. Kubler, The Shape of Time, 36.
42. For a provocative take on this critique, see Kieran Healy, “Fuck Nuance” (Chicago, August 2015),
http://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf.
43. Diane M. Zorich, “Library and Museum Information: Beauty and the Beast,” Spectra 18, no. 4 (Fall
1991): 3.
35
relative abstractability of text has eased scholars’ adoption of computational linguistics
methods for literary research. The contingency of image and physical object in art
historical interpretation, however, complicates eforts to integrate analogous methods
into our discipline. Certainly, not all art historical questions ought to be expressed as
structured data. The precision and specificity that would be required for certain types
of description — for example, how the artist manipulated a particular pigment in a
certain section of a painting, and the interplay between that technique and its visual
efect — recalls the specter of Jorge Luis Borges’ impossibly-mimetic 1:1 map.44
That said, explicitly quantitative approaches to art history have a long pedigree,
dating back as early as 1708, when Roger de Piles produced tables quantifying stylistic
qualities of old masters for his treatise Cours de peinture par principes.45 (Figure 6) In the
modern era, Jules Prown’s 1966 computer-aided work on patterns of patronage in the
portraits of John Singleton Copley is frequently cited as one of earliest computer-aided
art history projects, alongside Anthony Garvan’s 1968 statistical study of American
church silver.46 Quint Gregory’s unorthodox approach to looking at Haarlem still
44. Jorge Luis Borges,AUniversalflistory of ffiniquity, trans. AndrewHurley (NewYork: Penguin, 2004).
45. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Jacques Estienne: Paris, 1708), http : / / hdl . handle .
net / 2027 / gri . ark : /13960 / t5w67fg51; these data have been explored by both statisticians as well as
economists: M. Davenport and G. Studdert-Kennedy, “The Statistical Analysis of Aesthetic Judgment:
An Exploration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C (Applied Statistics) 21, no. 3 (January 1, 1972):
324–333, doi:10.2307/2346281; Kathryn Graddy, “Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles (†1709)
and Three Centuries of Art Prices,” The Journal of Economic flistory 73, no. 3 (September 2013): 766–791,
doi:10.1017/S0022050713000600.
46. Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), I:97–
137; Anthony N. B. Garvan et al., “American Church Silver: A Statistical Study,” inWinterthur Conference
Report: Spanish, ffrench, and English Tradition in the Colonial Silver of North America (Winterthur, 1968), 73–
104; A full historiography of what might be termed “digital art history” has yet to be authored, but
guiding references would includeKathleenCohen et al., “Digital Culture and the Practices of Art andArt
History,”TheArtBu͜etin 79, no. 2 (June 1, 1997): 187–216, doi:10.2307/3046243;WilliamVaughan, “History
of Art in the Digital Age: Problems and Possiblilites,” in Digital Art flistory: A Subject in Transition, ed.
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, and Hazel Gardiner (Portland: Intellect, 2005), 3–13; Johanna
Drucker, “Is There a ‘Digital’ ArtHistory?,”VisualResources 29, nos. 1-2 (2013): 5–13, doi:10.1080/01973762.
2013.761106.
36
lifes from 1600–1660 ofers one example where computer-aided analysis made it
possible to identify not only major trends in both iconography and compositional
solutions, but also to identify cases where artists seem to have diverged from certain
norms.47 Researchers of the Dutch and Flemish art markets in this period have also
demonstrated how thoughtful quantitative research can support richer understandings
about the motivations behind artists’ decisions. John Michael Montias devoted his
career to exploring the economic aspects of artistic styles, the historic values of painting
genres, the development of seventeenth-century auction practices, and the patterns of
painting display in Dutch households.48 Neil De Marchi, Hans van Miegroet, and Jan
De Vries have also studied the relationship of art and the market in this period.49
Even more common, however, are implicitly quantitative methods. The catalogue
raisonné can be understood as an object of digital scholarship avant la lettre: a volume
that structures knowledge by enumerating and categorizing artworks such that the
scholar may eiciently locate single objects, or gain a synthetic overview of an artist’s
47. Henry Duval Gregory, “Tabletop Still Lifes in Haarlem, c. 1610-1660: A Study of the Relationships
Between Form and Meaning” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2003), 16.
48. Key works by Montias include: John Michael Montias, “The Guild of St. Luke in 17th-Century
Delft and the Economic Status of Artists and Artisans,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the flistory of
Art 9, no. 2 (January 1977): 93–105, doi:10.2307/3780327; John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in
Del͓: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); John
MichaelMontias, “Cost AndValue In Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,”Artflistory 10, no. 4 (December
1987): 455; John Michael Montias, Vermeer and flis Milieu: A Web of Social flistory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989); John Michael Montias, “Socio-Economic Aspects of Netherlandish Art from
the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: A Survey,” The Art Bu͜etin 72, no. 3 (September 1990): 358–
373, doi:10.2307/3045746; John Michael Montias, “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam:
An Analysis of Subjects and Attributions,” in Art in flistory, flistory in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Culture, ed. David Freedberg and Jan De Vries (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art
& The Humanities, 1991), 331–376; John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces:
Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch flouses (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000).
49. Neil DeMarchi and Hans J. van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in
the Seventeenth Century,” The Art Bu͜etin 76, no. 3 (September 1, 1994): 451–464, doi:10.2307/3046038;
Neil De Marchi and Hans J. van Miegroet, Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450-1750 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2006); De Vries, “Art History.”
37
Figure 6: Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (1708, Paris: Jacques Estienne)
38
oeuvre. Arguments for or against an attribution, or for the location of an artwork
within a chronology, rely on the author’s mental model of the artist’s overarching career
— a model based on a sense, however tacit, of the numeric distribution of certain
features across that oeuvre.50 This goes to show that we have always been counting
pictures. Now we have a chance to engage with that practice more explicitly, and more
creatively.
1.4 A Case for Network Models in Printmaking History
If network analysis ofers useful approaches for art history writ large, what about
the histories of printmaking in the Low Countries? Over the last two decades,
researchers have paid increasing attention to how the business practices of publishers
and reproductive printmakers afected the style, subjects, and cultural status of prints.
David Landau and Peter Parshall charted the emergent division of labor between
designers, printmakers, and publishers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while
Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver have argued that this professionalization continued
into the seventeenth century.51
A series of publications in the wake of these books has used in-depth case studies to
detail how the behaviors of print publishers may have shifted in the early seventeenth
century. In a short, but rich, article from 1995, Nadine Orenstein contrasted the
business approaches of three Dutch publishers from 1600–1625, Hendrick Hondius,
Jacques Razet, and Jan Pietersz Berendrecht, to their sixteenth-century predecessors in
50. On this tendency in literary studies, seeMatthewWilkens, “DigitalHumanities and Its Application
in the Study of Literature and Culture,” Comparative Literature 67, no. 1 (January 3, 2015): 11–12. doi:10.
1215/00104124-2861911.
51. David Landau and Peter Parshall,TheRenaissancePrint, 1470-1550 (NewHaven: YaleUniversity Press,
1994); Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver, firaven ffimages: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and
flaarlem, 1540-1640 (Chicago: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, 1993).
39
Antwerp, Hieronymus Cock, Hans Liefrinck, and Gerarde de Jode.52 Orenstein delved
deeper into Hondius’ engraving and publishing practices in her 1996 book flendrick
flondius and the Business of Prints in Seventeenth-Century Holland, where she argued that
Hondius deliberately diversified both the genres, as well as the styles of prints that
he published, as a response to the growing number of printmakers and publishers in
the Netherlands over the course of his career.53 She revisited the question of variety
in print publishing in another article in 1998, in which she contrasted the varying
specialization or diversification of genre in the oeuvres of Hendrick Hondius, Claes
Jansz Visscher, Jacob Matham, and Jacques Razet.54 ElizabethWyckof has also argued
that a wider distribution of genres was necessary to succeed in the seventeenth-century
print market.55 On the other hand, Lorena Baines presents a counterexample in her
study of Nicolaes de Bruyn, a prolific printmaker working between 1592 and 1650
in Antwerp and Rotterdam.56 Unlike the engravers cited by Orenstein and Wyckof,
De Bruyn apparently found exceptional professional success by specializing in ornate,
narrative landscape scenes, rather than relying on diversification of subject matter as
insurance against changing market tastes.
52. Nadine M. Orenstein, “The Shift from Antwerp: The Diversification of Print Publishers in the
United Provinces around 1600,” Block Points: The Annual Journal and Report of the Mary and Leigh Block
fia͜ery 5 (1995): 43–63.
53. Nadine M. Orenstein, flendrick flondius and the Business of Prints in Seventeenth-Century flo͜and
(Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1996).
54. Nadine M. Orenstein, “Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic: Novelty and the Print Publisher,”
Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 28, no. 1 (1998): 141.
55. Elizabeth Ann Wyckof, “Innovation and Popularization: Printmaking and Print Publishing in
Haarlem During the 1620s” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), 194.
56. Lorena A. Baines, “Nicolaes de Bruyn (1571–1656) and the Art of the Professional Engraver” (PhD
diss., University of Delaware, 2011); Lorena A. Baines, Nicolaes de Bruyn, ed. Nadine Orenstein, 2 vols.
(Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision Publishers, 2014).
40
I share with these earlier projects the overarching goal of illuminating how the
changing mechanics of print production shaped the style, subjects, and status of
prints in this period. However, generalizations about what made for successful
and unsuccessful printmaking and publishing practices, such as the arguments about
diversification made by Orenstein and Wyckof, cannot be supported through case
studies alone. Print scholarship in particular, as Lorena Baines has suggested, relies
heavily on a quantitative sense of artists’ production, as oeuvres or inventories of
hundreds and sometimes thousands of prints defy synthetic textual description.57
Thus, many books on printmakers and their oeuvres look more like intricately cross-
referenced databases than they do synthetic histories that fluently assess all these
artistic data.58
This is not to denigrate the indexing impulse in the history of printmaking, but
simply to acknowledge how central these catalogs are to even the best attempts, such
as Landau and Parshall’s Renaissance Print, to create overarching histories. Indeed,
these indices will form the foundation of the data-driven analyses in the following
chapters. Network analysis has much to ofer in sifting these stockpiles of art
historical knowledge. Art history tends to privilege an individualist perspective that,
in its best instances, results in compelling and detailed accounts of artists’ personal
57. Lorena A. Baines, “Revisiting the Life andWork of the Flemish Engraver Nicolaes de Bruyn (1571-
1656)” (Works in Progress, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2015).
58. There is perhaps no better example of this thanMarieMauquoy-Hendrickx, Les estampes desWierix:
conservées auCabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque royaleAlbert ffier: catalogue raisonné, enrichi de notes prises dans
diverses autres co͜ections (Brussels: Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, 1978), reviewed by Martin Royalton-
Kisch, “Review: The Brothers Wierix,” Print Quarterly 3, no. 2 (June 1986): 141–143. Royalton-Kisch
dedicates a significant portion of his review to describing the scholarly machinery that Mauquoy-
Hendrickx provides her readers, including its use of subject matter as an overarching organizational
principle (“the only practicable solution to the problem of organizing so many engravings”); no less than
three indices cross-referenced by chronology, signatures, and iconography (not to mention an index of
the indices themselves); and a system of categorization codes and symbols for impression locations and
states that is so complex it had to be listed on its own removable reference card.
41
circumstances and influences. In its worst instances, however, this individualist
perspective constructs the artist as a genius who transcends all material and social
circumstances.59 At times when we do wish to characterize larger movements (one is
again reminded of Barr’s Diagram), we sometimes struggle to reconcile the wealth of
material evidence into comprehensible, synthetic theories that still account for the
place of the individual artist.
Network analysis ofers a bridge between these micro-scales and macro-scales
because its network representations are explicitly constructed from information about
individual actions. The print production network in this study, for example, will still
be constructed from the associations inferred from a multitude of individual prints.
We will retain the ability to drill into a particular connection and identify the physical
objects that are being used to justify it. Frequent reference back to this micro-scale
view will be necessary to avoid losing the trees for the forest, as it were.60 This multi-
scalar approach often reveals how varied both networks, and the positions and choices
of individuals that constitute them, can appear based on one’s frame of reference.
While art historians have long thought about networks in a colloquial sense, I
hope to have made clear that formalized, computational network analysis presents an
excellent opportunity for new research, even as it challenges our current usage of the
term. The afordances and drawbacks of network analysis presented in this overview
should provide a useful lens for the following chapters. Quantitative techniques
do demand a certain level of abstraction of reality. At the same time, they also
require practitioners to be particularly precise in their assumptions, hypotheses, and
59. The classic critique of the (male) genius artist construct is found in Griselda Pollock, Vision and
Diȩerence: ffemininity, ffeminism, and flistories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988).
60. On this critique of network analysis, seeMustafa Emirbayer and Jef Goodwin, “Network Analysis,
Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 6 (May 1, 1994): 1415.
42
description of evidence. However, the examples of network analysis both in art
history as well as in other humanistic fields presented here demonstrate that these
considerations are not all that far removed from the same concerns in “traditional”
art history. Even though they necessarily simplify reality, computational methods like
network analysis make more explicit the process of humanistic modeling that we are
already doing. And, for prints in particular, network analysis may allow us to gain a
synthetic overview that has often eluded scholars.
43
2 Print Production Centralization in the Low Countries
How centralized was print production in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries?
This is not an arbitrary question. The development of a professionalized print-
making industry in northern Europe during the mid-sixteenth century has been
singled out as a turning point in the history of early modern reproductive prints.
In their landmark overview of European printmaking, The Renaissance Print, David
Landau and Peter Parshall trace two parallel trends in artistic print production in
sixteenth-century Europe: individual, highly innovative printmakers who acted as
their own printers and distributors; and, on the other hand, an emerging class of
professionalized publishers who coordinated the print production pipeline.1 Landau
and Parshall argued that, as artists and publishers grappled with the possibilities and
challenges presented by printing technology over the course of the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, they inevitably came to embrace a more professionalized,
and thus centralized, reproductive print market. By the mid-sixteenth century,
“industrialized” houses such as that of Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp and Antonio
Lafréri in Rome began to dominate the artistic print landscape landscape. By 1530,
according to Landau and Parshall, the golden age of the independent Renaissance
peinture-graveurwas finished. In their place, highly-centralized engravers and publishers
would instead dominate the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Theirs is a compelling argument. To make one’s business out of selling relatively
cheap images, one had to operate at scale. Publishers needed a wide-ranging network
1. Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 260–283.
44
of buyers, yes, but also of talented platecutters, suppliers of paper, plates, and presses,
as well as artistic collaborators for creating designs for single prints, series, or large
book illustration projects. Modern firms separated the roles of inventor and sculptor as
a way to increase the eiciency and scale of production. Large, highly-centralized firms
could take full advantage of these afordances of scale. A print publisher who was able
to position himself in the core of the larger web of the print market by accumulating
enough artistic, material, and social capital would have rosy prospects, indeed.
But what, in fact, happened in the wake of this turn towards centralized printmak-
ing? Current overviews of seventeenth-century print production in the Low Countries
ofer conflicting assessments. Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver have argued that the
continuing division of labor between designers, printmakers, and publishers afected
the style and status of Netherlandish printmaking through the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury.2 They generally support the premise that the continuing professionalization
of artistic printmaking perpetuated the shift from prints’ role as artistic objects to
utilitarian media useful for their reproductive potential.3 While the roles of print
design and productionmay have become increasingly separated during the seventeenth
century, other evidence from the Low Countries suggests that publishing did not
remain centralized in the hands of a few large houses. Nadine Orenstein’s research into
the prominent seventeenth-century Dutch printmaker/publishers Hendrick Hondius,
Jacques Razet, and Jan Pietersz Berendrecht, suggests that an increasing number of
2. Riggs and Silver, firaven ffimages.
3. Along this same line of argument, see Ilja M. Veldman, “The Consequence of Professionalism:
Prints as Visual Communication,” Block Points: The Annual Journal and Report of the Mary and Leigh Block
fia͜ery 5 (1995): 10–27.
45
smaller publishing houses began to flourish in the northern Netherlands around mid-
century.4
A preliminary glance at the dataset of extant prints in the British Museum col-
lections would seem to confirm that the number of artists active in printmaking
began to rise steadily from 1575 onwards, peaking in 1650 before gradually descending.
(Figure 7) The numbers of Dutch and Flemish printmakers were subject to long-term
demographic and economic cycles that also afected their painting colleagues. The
numbers of active Dutch painters from this period, as measured both in modern-day
paintings collections and by listings in probate inventories, similarly began a gradual
increase around 1575, peaking between 1640 and 1650, before declining.5 This peak and
decline the population of active artists tracks, in turn, the larger population the share of
Europe’s urban population that were living in Dutch and Flemish cities in this period.6
(Figure 8)
As we will see, these gradual changes in the population of printmakers could have
a significant, and sometimes surprising impact on the shape of this network. But it
can be hard to gauge this impact through this one chart. Size is but one dimension of
a network. Networks with the same number of members may have radically diferent
internal structures that could result in very diferent experiences and incentives for
their constituents. Any comprehensive investigation into the way that printmakers
connected to each other must also take account of these structures.
4. Orenstein, “Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic.”
5. De Vries, “Art History,” 260–261, tables 1–2.
6. These population data have been derived from Jan De Vries, European Urbanization: 1500-1800
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), appendix 1. I have published a digitized version of this
dataset in Matthew D. Lincoln, “europop: Historical Populations of European Cities, 1500-1800” (R
Package [version 0.2], December 14, 2015), doi:10.5281/zenodo.35425.
46
0100
200
300
400
1550 1600 1650 1700 1750
p
ar
ti
ci
p
an
ts
nationality Dutch Flemish
Figure 7: The number of participants (artists, printmakers, and publishers) in the
Dutch and Flemish print production networks between 1550–1750, as measured from
the British Museum dataset.
In this chapter, I take a quantitative approach to the question of centralization by
applying network analysis methods to gauge just how centralized or distributed print
production in the LowCountries was at diferent points between 1550–1750. I will then
compare these results to those found in random graphs in order to understand which
changes in centralization, if any, may have been due to fundamental changes in the way
that printmakers connected, and which were simply the result of the regular growth
and shrinkage of the Dutch and Flemish networks over time. Finally, I will reconsider
the careers of several individual printmakers and publishers in light of these results,
suggesting how a changing network structure may have afected their own professional
decisions. The results will allow us to revaluate Landau and Parshall’s claims, but also
to explore how the simple incentives that they have posited could, in combination with
gradual changes in the size of these networks, result in unexpectedly complex realities.
47
German
Iberian peninsula
Italian
Other
Dutch
French
English
Flemish
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
1500 1600 1700 1800
Sh
ar
e 
of
 u
rb
an
 E
ur
op
ea
n
 p
op
ul
at
io
n
Figure 8: Proportional populations of diferent European regions. Over this period,
France and England increased their share of the European urban population, while
the population share of Italian and German cities decreased. The Dutch share of
the European urban population peaked in 1650. (“Other” regions include Scandinavia,
Scotland and Ireland, and eastern Europe)
48
2.1 Background: Why Centralization Mattered
A key structural property of any network is its network centralization, a quantitative
measure of how evenly or unevenly ties are distributed between its members. In
a centralized network, a few key individuals occupy powerful and flexible broker
positions. Actors in these positions are able to initiate contact with a wide range of
individuals they already know, and are granted easy access through those immediate
contacts to the rest of the network. (Figure 9(a) and 9(b)) Centralized networks
are not equal networks, however. The average individual in that same network is
unlikely to know multiple well-connected actors, meaning that their access to the rest
of the network is mediated and easily cut of by those few highly-central individuals.
Conversely, in a more decentralized network (Figure 9(c)), where connections are
spread more evenly, a given individual has a better chance of knowing more than
one well-connected actor, reducing his or her distance to the rest of the network and
making it easier to forge new and diverse connections.
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Figure 9: Network centralization examples. (a) is a highly-centralized “star” graph,
where one actor receives all the connections. (b) is a relatively centralized graph, where
a few nodes receive most of the connections. (c) is a relatively decentralized graph,
where most nodes have the same number of connections.
This characteristic of networks is directly relevant to the making of artistic prints.
On the one hand, themedium of printing demanded a set of artistic and technical skills,
49
not to mention a set of social connections and financial capital, that presented a barrier
to new entrants into the printmaking world. Print production required several types
of knowledge that could only be gained through sustained experience. Diferences
between printmaking techniques like woodcut, engraving, and etching could present
challenges even to highly skilled artists. Albrecht Dürer, for example, seems to have
only experimented brieflywith etchings compared to his prolific output of woodcut and
metal engravings, which suggests that he found the technique to be a poor match to his
established skills.7 Painters like Peter Paul Rubens or Abraham Bloemaert, who instead
entrusted the cutting of an engraving plate to dedicated printmakers, had to carefully
select an engraver who could successfully render the painter’s distinctive hand into the
printed medium. This requirement led to the rise of some star engravers who had
a reputation for their ability to faithfully reproduce a painter’s style, such as Boetius
Bolswert, engraver of prints after designs by Bloemaert, Rubens, David Vinckboons,
andMichelMierevelt.8 Print distribution presented yet another hurdle to new entrants
to the market. Publishers gained a competitive advantage by having a large pool of
contacts, both with artists as well as with distributors and buyers in domestic markets
and at the international book fairs. All these requirementsmay havemade itmore likely
that a few centrally-connected individuals would continually increase their number of
contacts in a rich-get-richer pattern of increasing centralization.
Evidence suggests that printmakers and publishers in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were quite conscious of these kinds of network efects, and developed
diferent strategies to respond to them. Publishers of books with intaglio illustrations
7. Susan Dackerman, “Dürer’s Etchings: Printed Drawings?,” in The Early Modern Painter-Etcher, ed.
Michael Wayne Cole (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
8. On Bolswert, see Nico van Hout and Paul Huvenne, Copyright Rubens: Rubens en de graȪek (Ghent:
Ludion, 2004).
50
may have felt these demands most dearly, and serve a useful illustration of the logistical
challenges print publishers faced. Like publishers of single prints or standalone series,
they needed to coordinate the production of a large series of images, sourcing copper
plates, commissioning designs and engravers, and ensuring they were correctly printed
(often by a third party printer). The complexity of these eforts were compounded
when carried out in parallel with the printing of text, which required an entirely
separate infrastructure of platen presses with text blocks, in addition to the roller
presses used for making impressions from copper plates.
Christopher Plantin was one of the first publishers to excel at proȪtably producing
books with intaglio illustrations in the mid-sixteenth century in Antwerp. The
technical knowledge of how to correctly register intaglio print impressions within
already-printed text pages was not novel in this period. What set Plantin apart was
his ability to coordinate all the necessary third-party labor consistently. This logistical
acumenminimized financial costs as well as delays, which were one of the most ruinous
roadblocks in publishing. As Plantin once lamented, production delays and labor
shortages presented, “innumerable problems to find and keep engravers who are often
depraved, pernickety, di cult, and do not keep their promises.”9 Plantin’s wide array
of connections to draughtsmen, platecutters, and specialized intaglio printers made
it possible for him to keep several engravers on retainer, which mean that he could
apportion them to projects as necessary.10 Plantin understood that maintaining a large
9. Plantin was almost certainly referring to his troublesome experience with the brothers Jan and
Hieronymus Wierix; Karen L. Bowen, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book ffi͜ustrations in Sixteenth-
Century Europe, in collab. with Dirk Imhof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 363.
10. ibid., 22–25, 54–55. Plantin also employed three diferent intaglio printers during his career: Pieter
Huys (who also produced plates for him), Mynken Liefrinck, and Jacques van der Hoeven. Another case
study on the negotiation between ambitious authors and the logistical constraints faced by publishers
is described in Dirk Imhof, “An Author’s Wishes Versus a Publisher’s Possibilities: The Illustration of
Thomas Sailly’s Prayer Books Printed by the Plantin Press in Antwerp c. 1600,” in ffi͜ustrated Religious
Texts in the North of Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Feike Dietz et al. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 205–220.
51
number of contacts, thus placing himself in a central position within a larger network,
gave him a commercial advantage.
On the other hand, several factors at both the individual as well as the societal
level may have instead encouraged a less centralized printmaking network. A nascent
printmaking community with a relatively small population of printmakers and publish-
ers might well have had just a few relatively skilled, experienced, and professionally-
established individuals occupying very central positions. But such a structure could
be transient. As the number of constituents increased, those experienced, highly-
central players would necessarily take on apprentices and commission less-experienced
collaborators. Knowledge is not a fixed quantity; as printmaking opportunities
expanded, more and more of those less experienced artists could have learned the
technical skills necessary to succeed in the medium. Likewise, a greater number of
knowledgeable publishers would be able to create their own local connections without
relying on the established knowledge and social connections of a printmaking “elite”.
As a result, what began as a highly-centralized network could, over time, evolve into a
much more distributed one.
Once again, we have anecdotal evidence for this type of behavior. Talented
and ambitious printmakers often strove to expand their own range of connections,
moving from a peripheral position associated with just one powerful publisher, to
becoming influential brokers themselves, able to publish their own designs and those
of others. The sixteenth-century Antwerp brothers Hieronymus and Johannes Weirix
certainly pursued this role. They worked almost exclusively for Plantin early in their
careers. However, as their own professional stars rose, they began to reject Plantin’s
commissions, as they found they were able to secure higher fees by shopping their
talents around to a number of diferent publishers.11 The Wierixes in the sixteenth
11. Bowen, Christopher Plantin, 50–51.
52
century and the Bolswerts in the seventeenth century were essentially following the
same pattern of behavior. Many engravers were already angling for independent
positions where they could publish their own work or set their own prices. This might
explain why Plantin tended to hire young engravers who were not yet able to stake out
on their own. They needed this experience in order to leverage even better professional
positions for themselves. Plantin, for his part, needed easy access to accommodating
labor.
There is anecdotal evidence for more decentralized print production, too. While
prominent publishers like Christopher Plantin or Hendrick Hondius exercised careful
control over all aspects of printmaking, from design to plate cutting to distribution,
there were alternative channels for print production that did not include the coor-
dinating hand of a professional publisher. In 1616, a witness at an Amsterdam court
described a German man seen visiting print shop of Nicolaes van Geilkercken, where
he ordered a print to be made from a chalk drawing. Notably, the German only
wanted Van Geilkercken to cut the image; he may have intended to commission
a calligraphic inscription for the print elsewhere.12 This anecdote reminds us that
print production did not have to be centralized within one studio, or even limited
to a tightly established cooperative between painter, designer, and publisher. There
was apparently enough room in the printmaking market for low-end specialists to
participate, and for individual consumers of certain means to direct the production
of their own prints. A burgeoning Dutch economy in the first half of the seventeenth
century may have contributed to this decentralization by supporting print markets in
smaller Dutch towns, thus enabling a more decentralized network of print producers
12. Nadine M. Orenstein et al., “Print Publishers in the Netherlands: 1580-1620,” in Dawn of the
fiolden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art 1580-1620, ed. Ger Luijten and Ariane van Suchtelen (Amsterdam:
Rijksmuseum, 1993), 167; the original document is published in J. G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis
van het bedrijfsleven en het gildewezen van Amsterdam, 3 vols. (The Hauge: M. Nijhof, 74 1927), vol. 2, no.
264.
53
with a wider geographic spread. Michael Montias has shown how economic prosperity
in the early decades of the seventeenth century may have promoted a burst in painting
activity between 1630 and 1650 inDelft, a market that was relatively decentralized, with
little institutional patronage compared to other contemporary artistic centers.13 Might
the same efect have changed the production pattern of prints as well?
On paper, these contradictory incentives are both plausible; indeed, they both may
have been operating in parallel between 1550 and 1750. Can we determine, though,
which incentive (if either) won out? Using the empirical evidence ofered by the
BritishMuseum andRijksmuseumprint databases, I will show how the balance of these
centralizing and decentralizing incentives may have played out over the seventeenth
century.
2.2 Data on Artistic Prints
The rich collections of Dutch and Flemish prints in the British Museum (hereafter
BM) and the Rijksmuseum (hereafter RKM) present an excellent opportunity to bring
quantitative methods to bear on data concerning prints. It must be noted that while
these institutions have especially rich holdings, particularly in Dutch prints, no one
print collection can be said to be perfectly “representative” of the full range of actual
connections between printmakers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. There are
two major, though not insurmountable, biases in these datasets. First, the relationship
between historical print production and the collections of prints found in the modern-
day BM and RKM is distorted by the independent histories of collecting unique to
each institution. This distortion can be mitigated, however, by comparing two distinct
13. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Del͓, ch. 7.
54
sources of data about the same phenomenon.14 By running the same analysis on both
datasets, it will be possible to easily compare the results ofered by both sources. Many
of the results presented below are shown twice: once for measurements derived from
the BM dataset, and once for those derived from the RKM dataset. Where similar
results are returned by both the BM and RKMdatasets, we can at least reject the claim
that the results are solely artifacts of collecting preferences specific to each museum.
Second to the source-specific biases of each dataset is the larger question of
historical distortion inevitably shared by both institutions. This study will have to
contend with the same unknown unknowns that plague any historical investigation.
Because of paper impressions’ fragility, prints likely have a very uneven survival rate,
and it would be unwise to take modern day collections as a proxy for the absolute sizes
of editions and print runs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 That said, the
reproducibility of prints does grant one advantage. Peter Parshall has endorsed the
idea that, if the exact sizes of print runs are not accurately represented in modern day
print collections, we can nevertheless understand a great deal about overall patterns
of production because the survival rate of a given print that has been reproduced
several times is much greater than that of other non-reproducible artifacts. In 1998,
Parshall suggested that the voluminous evidence of today’s museum print rooms, could
be invaluable for research if only it could be aggregated and analyzed fluently.16 Wenow
have that capability.
14. For an efective demonstration of this technique, see De Vries, “Art History,” 259–260.
15. Future work may involve applying statistical models of survivability to thinking about the loss
of prints, possibly based on surviving archival evidence about the sizes of original print runs; see, for
example, Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, “18,257 Impressions from a Plate,” Print Quarterly 22, no. 3
(September 2005): 265–279.
16. Peter Parshall, “Prints as Objects of Consumption in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval &
Early Modern Studies 28, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 21.
55
Both the BM and the RKM have published the cataloged information for their
collections as structured digital data.17 These data include object-level descriptions
such as creators and their various roles, title, date, medium, dimensions, and subject
matter. For printed artworks, each database details (when known) the artists who
produced the original design for the print, the printmaker who cut the woodblock or
plate, and, when applicable, the publisher who printed and distributed the artwork.
The BM database describes 49,205 print impressions dated between 1550 and 1750.
The RKM database describes 45,120 print impressions from the same period. These
numbers represent records that have been assigned dates, and which also have at least
two identified creators.18 Each database also contains biographical information on the
creators associated with these prints, including classifications by nationality. (Table 1)
Table 1: Count, by nationality, of artists born between 1500 and 1750 as
represented in the BM and RKM databases.
Nationality BM artists RKM artists
Dutch 874 606
Flemish 494 281
English 1,149 153
French 1,162 410
Italian 1,061 480
German 944 390
17. On the BM Linked Open Data initiative, see Oldman et al., “Realizing Lessons of the Last 20
Years.” What documentation is available for the RKM data may be found at http://rijksmuseum.github.
io/.
18. For the handling of unknown creators, see appendix A.1.
56
2.3 Methodology: Inferring Print Production Networks
In the previous chapter, I recounted several examples of historical network analyses.
In each of the studies, researchers inferred a network for analysis by establishing a
source of evidence, and following a set method for identifying what elements of that
evidence would serve as the nodes, or agents within that network, and what evidence
would be used to establish edges, or connections between those nodes. I will return to
two examples now in order to illustrate this process, before explaining the particular
process for constructing this print production network.
In the case of Padgett and Ansell’s research on Florentine familial networks, the
authors worked from archival records dating between 1400 and 1434 to establish a
network whose nodes were separate families (e.g. TheMedici, the Albizzi, the Peruzzi).
The edges between themweremarriages, employment in family-owned businesses, real
estate transactions, or loans.19 In the case of Stiller et al.’s analysis of character networks
in the plays of Shakespeare, each play was taken as the basis for a separate network.
Nodes were individual characters within a play, and an edge was established between
characters when they appeared on stage together.20
The same can now be done using these print collections. From these individual
artwork records, it is possible to construct a digital model of a network that represents
the inferred social connections between these artists.21 In this network, artists
(the nodes of the graph) are connected (by edges) when they are associated with the
production of a print in one of three general roles: designer (either as an active
19. See section 1.1, page 20.
20. See section 1.1, page 23.
21. Only a high-level discussion of how I have inferred this network will be presented in this chapter
text. More detailed specifics can be found in appendix A.
57
participant, or simply “made after”), printmaker, and/or publisher. These three roles
encompass 97% of the artistic ties as described by the BM for the set of prints under
consideration, and 77% of all ties described by the RKM.22 A single print may thus
provide a basis for connecting designer, engraver, and publisher nodes at a particular
point in time. Dozens or hundreds of prints support the construction of a larger
network. The basic process for this construction entails the following steps:
1. Create small sections, or time-slices, of the production network as it may have
existed at diferent points in time.
2. From these time-slices, calculate various metrics on the network as a whole.
3. For each individual within each of these time-slices, calculate various metrics for
that given individual at that point in time.
Rather than construct a large network looking at every print in the BM and RKM
databases at the same time, I will use a rolling window approach to construct many
“slices” of the network as it existed at diferent points in time and compare changes
in certain network characteristics over time. (Figure 10) For example, a slice of the
network between 1645 and 1655 would include all artists who were alive at some point
during that ten year interval.23 These artists will only be connected by edges derived
22. Details on various types of production roles can be found in appendix A.2.
23. The interval of ten years is somewhat arbitrary. I have selected it because it strikes a good balance
between granularity and generality, and also falls within the rough art historical convention of using
“circa” to mean ± five years.
58
from what prints were being produced during that same 1645–1655 interval.24 (Figure
11) The resulting network will be unweighted and undirected.25
Complete graph
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Figure 10: Visualizing the method for creating time slices of the historical print
production network. Each node in the graph is an artist, engraver, or publisher, and
links are formed when two artists both worked on the same print.
Constructing each time slice of the network in this way does simplify one important
aspect of print production: that printmakers could reproduce designs of artists who
were no longer alive, and, furthermore, that publishers could purchase and republish
plates by printmakers who were no longer alive. In anticipation of this problem, I ran
24. Both the BM andRKMdatabases specify a “start date” and “end date” for artworks. Most artworks
have only one date of production associated with them; in these cases, “start date” and “end date” are
equal.
25. On directed versus undirected networks, see appendix A.3; on network weighting, see appendix
A.4.
59
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Jan Harmensz. Muller
Harmen Jansz. Muller
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Clement de Jonghe
Cornelis van Dalen I
Figure 11: Visualizations of the core components of two Dutch network time slices,
with some of the most central figures labeled.
all analyses in this chapter and the following ones twice: once using this “alive only”
method of time slice construction, and once constructing each slice by including all
artists who had been born up to that date, including ones who had already died. For
all the metrics considered in this and those that follow, the choice to exclude dead
artists from the network analysis had only a marginal efect on the observed statistics
such as centralization. For the sake of visual legibility, all the figures shown here, unless
otherwise noted, are based on networks constructed using the “alive only” method.
I also want to focus on the particular subsection of the broader European print
production network comprising Dutch and/or Flemish artists. Therefore this chapter
60
will only consider professional connections inferred from objects that had at least one
Dutch or Flemish creator.26
Having created national sub-networks from each time slice, we can compute their
graph centralization scores.27 The higher score, the more centralized a graph is; the
lower the score, the more distributed it is. It is also possible to characterize centraliza-
tion at the scale of the individual. An individual node’s degree centrality characterizes
how many diferent connections it has to other members of the network.28
2.4 Results: A Mixed Message
Figure 12 displays the changing network centralization score for theDutch and Flemish
communities of print producers between 1550–1750, contrasting that metric with
number of participants in the network (nodes) and the changing number of connections
between them (edges). Results from both the BM and RKM datasets are overlaid.
While there are several local diferences between the BM and RKM results, they are
generally consistent with each other, providing some measure of confidence that the
26. The dynamics of international connections will be discussed at greater length in chapter 3. For
more on the challenges of describing nationality in the early modern period, see section 3.2.
27. Freeman defines graph centrality by summing the diference of each individual nodes’ degree
centrality C(pi) to that of the most-central node C(p∗), normalized based on the sizeN of the network:
C(g) =
∑
N
i=1
C(pi)− C(p
∗)
N2 − 3N + 2
Linton C. Freeman, “Centrality in Social Networks: Conceptual Clarification,” Social Networks 1, no. 3
(1978): 226–237, doi:10.1016/0378-8733(78)90021-7.
28. There are several other more subtle methods for measuring centralization, such as betweenness,
closeness, or eigenvector centrality. The basic measure of degree centrality is useful for this particular
question because we are interested in looking at the basic numbers of collaborators that these network
participants had, rather than more complex 2nd-degree or nth-degree relationships whose meaning in
this co-production network is more ambiguous.
61
Dutch Flemish
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Figure 12: Comparison of the changing centralization of the Dutch and Flemish print
production network between 1550–1750 with the changing number of participants in
the network (nodes) and the changing number of connections between them (edges)
over the same period.
62
result we are seeing is partially representative of actual historical trends, and not solely
an artifact of the individual collecting practices of either the BM and RKM.
We see a gradual rise and fall in the number of active printmakers over the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. However, the networks of both Dutch and Flemish
printmakers fluctuated sharply between relative centralization and decentralization
during the same period. In the northern Netherlands, centralization was generally
low through most of the sixteenth-century, spiking rapidly around 1575, with another
spike at 1600, before falling quickly down to earlier levels by about 1650. With small
variations, the Dutch network centralization remained at relatively consistent levels
from then until about 1720, when it once again quickly increased.
The southern Netherlands, by comparison, exhibited a much higher level of
centralization in the mid-sixteenth century than did the Dutch. In 1550, the Flemish
network also had more participants than did the Dutch. However, the population
of Flemish printmakers increased only gradually through 1650, the number of active
Dutch printmakers surpassing them in 1600. By 1650, the number of Flemish
printmakers began to decline. Despite the smaller number of active printmakers,
the print production of the southern Netherlands easily rivaled that of the north,
experiencing an especially sharp increase between 1625 and 1645. Flemish centralization
gradually declined until shortly after 1600, when that network experienced its own
sharp spike in centralization at the same time as it saw a dramatic increase in the
number of prints being made by Flemish artists. This spike was short-lived, however,
and by 1650 the Flemish print production underwent relatively quick decentralization
as soon as this brief printmaking boom wore of, dropping to very low levels by 1675 as
it diminished greatly in size and activity.
Both the Dutch and Flemish results suggest that both the centralizing and decen-
tralizing incentives posited above did have their efect in the sixteenth and seventeenth
63
centuries, but that the incentives towards decentralization won out — at least in
the long run. This would seem to confirm Landau and Parshall’s claim that the
highly-centralized model that Hieronymus Cock constructed in Antwerp was an
immense success in its own time. But these initial results also undermine the notion
that printmaking would inevitably necessitate highly centralized production in the
following centuries. If printmaking, as amedium, encouraged high centralization at the
local level, with printmaker-publishers amassing a wide range of contacts, why did this
not result in persistently high centralization at the regional level? What is more, these
results also suggest the surprising speed with which these structural shifts could occur.
The gradual changes seen in the network populationwould indeed appear tomaskmore
dynamic upheavals in actual network concentration.The change in centralization, on
the other hand, was far more abrupt.
Unaccustomed to thinking of our subject matter in terms of unpredictable systems,
art historians may be surprised to find such rapid structural changes in networks
involving hundreds of artists, printmakers, and publishers. Why would the Dutch
printmaking network have centralized so abruptly, only for this intense focus to rapidly
dissipate within a generation, even as the volume of Dutch print production continued
to increase? This type of “phase change” behavior, where marginal changes in one
set of characteristics catalyze a much more dramatic change in another measurement,
are common characteristics of complex systems like social networks.29 This raises the
question: which of these changes might signify the influence of some outside event
or other fundamental change in the ways in which these designers, printmakers, and
publishers connected to each other? (e.g. were certain publishers or printmakers able
to attract far more students or collaborators than wemight expect given the size of that
29. Watts, Sma͜Worlds, 53.
64
network?) And which changes are just the kinds of shifts we might find in any other
networks of the same size that follow a similar, rich-get-richer pattern of connection?
2.4.1 Random Networks: Distinguishing the Exceptional from the Expected
Stiller et al. faced a similar problem in their research on Shakespeare’s character
networks. They aimed to find which plays had unusually densely—or sparsely—
connected character networks, and how these compared to other kinds of non-play
networks. To do this, they compared metrics calculated from each play network to the
metrics found in randomly-generated networks of similar sizes.30 This made it possible
to isolate those truly exceptional plays, like Richard ffiffiffi, that exhibited quite diferent
characteristics from networks of the same size that had been generated at random. In
other words, Shakespeare had connected characters in Richard ffiffiffi in a manner very
diferent from the way he had done so in other plays, and in a way that could not be
accounted for simply by looking at the number of characters and interactions in the
play’s character network.
While Stiller et al. were comparing diferences between diferent plays, we want
to compare the state of the print production network at diferent points in time. In
which years were these networks about as centralized as we would expect for a network
of similar size, and when were they much more (or less?) We can do this by running the
same centrality measurement on a random network of the same size as each network
time slice (that is, with the same number of nodes and the same number of edges)
derived from the BM or RKM data. Links between any two nodes in this graph are
generated based on a power law probability distribution.31 It produces a graph such that
30. Stiller, Nettle, and Dunbar, “The Small World of Shakespeare’s Plays,” 401–404.
31. A probability distribution assigned the probability that a variable will have a particular value within
a particular range. Diferent types of probability distributions weight probabilities diferently. For
65
a handful of nodes have a very large number of connections, and the majority of nodes
make very few connections. This distribution of edges creates a network similar to
the kind that we have observed in the print production networks: a rich-get-richer
scenario, where a few actors make and receive the majority of connections. Because
random graph generation is stochastic, the same simulation run twice with the same
inputs will produce slightly diferent outputs. (Figure 13 (b-f)) Run many times, a
randomized simulation will tend to produce values that fall within a certain range, with
many iterations producing values close to some average, and a few iterations producing
outliers.
Figure 14 compares the centralization values returned by these random graph
models to those found for the Dutch and Flemish communities in both the BM and
RKM datasets. The shaded bands indicate the range occupied by 90% of the most
central values produced by random graph sampling (thus excluding the most extreme
outliers). The black trend line represents the actual centralization valuemeasured from
the data at each year. These bands indicate how centralized random networks of the
same size tend to be.
example, in a uniform probability distribution, all possibilities have an equal probability. In the context
of making connections within a network, a uniform distribution of ties means that all nodes in the
network will have an equal chance of making or receiving a connection. On the other hand, a power-
law probability distribution describes the distribution of some set of ranked occurrences in which small
occurrences (e.g. people with only a few social links) are extremely common, whereas large instances
(e.g. people with a huge number of social links) are extremely rare.
The model implemented here sets the connection chance, or fitness f , of node ni such that:
fni = i
−
1
γ−1
The exponent γ determines the skew of the probability distribution. In this context, the skew governs
precisely how attractive well-connected individuals are to new entrants to the network, with a larger skew
denoting a stronger attraction. A γ of 2.25 provides a close fit for almost every network shown here. On
this model for generating random networks, see Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, “Emergence of
Scaling in RandomNetworks,” Science 286, no. 5439 (October 15, 1999): 511, doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.
509, and the R implementation in G. Csardi and T. Nepusz, “The igraph Software Package for Complex
Network Research,” ffinterJournal Complex Systems (2006): 1695, http://igraph.org.
66
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Figure 13: A visualization of random graph generation. (a) is the network generated
from the BM data between 1640–1650. (b-f) are five randomly generated networks
with the same number of nodes and edges as (a).
67
Dutch Flemish
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1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750
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Figure 14: Comparing observed results with random graph results.
68
Both theBMandRKMdatasets are largely congruent. Moreover, we find thatmany
of the sudden changes in Dutch and Flemish centralization through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries are surprisingly consistent with the results returned by random
graph sampling. Even as observed levels of centralization shifted dramatically over this
period, the basic attractiveness of well-connected individuals (the exponent λ of the
power law probability distribution) remained essentially constant between 1550–1700.
In other words, for all the apparent fluctuations in the printmaking networks in the
northern and southern Netherlands, the simple incentive for printmakers to seek out
well-connected collaborators appears to have been nearly constant through the end of
the seventeenth century. This constant, coupled with the gradual changes in the sizes
of these networks, could result in surprisingly sudden shifts in network structure. So,
while the thesis that highly centralized printmaking of the sixteenth century would
continue through the seventeenth century was not correct, its underlying assumption
about the connective incentive of print production did persist.
Not every year of empirical data lines up with the random graph results, however.
Not all these changes, in other words, were due to the shifting size of these commu-
nities alone. The first deviation, which appears in both the BM and RKM results,
occurs in the Dutch network around 1580, with a spike in centralization that does not
occur in the random graphs with the same number of nodes and edges. Another major
aberration occurs in the BM results (though not the RKM model), where, around
1720, the model under-predicts the jump in centralization experienced by the Dutch
network.32 In the Flemish network, a large spike is observed around 1640 that exceeds
the centralization shown by random graph sampling.
32. This particular anomalymay be explained by the arrival of Bernard Picart, who established a highly-
centralized school in Amsterdam, the Amsterdamse tekenschool, for training engravers. See section 3.4.4.
69
What (or who) may have caused these deviations? And what efect might these
larger structural changes, whether predictable or not, have had on individual artists?
That is the question we now turn to.
2.5 Case Studies in Centrality
Having calculated the overall level of centralization in the Dutch and Flemish print
production networks above, it is useful to disaggregate these larger networks and look
at the changing positions of the individual artists within them, both in the north and
in the south.
Figure 15 shows the most central members of the Dutch print production network
at diferent points in time.33 Many of the most central artists in each of these years
are well-known names, such as Hendrick Goltzius, Claes Jansz Visscher, Hendrick
Hondius, and Frederick de Wit. However, other highly central artists are relatively
unknown, such as Abraham Blooteling and Jonas Suyderhoef. Though each held
relatively central positions in their own time, their respective networks were radically
diferent from each other. We must ask how the experience of being “central” in the
printmaking network had changed between the end of the sixteenth century and the
start of the eighteenth. Three case studies of Hendrick Goltzius, Hendrick Hondius,
and Jonas Suyderhoef, will explore the impact that these individual artists may have had
on the larger network, while also reevaluating how the broader shape of the network
may have afected these artists’ individual decisions.
33. This sampling of years is somewhat arbitrary, but does provide a relatively even overview of the
time period under consideration.
70
1560
1585
1615
1645
1675
1715
Frederik Sustris
Hans Vredeman de Vries
Harmen Jansz. Muller
Lambert Sustris
Cornelis Bos
Dirk Volkertsz Coornhert
Hans Bol
Maarten van Heemskerck
Dirck Barendsz.
Jacques de Gheyn II
Jan Harmensz. Muller
Hendrik Hondius I
Harmen Jansz. Muller
Jacob Matham
Bartholomeus Spranger
Hendrick Goltzius
Theodor Matham
Simon van de Passe
Jan van de Velde II
Abraham Bloemaert
Hendrik Hondius I
Jacob Matham
Hendrick Goltzius
Claes Jansz. Visscher
Cornelis Danckerts I
Clement de Jonghe
Jan Lievens
Claes Jansz. Visscher
Rembrandt
Theodor Matham
Jonas Suyderhoef
Frederick de Wit
Jacob Gole
Sir Peter Lely
Clement de Jonghe
Pieter Schenk
Nicolaes Visscher II
Frederick de Wit
Gerard Valck
Abraham Blooteling
Gerard Valck
Jan van der Vaart
Gérard de Lairesse
Jacob Gole
Adriaen van der Werff
Jacob Houbraken
Pieter Schenk
Bernard Picart
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
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0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
Figure 15: The top most central members of the Dutch printmaking network in the
years 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, and 1715, ranked by their degree centrality (BM
Dataset)
71
2.5.1 Hendrick Goltzius and His Studio
In 1582, Goltzius left the employ of Philips Galle to begin his own independent studio
in Haarlem.34 Goltzius assembled a large group of engravers who learned to emulate
his distinctive style in order to produce prints from Goltzius’ own designs. The
Goltzius studio quickly became one of the foremost print producers in the northern
Netherlands at that time. Perhaps the most talented of Goltzius’ pupils was Jan
Saenredam, an engraver who came to work in Goltzius’ shop in 1589, relatively late
in his life. Saenredam had an exceptional grasp of the technicals of engraving. More so
than his fellow students, Saenredam seems to have inherited his teacher’s ability to bend
the rigid and di cult technique to his will, rendering highly coloristic prints with deft
handling of light, shadow, and volume. Saenredam put these talents to use executing a
number of lateGoltzius designs that featured single or paired allegorical figures. (Figure
16) After Goltzius turned to painting in 1600, his stepson Jacob Matham took over the
Haarlem shop. Saenredam had returned to his hometown of Assendelft in 1595, where
he began to produce prints after his own designs, while continuing to engrave plates for
others, including the prolific painter and draughtsman Abraham Bloemaert.35 Like the
other printmakers who had worked with Goltzius, Saenredam was able to establish his
own career as an independent printmaker. However, he never built a firm as large and
renowned as Goltzius had, nor did he attract a large school of students. He also did
not publish his own prints independently, but instead worked with third parties to have
34. On the Goltzius studio, see Jan Piet Filedt Kok, “Hendrick Goltzius: Engraver, Designer, and
Publisher 1582-1600,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42-43 (1991): 159–218; Leeflang, fioltzius, ch. 4.
35. Walter L. Strauss, ed., Netherlandish Artists: Matham, Saenredam, Mu͜er, 2 vols., The Illustrated
Bartsch 4 (NewYork: Abaris Books, 1980); IljaM. Veldman, “Maurice as theNimrod of his Age: Political
Propaganda Prints by Jan Saenredam,” The Rijksmuseum Bu͜etin 58, no. 2 (January 2010): 128–137.
72
his plates printed.36 In the following decade, other Goltzius students also moved away
from Haarlem and established their own engraving practices or full publishing houses.
Jacob de Gheyn moved to Amsterdam, as did Jan Harmensz Muller, who inherited his
father’s publishing firm. Willem Jacobsz Delf returned to his hometown of Delft, and
Pieter de Jode returned to Antwerp.
Goltzius made an enduring contribution to engraving styles and techniques, as well
as to the overall artistic standing of prints in the Netherlands and beyond. But his
firm also had a dramatic impact on the future structure of the Dutch printmaking
network — an impact due in large part to the timing of his career. Goltzius’ well-
deserved reputation as a masterful printmaker attracted apprentice engravers from
many diferent cities in the northern and southern Netherlands. This attractive
power was truly exceptional. The rise of Goltzius and his studio likely explain that
remarkable surge in centralization seen around 1580, one that exceeded what we might
have expected in randomized networks of the same size. When Goltzius opened his
firm in the mid-1580s, no Dutch competitors were as centrally-placed as he was, with
connections not only to his own group of Dutch printmakers, but also to foreign
publishers and commissions. Any aspiring printmaker or publisher looking for a
partner in the northern Netherlands would have had few choices as attractive as
Goltzius’ Haarlem studio.
The highly centralized “star power” that attracted so many aspiring engravers to
apprentice with Goltzius in the last decades of the 1600s likely primed the network
for its speedy decentralization in the following decades. The following generation of
printmakers had built up enough artistic and technical knowledge to allow the print
network to spread out, increasing the number of relatively competitive printmakers
36. Several of his later prints bear the Amsterdam address of Hermann Allartz, of whom little is
known; Ernst Wilhelm Moes and Combertus Pieter Burger, De Amsterdamsche boekdrukkers en uitgevers
in de zestiende eeuw (Amsterdam: M. Nijhof, 1915), 4:324–49.
73
Figure 16: Jan Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, Evening, c. 1595. Engraving, 21.1
x 15.1 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of
Art, Washington.)
74
and thus decentralizing the overall network. To be sure, there would still be well-
connected members of the network in the wake of Goltzius. However, after the
surprising spike in centralization during Goltzius’ most active period running his own
print shop, the Dutch print production network returned to a level of centralization
to be expected for a network of its size. Claesz Jansz Visscher would inherit Goltzius’
position as the most central print producer (both as engraver and publisher) in the
network of 1615, but he would not dominate the network to quite the same extent
as Goltzius had. Printmaking dynasties like the Visschers and, to a lesser extent, the
Mathams, were able to maintain relatively central positions throughout the century.
For example, in 1640, JacobMatham’s son, Theodor (1605/6–1656) had risen to become
the most well-connected member of the Dutch network, working in Amsterdam and
specializing in engraving large figural scenes.37 Claes Jansz Visscher and his progeny
also feature prominently in the list of highly central Dutch print producers well into the
1600s, with Claesz holding prominent positions in 1600 and 1640, and his sonNicolaes
continuing to rank amongst prominent publishers in 1670 like Frederick de Wit and
Clement de Jonge.38 However, even as the Visschers, particularly Claes, would assume
powerful positions brokering ties between a large array of other artists, printmakers,
and publishers, they would have more well-placed competition than Goltzius ever did.
For the remainder of the century, no single individual would occupy as privileged a
position in the Dutch network of printmakers as Goltzius did in the 1580s.
37. Léna Widerkehr, “Jacob Matham fioltzij Privignus: Jacob Matham graveur et ses rapports avec
Hendrick Goltzius,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42-43 (1991–1992): 219–60.
38. On the Visscher family, see Huigen Leeflang, “The Sign of Claes Jansz Visscher and his Progeny:
The History and Significance of a Brand Name,” The Rijksmuseum Bu͜etin, no. 62 (2014): 240–269.
75
2.5.2 Hendrick Hondius
Hendrick Hondius is also a well-known name in the history of Dutch printmaking who
ranks as one of the more central network players in 1615. Nadine Orenstein has argued
that Hondius, a successful publisher in Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague between
1600–1630, diversified the output of his shop, and thus his connections to the rest of
the Dutch market, as a way to distinguish himself in an environment with more and
more competing artists.39 In the first decade that he opened his publishing business in
The Hague, he engraved and issued landscapes, and mythological subjects from both
northern and southern. He also produced portrait series, as well as several religious
and allegorical images. Moving to Leiden in 1604, Hondius took on his first large-scale
book illustration project, producing images for Hans Vredeman de Vries’ Perspectiva.
He also continued to produce original designs for landscapes and political allegories
and portraits, while also publishing maps and other individual reproductive prints.
Orenstein has also noted that Hondius diversified stylistically. He did not enforce the
kind of “house style” that so distinguished Goltzius’ print studio in the 1580s–90s, but
rather commissioned engravers to work in diferent styles based on the designs they
were reproducing, often juxtaposing varying hands by publishing prints by diferent
engravers as part of the same series.40 Hondius also published many genres of printed
materials, from fine art prints (using designs by contemporaries, but also those of old
masters whose works he carefully copied or whose old printing plates he had managed
to acquire) to book illustrations.41 Importantly, Hondius also appears to have courted
a more domestic market than did Goltzius. He issued more engravings after Dutch
39. Orenstein, flendrick flondius, 139.
40. Ibid., 18–19, 75.
41. Ibid., 48.
76
designs than after foreign sources, and he applied to the States General for a printing
privilege rather than to a foreign sovereign like Rudolf II, as Goltzius had done.42
Figure 17: Andries Stock after David Vinckboons, Autumn, published by Hendrick
Hondius, 1618. Engraving, 38.5.x 50 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Towhat extent didHondiusmake these decisions a response not just to the growing
size of the print market, as Orenstein argues, but also to the shifting structure of that
network? As noted above, the size of the print market had been steadily increasing
since 1580, and would not peak until 1650. By the 1610, however, the printmaking
network in the Netherlands had already passed its most highly-centralized moment
42. Orenstein, flendrick flondius, 47. This may also have been due to a rise in the number of privileges
that the States General dispensed after the Treaty of Münster; see section 3.3.1.
77
Figure 18: Simon Frisius after David Vinckboons, Winter, published by Hendrick
Hondius, 1618. Engraving, 38.3.x 50 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
78
around 1600, and it would continue to decentralize over the rest of Hondius’ career. In
other words, the growing size of the print network was not a new problem for Hondius;
its rapid decentralization, however, was. Hondius faced a print production landscape
that was gradually becoming less structurally dependent on central publishers like Claes
Jansz Visscher, or even himself.
This topological shift may havemade certain professional strategies more attractive
to Hondius than others. A more evenly-distributed network of designers, engravers,
and publishers would have made it easier for Hondius to diversify his design sources.
In a highly centralized network, a given individual has a smaller chance of knowing
one of the few, highly-connected actors. As a result, his or her potential connections
to other parts of the network are fewer, rendering them more isolated. On the other
hand, in a more decentralized network where connections are spread more evenly, the
same individual has a better chance of knowing other relatively well-connected actors,
in efect reducing his or her distance to the rest of the network and making it easier to
forge new connections with a diverse group of actors.
Like Visscher, Hondius began his career in a rather advantageous position, having
mademany prominent contacts both inAntwerp (though heworked inHollandmost of
his life, hewas born in Brabant) as well as inCologne andParis beforemoving theHague
by 1597.43 As the Dutch printmaking network rapidly decentralized between 1600–
1650, Hondius would have found it more and more di cult to maintain this highly
central position; indeed, his own centrality in the Dutch print network decreased over
the course of his career. At the same time, however, a more distributed network
meant that Hondius’ immediate contacts were more likely to themselves be relatively
well-connected, thus increasing Hondius’ chances of making more diverse connections
with new entrants to the print market. He would have found it progressively easier and
43. Orenstein, flendrick flondius, 25–26.
79
easier to connect to a diverse range of artists and engravers who specialized in a variety
of genres, from maps to book illustrations to portraiture, landscape, and genre prints.
Rather than viewing Hondius’ diversification as a fight against the competitive
forces of a larger print market, it may be more useful to understand his publishing
decisions as consonant with the evolving structure within which he operated. This
structure was not only larger, but also increasingly diversified between many actors
rather than centralized around a key few. As the next case study shall demonstrate,
Hondius was not the only printmaker to modify his practice to suit a decentralizing
production network.
2.5.3 Jonas Suyderhoef
It is unsurprising to find names like Goltzius, Visscher, or Hondius at the top of the
Dutch centralization charts. Far less known is the printmaker Jonas Suyderhoef, who
ranks as one of the central hubs of the Dutch print production network in 1640, even
outranking Rembrandt. Like, Hondius, Suyderhoef also adapted to work in a more
decentralized production network. What made him so central in his time, and why has
he been overlooked in later studies of Dutch printmaking history?44
Jonas Suyderhoef was born in Haarlem to Andreas Pietersz Suyderhoef, secretary
to the Dutch Ambassador to Constantinople.45 He was an active member of the Guild
of St. Luke, and would become dean in 1678. Suyderhoef used a combination of
engraving and etching to produce prints after a remarkably wide range of artists. Formal
portraits comprise a large proportion of his oeuvre. His most prominent project was
44. To their credit, Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten acknowledged this lacunae in Eddy de Jongh
and Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: fienreprints in the Netherlands, 1550-1700 (Amsterdam; Ghent:
Rijksmuseum; Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1997), cat. 64.
45. Johann Wussin, Jonas Suyderhoef, son œuvre gravé, classé et décrit, trans. Henri Hymans (Brussels:
Labroue et Mertens, 1862), 11–12; F. W. H. Hollstein,Dutch and fflemish Etchings, Engravings, andWoodcuts,
ca. 1450-1700 (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1949), 28:201–260.
80
for Pieter Soutman’s 1644 EȬgies imperatorumdomusAustriacae, a series of royal portraits
done after paintings by Rubens, Gerrit van Honthorst, Anthony van Dyck, and Pieter
Soutman himself. Soutman, who lived in Haarlem at the time, would likely have known
Suyderhoef ’s reproductions after portraits of prominent Dutch intellectuals by Frans
Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Pieter Dubordieu.
Suyderhoef also reproduced a range of works after Gerard ter Borch II, from the
oicial portrait of the signing of the treaty of Münster, to a portrait of Godart van
Reede.46 Nor did he limit himself to formal portraits. Suyderhoef also produced many
plates after genre scenes by Adriaen van Ostade, at least one of Ter Borch’s early
guardroom scenes, and even an Italianate landscape by Nicolaes Berchem. Suyderhoef
also rendered a handful of history paintings, including a free reproduction of Rubens’
ffa͜ of the Damned on two sheets, which was published by Soutman and dedicated to
ConstantijnHuyghens. (Figure 19) Produced just two years after Rubens’ death in 1640,
the print may have held special significance for the secretary to the Stadholder, as he
and Rubens had maintained a correspondence between 1635 and 1640 debating the
principles of architectural design, and their expression in each other’s houses.47 This
print testifies to the continuing artistic exchange between Haarlem and Antwerp that
continued long after Rubens visited theDutch city in 1612.48 It was during this visit that
Soutman likely met Rubens. Soutman would join Rubens’ Antwerp studio in 1616 as a
46. François Gerard Waller, Biographisch woordenboek van noord Nederlandsche graveurs, in collab. with
Willem Rudolf Juynboll (Amsterdam: B.M. Israël, 1974), 491.
47. Koen A. Ottenheym, “De correspondentie tussen Rubens en Huygens over architectuur,” Bu͜etin
KNOB 96, no. 1 (1997): 1–11, doi:10.7480/knob.96.1997.1.390.
48. J. G. van Gelder, “Rubens in Holland in de zeventeinde eeuw,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 3,
no. 1 (1950–1951): 103–150; Filip Vermeylen and Karolien De Clippel, “Rubens and Goltzius in Dialogue:
Artistic Exchanges Between Antwerp and Haarlem During the Revolt,” De zeventiende eeuw 28, no. 2
(December 19, 2012): 138–160, doi:10.18352/dze.8236.
81
printmaker and painter, returning to Haarlem in 1633 to open his own print publishing
house. It is likely through Soutman that Suyderhoef was introduced to Rubens’ works.
This remarkable scope of Suyderhoef ’s oeuvre is matched by (and likely a product
of) the large number of publishers with whom he worked. In addition to publishing in
Haarlemwith Soutman, he also worked for the Leiden publisher Cornelis Banheinning,
who published most of his reproductions after Dubordieu, a Leiden painter.49 Suyder-
hoef ’s network also extended to Amsterdam, where the publisher Pieter Goos issued
several of Suyderhoef ’s works after Rembrandt.50 Goos also published his prints after
Van Ostade, as did the Amsterdam publishers Frederick de Wit, Clement de Jonghe,
Dancker Danckerts, and Nicolaes Visscher.51 Often the same print would be issued
under several diferent addresses, as happenedwith one of his print afterOstade (Figure
20) and another after a Soutman portrait of Goltzius (Figure 21).52 These plates may
49. Waller, Biographisch woordenboek van noord Nederlandsche graveurs, 425.
50. On Goos, see A. D. de Vries, “Biografische aanteekeningen betrefende voornamelijk Amster-
damsche schilders, plaatsnijders, enz. en hunne verwanten,” Oud flo͜and 3 (January 1885): 145–146.
51. On Danckerts, see Jaap van der Veen, “Danckerts en Zonen: Prentuitgevers, plaatsnijders en
kunstverkopers te Amsterdam, ca. 1625-1700,” in fiedrukt tot Amsterdam: Amsterdamse prentmakers en
-uitgevers in de fiouden Eeuw, ed. Elmer Kolfin and Jaap van der Veen (Amsterdam: Museum het
Rembrandthuis, 2011), 58–119.
52. Suyderhoef ’s role in these reproductions is inconsistently referenced in publisher inventories. For
example, in the c. 1680 inventory of Nicolaes Visscher, Suyderhoef is frequently noted as a creator of
the print:
1. “Leuwejacht, door P.P. Rubens en Jonas Suyderhoef. :10:” (p. 7)
2. “Satyrs en Tygers, door de Laer en Suyderhouf. :10:” (p. 7)
3. “Boerekroeg. door Adr. van Ostade en Jonas Suyderhoef. :6:” (p. 15)
4. “Brandewijn drinckende Wijven. door Adr. van Ostado en Joh. Suyderhoef [no price]” (p. 15)
However Suyderhoef gets no credit for carving the plate of Soutman’s portrait of Hendrick Goltzius
(which, incidentally, is a reversed copy of Jacob Matham’s original engraved portrait of his stepfather),
which Visscher described only as “Henricus Goltius, door P. Soutman. :6:” (p. 16). Catalogus van groote
en kleene Land-Kaerten, Steden, Print-Kunst En Boecken van Nicolaes Visscher van Amsteldam. ’t Amsteldam,
Op den Dam, in de Visscher, (c. 1680), Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel Cb 105, transcribed in
Jan van der Waals, Prenten in de gouden eeuw: van kunst tot kastpapier (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, 2006), 219–229.
82
have been traded between the publishers themselves, though it is also possible that
Suyderhoef may have lent the plate to each publisher under an agreement that each
may have leased the plate for a set series of impressions.53
Suyderhoef fulfilled a demand for freelance engravers who were able to produce
reasonably good engravings after almost any artist or genre, and who were willing to
work with a wide array of publishers. Unlike Goltzius or Hondius, Suyderhoef does
not appear to have ever tried to establish his own publishing business. Perhaps this
was because there was already too much established competition among publishers in
Haarlem by the 1630s when Suyderhoef would have began producing prints for the
market. Conversely, the rising number of active publishers both in Haarlem and in
other Dutch cities may have made it possible for Suyderhoef to make a comfortable
living as a freelance engraver alone, rising to a high rank in the Haarlem guild.
In the decentralized network that existed in the mid-seventeenth century northern
Netherlands, it may have made professional sense not to work exclusively with a single
publisher, given the wide array of reasonably well-connected publishers that were
available as clients.
At first glance, it is easy to understand why Suyderhoef has been overlooked in
histories of Dutch printmaking. Because his only known works are reproductions,
he has never received the kind of close attention given to engravers from the same
period who made original works as well as reproductions, such as Hendrick Hondius.
Moreover, Suyderhoef ’s prints are often workmanlike in character. Despite occasional
bright spots in his renderings, such as in his prints after Frans Hals, Suyderhoef tended
to inscribe lines with a regularity that prevent his prints from replicating the vivacity
53. On this practice, see Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, “Reputation and Wage: The Case of
Engravers Who Worked for the Plantin-Moretus Press,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the flistory
of Art 30, nos. 3/4 (2003): 161–195, doi:10.2307/3780915.
83
Figure 19: Jonas Suyderhoef, after Peter Paul Rubens, ffa͜ of the Damned, published by
Pieter Soutman, 1642. Engraving, 74.5 x 56.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
(Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.)
84
Figure 20: Jonas Suyderhoef after Adriaen van Ostade, Three Crones or “Dutch ffates”,
(left) published by Dancker Danckerts; (right) published by Nicolaes Visscher. 29.8 x
22 cm. British Museum, London. (Images © Trustees of the British Museum.)
85
Figure 21: Jonas Suyderhoef after Pieter Soutman,flendrick fioltzius, (left) published by
Pieter Soutman; (right) published by Cornelis Visscher. Engraving and etching, 40.9 x
27.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Images courtesy National Gallery of
Art, Washington.)
86
of their models. His figural handling is competent, but plagued by occasional awkward
passages.
That said, there was clearly a broad market in the seventeenth century for prints
of this quality, and it is for that reason that Suyderhoef ’s career deserves attention.
While his aesthetic impact does not come close to that of Rembrandt’s prints, it is
remarkable that, ͒om the viewpoint of centrality to print production, Suyderhoef actually
outranks Rembrandt. Between his work with printmakers such as Jan Joris van Vliet
and publishers like Clement de Jonghe, Rembrandt was also relatively well-connected;
he does make the list of top ten most central Dutch print producers in 1645.54 (Figure
15) Yet if Suyderhof didn’t produce the stunning novelty that Rembrandt did, he did
play a more crucial role in disseminating a wide range of images across many diferent
cities in the northern Netherlands through his reproductions. In this way, Suyderhoef
could be seen as a type of connective “dark matter” — unacknowledged in the canon,
but critical to the functioning of the artistic world at the time.55
2.5.4 Flemish Printmaking Dynasties
Like the Dutch, the Flemish print production network underwent sudden structural
fluctuations during the seventeenth century. As can be seen in Figure 12, these fluctu-
ations did not occur in tandem. Disaggregating these network-wide statistics in order
to examine individuals within this network sheds light on this diference. (Figure 22)
54. On Rembrandt’s work with Van Vliet in particular, see Christiaan Schuckman, Martin Royalton-
Kisch, and Erik Hinterding, Rembrandt & Van Vliet: A Co͜aboration on Copper (Amsterdam: Museum het
Rembrandthuis, 1996), 8-14.
55. I borrow this sense of the term “dark matter” from Gregory Sholette’s study of the unseen
inhabitants of the the contemporary art word (e.g. low/mid-level arts managers, “failed” artists and
amateurs who support art classes and supply stores), whose crucial role in supporting the market is
erased by the “interpretive” class of curators, critics, and academics who instead focus on the few elite
visible artists; Gregory Sholette,DarkMatter:Art andPolitics in theAge of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto
Press, 2011), 1–2. I thank Paul Jaskot for bringing this citation to my attention.
87
1560
1585
1615
1645
1675
1715
Frans Huys
Hans Liefrinck I
Michiel Coxie I
Frans Floris
Philips Galle
Lambert Lombard
Cornelis Cort
Hieronymus Cock
Aegidius Sadeler II
Johannes Wierix
Hieronymus Wierix
Raphael Sadeler I
Gerard de Jode I
Philips Galle
Maarten de Vos
Jan Sadeler I
Hieronymus Wierix
Philips Galle
Raphael Sadeler I
Theodoor Galle
Cornelis Galle I
Pieter de Jode I
Crispijn de Passe the Elder
Peter Paul Rubens
Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert
Frans van den Wyngaerde
Cornelis Galle II
Paulus Pontius
Pieter de Jode II
Jan Meyssens
Anthony van Dyck
Peter Paul Rubens
Abraham van Diepenbeeck
Jan Meyssens
Pieter de Jode II
Cornelis Galle II
Jan van der Bruggen
Pierre Louis van Schuppen
Richard Collin
Gérard Edelinck
Filibert Bouttats the Younger
Frans van Stampart
Franz Ertinger
Michiel Heylbroeck
Peter Tillemans
Robert van Audenaerde
Arnold van Westerhout
Michael van der Gucht
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
Figure 22: The top ten most central members of the Flemish printmaking network in
the years 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, and 1715, raked by their degree centrality (BM
dataset)
88
Much as Goltzius did in the Dutch network of 1585, Hieronymus Cock unsurprisingly
dominated the Flemish network of 1550. The other top-ranking participants in that
year were either Cock’s artistic sources (Lambert Lombard, Frans Floris, Pieter Bruegel
the Elder,Michiel Coxie) or engravers with whomhe contracted (Cornelis Cort, Philips
Galle).56 By 1585, the Flemish network had transitioned from a unipolar one with Cock
at the center, to a multi-centric network with a large array of engraver/publishers who
had worked for either Cock or Plantin early in their careers, but then transitioned
into publishing works by themselves and after others. These included Jan and Rapahel
Sadeler, Philips Galle (a former student of Cock’s), Hieronymus and Johannes Wierix,
and Gerard de Jode. Like the transition underwent by the Dutch network around 1610,
the Flemish network trended towards amore decentralized structure as the overall skill
level of its inhabitants increased. While one or two well-connected hub individuals
might have maintained their dominance for a few decades, the small number of new
printmakers that they enabled soon were influential enough to become hubs in their
own right — albeit smaller in scale, and with more competition.
This smaller scale may explain the predominance of printmaking families among
the list of central Flemish print producers like the Wierixes, the De Jodes the Galles,
or the Sadelers.57 They all established businesses that were able to produce massive,
multi-generational stocks of plates.58 With few newcomers in the seventeenth century
tempted to try their luck at starting an engraving or publishing practice in Antwerp,
already established firms were easily sustained over multiple generations.
56. Joris vanGrieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan van der Stock,flieronymusCock: TheRenaissance in Print (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 30–36.
57. The Sadeler family will be discussed at greater length in sections 3.4.1 and 4.4.3.
58. For example, Orenstein counts around 1,000 distinct plates ofered byCock, 1,700 by theWierixes,
and almost 3,700 by the Galle family; Orenstein, “The Shift from Antwerp,” 48.
89
The Galle family is an excellent example. Philips Galle, who was born in Haarlem
but worked for Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp, acquired citizenship in the Flemish city
in 1571 and established his own printmaking workshop and publishing house there. He
filled a gap left after Cock’s death in 1571, specializing in learned humanist allegories
and depictions of mythologies.59 Galle thrived in Antwerp, and produced prints at
a far greater rate than he ever had in Haarlem. This is likely because he stopped
cutting plates by himself, and began to outsource both the cutting of plates as well
as the drafting of print designs to specialized artists.60 Like so many others, Galle
professionalized his print production process by creating a locally-centralized network
of artistic labor.
In addition to his own engravings, Philips published works by his own sons
Theodoor and Cornelis, the Wierix brothers, the Collaerts, as well as the young
Hendrick Goltzius, who commemorated his mentor with an engraved portrait when
he left to establish his Haarlem studio in 1582.61 (Figure 23) Theodoor took control
of the workshop around 1600, and continued to produce from both his father’s stock,
reissuing many engravings originally produced in the late sixteenth century.62 Under
Theodoor’s leadership, the Galle press also began to work more closely with Plantin,
accepting more commissions from the book publisher than Philips had. Theodoor’s
own son Johannes would continue selling old Galle family prints well into the latter
half of the seventeenth century. Philips’ second son, Cornelis, was also well-placed to
59. Orenstein, “The Shift from Antwerp,” 49.
60. Manfred Sellink, “Philips Galle (1537-1612): Engraver and Print Publisher in Haarlem and Antwerp”
(PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit, 1997), 18–22.
61. See section 2.5.1.
62. Sellink, “Philips Galle,” 38–39.
90
take advantage of printmaking demand by the Rubens workshop, making a name for
himself through his reproductions after the master painter.63 (Figure 24)
The descendants of Gerard de Jode appreciated the same dynastic benefits. Like
Galle, De Jode was born in the northern Netherlands, but established himself in
Antwerp by 1547 as a master in the Guild of St. Luke. There, De Jode specialized in
publishing original map engravings as well as maps cut by Jan and Lucas van Doetecum,
as well as reprints of earlier maps, most notably Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum orbis
terrarum of 1564. Gerard’s son Pieter (I) studied with Goltzius in Haarlem, but would
return to Antwerp by 1599, where he produced a wealth of book illustrations for
Plantin and for Jacob Cats, and reproductive works after Rubens, Van Dyck, and
other Antwerp painters. Pieter’s son (also named Pieter) would continue in his father’s
and grandfather’s footsteps, continuing to make his own new engravings (particularly
reproductions of Van Dyck portraits) while publishing old plates from the family
stock.64
More so than any of their counterparts in the northern Netherlands, these Flem-
ish printmaking families were able to establish long-lived dynasties that dominated
Antwerp print publishing for more than a century. Without the persistent influx of
new talent and competition into Antwerp, these established Flemish families could
easilymaintain their businesses by passing down artistic knowledge, social connections,
and (perhaps most importantly), large inventories of plates that provided a stable
foundation for young heirs to the business.
This concentrated size of the Flemish print network may also explain why it
suddenly re-centralized after the turn of the century. Starting around 1625, the
63. Cornelis would also later travel in Rome and Florence; Sellink, “Philips Galle,” 39.
64. On theDe Jode dynasty, seeHollstein,Dutch andfflemish, 9:200–220; Carl Depauw andGer Luijten,
Anthony Van Dyck as a Printmaker (Antwerp: Antwerpen Open, 1999), 376–379.
91
Figure 23: Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Philips fia͜e, 1582. Engraving, 22.3 x 14.5 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
92
Figure 24: Cornelis Galle, after Peter Paul Rubens, Ecce flomo, published by Theodoor
Galle, after 1612. Engraving, 37 x 28 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
93
gradual decline in Flemish centralization reversed sharply, if briefly, to become more
centralized than ever before for about two decades — a surge that was far greater
than expected for a similar network of that size. (Figure 14) As we saw during a
similar centralization spike in the Dutch network, exceptional individuals could have
a powerful impact on their regional printmaking networks. Sitting at the heart of
this re-centered Flemish network were Rubens and Van Dyck, both of whom had a
long, sustained engagement with printmakers.65 Sweeping print series projects like
Van Dyck’s fficonographie or Jan Meyssens’ Theatrum principum virorumque engaged the
services of multiple engravers.66 Rubens, of course, is famed for his sometimes-rocky
relationships with a long line of engravers, including Lucas Vosterman, Paulus Pontius,
and Christofel Jegher.
During this period of greatest network concentration, the number of prints being
made surged with no accompanying increase in the number of actual participants
in the network. While Flemish printmakers and publishers were producing more
prints than their northern counterparts at this time, note they did so with little more
than half the number of participants in the network. At the same time that the
United Provinces were experiencing an economic boom that attractedmany artists, the
southern Netherlands’ economy was still sufering from the efects of Spanish invasion
at the end of the sixteenth century. The closure of the Scheldt river and the exodus of
prosperous Protestant merchants had led to economic stagnation in Antwerp. Though
shining stars like Rubens and Van Dyck, not to mention engravers like Aegidus Sadeler,
could still win international commissions, Antwerp itself was not an attractor for
65. Hout and Huvenne, Copyright Rubens; Ann Diels, The Shadow of Rubens: Print Publishing in 17th-
Century Antwerp: Prints by the flistory Painters AbrahamVanDiepenbeeck, Cornelis Schut and Erasmus Que͜inus
ffiffi, trans. Michael Hoyle and Irene Schaudies (Turnhout: Royal Library of Belgium, 2009).
66. Joaneath A. Spicer, “Anthony van Dyck’s fficonography: An Overview of Its Preparation,” Studies in
the flistory of Art 46 (January 1994): 325–364.
94
young artistic talent, be they printmakers or painters. In a small network with few
new entrants, a handful of influential individuals could still maintain the kinds of
highly centralized positions that were no longer available in the more distributed
northern provinces. This focused and demanding environment would have favored
highly professionalized printmakers who were able to produce prints consistently and
prolifically.
2.6 Conclusion: Simple Rules for a Complex System
This chapter has examined multiple dimensions of this network: from its basic size in
terms of nodes and connections, to the structural characteristic of centralization, to
the attractiveness of well-connected nodes. Each one of these dimensions presents a
distinct view of the environment that printmakers like Goltzius, Hondius, Suyderhoef,
the Galles, or the De Jodes inhabited. Some of the most central members of these
networks were familiar names to historians of art and printmaking, however even those
well-known careers are better understood when set within a larger context. Both the
lasting influence of Hendrick Goltzius’ Haarlem studio, and the creative decisions of
the engraver/publisher Hendrick Hondius, are enriched when we ask how they may
have impacted the structure of the rest of the printmaking network, and how that
network in turn may have afected their own actions. Moreover, printmakers like Jonas
Suyderhoef exemplify how certain structurally-important individuals may have gone
unacknowledged by the art historical canon.
In one sense, this analysis has confirmed Parshall and Landau’s core argument:
that the highly centralized form of print production originated by Hieronymus Cock,
Hans Liefrinck, and other sixteenth-century publishers would govern printmaking well
into the future. This system of professionalized publication would tend to favor well-
connected individuals able to marshall commissions, clients, and labor from a wide
95
spectrum of the market. However, network analysis has also revealed that the ramifica-
tions of this simple rule could be unexpectedly complex. With a handful of exceptions
where combinations of economic circumstances and extraordinary individuals like
Hendrick Goltzius or Peter Paul Rubens caused unique spikes in centralization, many
of the apparently major changes in Dutch and Flemish printmaking centralization
were simply manifestations of the gradual rise and fall in the number of active
printmakers over this period. This approach ofers a crucial context for future
studies of individual printmakers, while also demonstrating how network analysis can
illuminate dimensions and scales of historical events that are otherwise di cult for art
historians to conceptualize. How this system played out on the continental scale will
be the subject of the next chapter.
96
3 The European Context: The Netherlands and Interna-
tional Printmaking Collaboration
The previous chapter explored a key aspect of the regional structures of Dutch and
Flemish print production networks, only considering the relationships of diferent
print producers within those two subsections of the larger European community. But
prints from the Low Countries, much like paintings from that region, were produced
within an international network of artists, dealers, and patrons. What light can
network analysis shed on the international dynamics of early modern print production?
In this chapter, I will consider the place of these Dutch and Flemish printmaking
communities within the larger European world of artistic prints, once again focusing
on the potential historical professional networks that we can infer from surviving
print impressions. Did Dutch and Flemish printmaking communities, as a whole,
trend towards more internal, or more external collaboration between 1550 and 1750?
One may locate a strong international strain of printmaking in Dutch printmaking
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as printmakers like Hendrick Goltzius
looked to foreign artists for design inspiration, or found favorable publishers and
marketplaces in foreign cities. However, this internationalized print production
existed alongside a domestic turn in Dutch printmaking in the same period. How do
these communities’ shifts compare to those in other prominent printmaking centers in
Italy, Germany, or France? Moreover, how varied were individuals’ strategies when it
came to domestic and international collaboration? Did individual artists, printmakers,
or publishers distinguish themselves by working predominantly with international or
97
local collaborators? Case studies will crucially illuminate how diverse practices of
international print production were in this period in the context of these overall trends.
This chapter will also return to questions of the longue durée history of printmak-
ing. Were these changes in the balance of international versus domestic production
determined by specific historical events? Or were these patterns largely subject to
larger, longer-duration structural incentives, like the gradually changing balance of
printmakers working in Amsterdam versus Rome? Although dramatic shifts in the
amount of foreign printmaking collaborations by both Dutch and Flemish artists
between 1550–1750 can be found, this chapter will show that similar patterns in
other countries suggest that many of these changes can be explained by longer-term
demographic changes and the relative maturity of diferent regional print production
communities. That said, it will also be shown that there are occasions where the mere
size of these communities cannot predict how inwardly- or outwardly-facing their print
production was. It is in these discrepancies that we may locate the influence of outside
events on artists’ ability to travel or work across long distances.
3.1 Background: Dutch and Flemish Print Production Across Europe
There is no better means whereby the painter himself can make his
renowned name known: Namely, that he sometimes, using time and
diligence for this purpose, engraves one of his celebrated compositions of
drawing in print: Because it can go through the whole world, coming into
every art lovers’ hands, while paintings almost always remain in one place…1
1. “Daer is oock noch een ander middel, waer door den Schilder hem selven een Vermaerden Naem
kan maecken: Namentlijck dat hy somtijts, tijt ende vlijt daer toe aenwent, om eenige van sijn feste
ordinantien en teyckeningen in print uyt te geven: Want vermits die de geheele Werelt door-wandelen,
en in alle Liehebbers handen komen, en dat de Schidleryen meest altijt maer in eene plaets blijven…”;
Willem Goeree, ffinleydingh tot de practijck der al-gemeene schilder-konst (Middelburg, 1670), 125, http : / /
archive.org/details/inleydinghtotdep00goer
98
…release your works freely into print, so that your name will sooner fly
over the world. Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, though wondrous
painters, obtained their greatest fame from engraving.2
Regarding [prints’] efect: what fame is to the ear, theirs is to the eye.
Painting has but one result, but engraving hundreds. Fame can tell the
many wonders of painting in its absence; but engraving makes itself present
everywhere; it flies the world over, as it sounds the echoing trumpet of
renown.3
Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Dutch art commentators Willem
Goeree, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Gérard de Lairesse uniformly agreed on the
power of prints to transmit an artist’s images far and wide. Thanks to the relative ease
of moving finished impressions, prints had been a mainstay of the international art
market in Europe for more than a century and a half. At the renowned Frankfurt book
fair, prominent book publishers even included special sections in their inventory lists
devoted to artistic prints and engraved maps.4 The consumption of prints was clearly
internationalized by the early 1500s. To what extent, however, was their production
internationalized? When were engravers in the Low Countries inclined to make
reproductions after foreign artists, or to work with foreign publishers?
Current histories of Dutch printmaking frequently contrast the relatively interna-
tional character of Dutch printmaking in the late sixteenth-century with the meteoric
2. “…laet dan vry uwe werken in print uitkomen, zoo zal uwen naem te spoediger al de werelt over
vliegen. Albert Durer en Lukas van Leyden, wondere Schilders, hebben nochtans hun grootste gerucht
door het graefyzer verkreegen.”; Samuel van Hoogstraten, ffinleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst
(Rotterdam, 1678), 195, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t51g2037s
3. “Wat haare uitwerking aangaat, zy is voor het gezicht het geen de Faam voor het gehoor is. De
Schilderkonst heeft maar een Origineel, maar de Graveerkunde honderden. De Faam kan van de
Schilderkonst veele wonderen vertellen in haar afweezen: maar de Graveerkunde maakt zich overal
tegenwoordig. Zy vliegt zo wel de geheele waereld over, als de klank der galmende trompet des
Geruchts.”; Gérard de Lairesse, firoot schilderboek: waar in de schilderkonst in al haar deelen..., 2nd ed.
(Amsterdam, 1712), 2:372–373, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t5j97bv64
4. David Paisey, “Prints at the Frankfurt Book Fairs, 1568-1600,” Print Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2006): 54–55.
99
rise of “domestic” imagery between 1580 and 1620. Indeed, the early history of Dutch
printmaking is tightly interwoven with international influences. Lucas van Leyden
attracted international attention for his masterful handling of the burin. In Italy,
Marcantonio Raimondi frequently adopted Lucas’ silvery landscape backgrounds for
use in his own prints, such as the Climbers of 1510 that melds a quotation from Lucas
with figures derived from Michelangelo’s renowned drawing of the Battle of Cascina.5
(Figure 25)
Figure 25: (left) Lucas van Leyden designed and engraved, Mohammed and the Monk
Sergius, 1508. Engraving. British Museum, London. (Image © Trustees of the British
Museum.) (right) Marcantonio Raimondi after Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Climbers,
1510–1520. Engraving, British Museum, London. (Image © Trustees of the British
Museum.)
5. On Marcantonio’s quotation of Lucas, see Bernadine Ann Barnes, Michelangelo in Print:
Reproductions as Response in the Sixteenth-Century (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 16.
100
Lucas also gained the attention of the Nuremberg master Albrecht Dürer, who
made a point to visit the Leiden artist during a journey to the Netherlands in 1520.
Prints played a variety of roles on this trip. Dürer had brought not only his acute eye to
the Netherlands (he produced many sketches while there), but also a sizable inventory
of woodcut and engraving impressions. He carried no less than thirty four copies of
his Sma͜ Passion series, and, according to his diary, gifted a complete set of his printed
oeuvre on several occasions.6 Dürer sold many of these prints to pay expenses for his
trip. Others, however, served as objects of mutual gift exchange with distinguished
hosts. Like many gifts, these were often strategic. For example, Dürer gave a complete
set of impressions to the regent the of Netherlands, Marguerite of Austria, in the hopes
of strengthening his own contacts with the new Hapsburg emperor, Charles V.
Dürer engaged inmutual artistic gift giving with several Netherlandish artists, using
print impressions as well as the occasional drawn portrait as a conduit to exchange visual
sources and to signal mutual esteem.7 Tommaso Vincidor, a former pupil of Raphael
who had moved to Antwerp in 1520, received a complete edition of Dürer’s prints.8
Dürer also made contact with the world landscape painter Joachim Patinir, gifting the
Netherlandish artist several of his own prints, as well as some impressions of works by
his German pupil Hans Baldung Grien.9 Significantly, Dürer would exchange 8 florins’
worth of his own prints for a complete set of Lucas’ own oeuvre when the two met in
6. GeorgesMarlier andMarnix Gijsen, eds.,AlbrechtDürer: Diary offlis Journey to theNetherlands, 1520-
1521 (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1971).
7. OnDürer and artistic gift giving, see ArnoldNesselrath, “Raphael’s Gift toDürer,”MasterDrawings
31, no. 4 (December 1993): 376.
8. Dürer would also paint his portrait; Marlier and Gijsen, Albrecht Dürer: Diary, 19.
9. Dagmar Eichberger, “Dürer and the Netherlands: Patterns of Exchange and Mutual Admiration,”
in The Essential Dürer, ed. Larry Silver and Jefrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010), 153.
101
Leiden on June 10th, 1520.10 The value of these gifts to Lucas is perhaps best measured
by the subtle correspondences to be found between his own Passion series, engraved
one year later, and Dürer’s works.11
With the rise of large print production houses and the professionalization of
engraving in themid-sixteenth century, collaborative print production began to take on
international dimensions. Some Dutch printmakers had built thriving careers creating
engravings for Italian painters in Venice and Rome, enjoying the fruits of northern
Europeans’ reputation for printmaking skill that had been promulgated by Giorgio
Vasari.12 Cornelis Cort, in Rome from 1565–1578, found great success as a printmaker
for major Italian painters such as Titian (Figure 26), Giulio Clovio, GirolamoMuziano,
and Federico Zuccaro.13 In addition to German and Italian centers, the mid-sixteenth-
century publishing house of Hieronymus Cock, Aux Quatre Vents, proved especially
influential to multiple generations of Dutch printmakers. As noted in the previous
chapter, during his early career in Haarlem between 1557–1570, Philips Galle engraved
several prints to be published in Antwerp by Cock.14
Galle’s experience would be mirrored in the following generation of Dutch print-
makers. Early in his career, Hendrick Goltzius produced many reproductive prints for
Galle after a wide range of artists. Goltzius lived in Haarlem while Galle remained
10. Marlier and Gijsen, Albrecht Dürer: Diary, 29.
11. Karin Orchard, Albrecht Dürer und Lucas van Leyden: ein Vergleich; 14 September - 28 Oktober 1990
(Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1990), 14–15.
12. David Landau, “Vasari, Prints and Prejudice,”OxfordArt Journal 6, no. 1 (January 1983): 3–10; Sharon
Gregory, Vasari and the Renaissance print (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 2–4.
13. Manfred Sellink, Cornelis Cort: Accomplished Plate-Cutter ͒omfloorn inflo͜and (Rotterdam:Museum
Boymans-Van Beuningen, 1994); Gert Jan van der Sman, “Dutch and Flemish Printmakers in Rome 1565-
1600,” Print Quarterly 22, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 251–252.
14. See section 2.5.4.
102
Figure 26: Cornelis Cort, after Titian’s altarpiece in S. Salvatore, Venice, published by
Antonio Lafréri, Annunciation, c. 1566. Engraving, 41.5 x 47.6 cm. British Museum,
London. (Image © Trustees of the British Museum.)
103
based in Antwerp, working via correspondence much as Galle had done for Cock in
his early years. Goltzius would continue this model of remote collaboration even after
setting up his own independent studio in 1582. The collaboration between Hendrick
Goltzius and Bartholomeus Spranger, court painter to Rudolf II, illustrates well how
the design, cutting, andmarketing of a print could easily take on an international scope.
In 1585 or 1586, Spranger sent a large, fully-finished drawing (Figure 27) from the Prague
court toHaarlem, whereGoltzius had recently established his own independent studio.
By 1587, Goltzius had transformed Spranger’s drawing into a masterful large-scale print
dedicated to Wolfgang Rump, an oicial at the Prague court. (Figure 28) Early proofs
of the print suggest that multiple versions were sent back and forth between Prague
and Haarlem before the print was finalized.15 This print would be marketed at the
international Frankfurt book fair in September of that same year.16
Hieronymus Cock also exerted a lasting influence on printmaking in the Northern
Netherlandswith a series of Flemish country scenes (Figure 29) after the so-called “Mas-
ter of the Small Landscapes” (engraved by Johannes and Lucas van Doetecum).17 These
unassuming prints inspired multiple generations of Flemish and Dutch printmakers
to produce both direct copies and inspired renditions, and played a key role in the
development of both the printed and painted Dutch landscape tradition. In the first
15. Surviving proofs by Jan Muller bear hand-drawn corrections by Spranger, suggesting the painter
maintained close involvement in the print production process; Jan Piet Filedt Kok, “Jan Harmensz.
Muller as Printmaker — I,” Print Quarterly 11, no. 3 (September 1994): 233; also see Annette Strech,
“Spranger inventor: Überlegungen zu Entstehung und Funktion von Stichen nach Sprangers Werken,”
in Rudolf ffiffi, Prague and the World: Papers ͒om the ffinternational Conference, Prague, 2-4 September, 1997, ed.
Lubomír Konečný, Beket Bukovinská, and Ivan Muchka (Prague: Artefactum, 1998), 201–203.
16. Leeflang, fioltzius, 82–83, cat. 28.
17. Cock also served as a northern conduit for Italianate landscapes, publishing several print series
depicting Italian topography and Roman ruins; Boudewijn Bakker and Michael Hoyle, “Pictores, Adeste!
Hieronymus Cock Recommending His Print Series,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the flistory of Art
33, nos. 1/2 (January 2007): 60–61.
104
Figure 27: Bartholomeus Spranger, TheWedding ffeast of Cupid and Psyche, 1575–1587. Pen
in brown, brush in grey, heightened with white gouache over a sketch in black chalk on
paper coated with a light grey preparation, indented for transfer, 39.7 cm. x 83.4 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Figure 28: Hendrick Goltzius, after Bartholomeus Spranger, TheWedding ffeast of Cupid
and Psyche, 1587. Engraving, 43.5 cm. x 86.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
105
decades of the seventeenth century, Haarlem printmakers Claesz Jansz Visscher, Esaias
van de Velde I, Willem Buytewech, Hercules Segers, and Jan van de Velde II, began to
produce their own versions of the local, rustic landscape view heavily inspired by the
Sma͜Landscapes (Figure 30 ).18 These images, which highlighted specific local landmarks
as well as more generalized “Dutch” views, featured distinctive elements such as rolling
dunes, canals, and signs of local industry such as linen bleaching.
This local turn in printmaking has been connected with the coalescing of a Dutch
national identity during the course of the revolt against Spain between 1568–1648.19
All of these printmakers joined the Haarlem guild in 1612, forming a critical mass of
pioneering talent who each took up the printed landscape as their subject in one form
or another. These landscapes ranged in specificity and style. They could take the form
of specific locations, such as Esaias van de Velde’s rendering of the fort at Tholen, a
structure that may have held particular importance for viewers seeing it just a few years
after the signing of a temporary truce between the United Provinces and Spain in 1609.
(Figure 30). Other landscape prints by these Haarlem pioneers were more generalized,
albeit indisputably “Dutch”, views. (Figure 31) Nor was the Flemish influence on the
Dutch landscape tradition limited to seemingly-real landscapes: Jan van de Velde II
18. On the relationship of the Sma͜ Landscapes to the printed landscape tradition in Haarlem, see
Alexandra Onuf, “Envisioning Netherlandish Unity: Claes Visscher’s 1612 Copies of the Small Landscape
Prints,” Journal of flistorians of Netherlandish Art 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–13, doi:10 . 5092 / jhna . 2011 . 3 . 1 .
4; Alexandra Onuf, “Old Plates, New Impressions: Local Landscape Prints in Seventeenth-Century
Antwerp,” The Art Bu͜etin 96, no. 4 (December 2014): 424–440.
19. David Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (London: British Museum
Publications, 1980), 11–15; Catherine Levesque, Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century flo͜and:
The flaarlem Print Series and Dutch ffidentity (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994), ch. 6.
106
would commonly mix fantastic landscapes (Figure 32) in extended print series that also
included both specific landmarks as well as generalized Dutch scenes.20
Figure 29: Johannes and Lucas vanDoetecum after theMaster of the Small Landscapes,
Vi͜age Road with Draw We͜, published 1559/1561. Etching, retouched with engraving,
13.3 x 19.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery
of Art, Washington.)
This international flow of images and influence did not occur in a vacuum. In the
late sixteenth century, the northern Netherlands entered a golden age of economic
growth thanks to their unmatched control of international sea trade around the
world. As their prosperity increased, many Dutch authors, musicians, and artists
sought to add internationalizing elements to their works, as a way of asserting Dutch
20. Robert Fucci, “Arcadia Unbound: Early Dutch Landscape Prints and the Amenissimae aliquot
regiunculae by Jan van de Velde II,” Art in Print: The filobal Journal of Prints and ffideas 4, no. 5 (2015): 4.
http://artinprint.org/article/arcadia-unbound/.
107
Figure 30: Esaias van de Velde, ffort with defenses at Tholen on the Scheldt, 1615–1616.
Etching, 8.3 x 16.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Figure 31: Jan van deVelde II,WinterLandscape, c. 1615–1646. Etching. NationalGallery
of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.)
108
Figure 32: Jan van de Velde II, October from the series Twelve Months, 1616. Etching.
National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art,
Washington.)
109
cultural legitimacy in the broader world of early modern Europe.21 Several waves of
Dutch artists also traveled south to study and paint in Italy, establishing an expatriate
community in Rome.22 Prominent Dutch and Flemish portraitists found many patrons
in the English court, and printmakers from the Low Countries were in particular
demand in London. Likewise, foreign publishers and print sellers may have found the
thriving Northern Netherlands a particularly attractive market.23
The political environment may not have been as conducive to the flow of prints
across international borders, however. The start of the Dutch revolt against Spain
in 1568 may have made it more di cult for artists in the Low Countries to conduct
international business, from the early transmission of contracts and drawn designs
to the large shipments of finished impressions required for a successful printmaking
business. At the same time, the flourishing economy supported a blossoming print
industry in Amsterdam in particular.24 With avenues to international collaboration cut
of, and an increasing amount of domestic supply and demand in centers like Haarlem
andAmsterdam, Dutch printmakers and publishersmay have been encouraged tomake
more domestic connections than ever before. Now, rather than having to turn to
international partners to produce prints, Dutch artists, printmakers, and publishers
could increasingly work with their own countrymen. In chapter 2, we found that
21. On the interest in legitimizing Dutch culture on the European stage, see AlisonMcNeil Kettering,
The Dutch Arcadia: Pastoral Art and ffits Audience in the fiolden Age (Totowa: Allanheld and Schram, 1983).
22. On seventeenth-centuryDutch artists’ interest in Italy, see Peter Schatborn,Drawn toWarmth: 17th-
CenturyDutchArtists in ffitaly, in collab. with Judith Verberne (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2001); Laurie B.
Harwood, Christopher Brown, and Anne Charlotte Steland, ffinspired by ffitaly: Dutch Landscape Painting,
1600-1700 (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002).
23. Paul Hoftijzer, “Antwerp: Books, Publishing and Cultural Production Before 1585,” in Urban
Achievement in Early Modern Europe: fiolden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, ed. Patrick Karl
O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 251–252.
24. Ibid., 249.
110
a flourishing Dutch art market, both in Amsterdam as well as in smaller towns like
Utrecht and Delft, appears to have supported a more decentralized print production
network than had existed in the late sixteenth century.25 It is possible that this
same decentralization may have spurred more domestic collaboration as well. To help
illuminate how the balance of these incentives changed between 1550–1750, we can once
again turn to network analysis.
3.2 Methodology: Measuring International Interaction
When, and to what extent, do actors who belong to one category make connections to
each other, versus to actors in another? This is a common question in network analysis,
and can be measured by using the group-external/group-internal index (hereafter EI
index).26 The EI index measures the balance between the number connections actors
madewithin a specified group (in this case, nationality) versus those theymade to actors
outside that group.27 (Figure 33) This index can work at several scales. It can be used to
quantify an entire group’s propensity to connect with other groups (e.g. Dutch artists
connecting to non-Dutch artists). A positive EI index indicates that nodes within that
group made most of their connections to nodes belonging to other groups, while a
25. See section 2.4.
26. See, for example, Godinho de Matos et al., “Peer Influence in the Difusion of the iPhone 3G over
a Large Social Network,” Management ffinformation Systems Quarterly 38, no. 4 (May 28, 2014): 15, doi:10.
2139/ssrn.2053420.
27. The EI index comprises the ratio of the diference between the number of a group’s external (ne)
and internal (ni) links to the total number of links the group makes:
ϵ =
ne − ni
ne + ni
Originally proposed in David Krackhardt and Robert N. Stern, “Informal Networks and Organiza-
tional Crises: An Experimental Simulation,” Social Psychology Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1, 1988): 127–129,
doi:10.2307/2786835; also see Hanneman and Riddle, ffintroduction to Social NetworkMethods, 128–132.
111
negative EI index indicates those nodes made most of their connections internally.
One can also measure the EI index of a single individual, comparing the number of
connections they make to members of their own group, versus to those belonging to
another.
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Group A
10 external : 50 internal
EI index = −0.67
Group B
10 external : 8 internal
EI index = 0.11
Group C
0 external : 30 internal
EI index = −1
Figure 33: A network with three groups of 20 nodes each. Group A is densely
interconnected, so while its members do make some external connections, by in large
they connect to each other. Therefore, that group has a negative EI index. Nodes in
group B, on the other hand, make a slim majority of their connections externa͜y, giving
that group a positive index. Nodes in group C connect exclusively to each other, and
so that group has the lowest possible EI index of -1.
Just as network centrality could be measured at diferent points in time in the
Dutch and Flemish printmaking communities in the previous chapter, an EI index can
be measured for each regional/national community in the European network in this
period.28 Demarcating the “borders” of nationality in the early modern period is an
inherently tricky problem, perhaps no more so than in the case of the Low Countries
28. See sections 2.2 on data, and 2.3 on inferring production networks.
112
during the age of the Eighty Years War.29 The Dutch 1581 Act of Abjuration (in the
wake of the Union of Utrecht two years prior) marks the oicial schism between
the seventeen United Provinces in the northern Netherlands and the territories of
the Spanish-controlled southern Netherlands. And while this break is a convenient
historical landmark, it was soon followed by large waves of emigration from the south
as Protestants and other non-Catholics fled religious persecution in Antwerp for the
relatively more tolerant north. Many of these migrants were painters like Gillis van
Coninxloo, Clara Peeters, and Roelandt Savery, who had an abiding impact on artistic
development in the United Provinces.
Flemish printmakers also emigrated to the north, including Nicolaes de Bruyn and
Jan van Londerseel, both of whom moved to Rotterdam (Londerseel by 1610, and De
Bruyn by 1617).30 As noted earlier, Flemish landscapes were a crucial inspiration for the
popular idiomof localDutch countryside print series that were popularized byHaarlem
printmakers in the 1610s.31 To split artists from these two countries can be an arbitrary
division.32
29. On the challenge of constructing the right national context for Netherlandish printmakers
in particular, see Jan Piet Filedt Kok, “Early Netherlandish Prints in Dresden. Review: Tobias
Pfeifer-Helke, Mit den Gezeiten: Brühe Druckgraphik der Niderlande: Katalog der niederländischen
Druckgraphik von den Anfängen bis um 1540/50 in der Sammlung des Dresender Kupferstick-
Kambinetts,” Print Quarterly 32, no. 3 (September 2015): 348.
30. Peter van der Coelen, Patriarchs, Angels & Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking
͒om Lucas Van Leyden to Rembrandt, Studies in Dutch Graphic Art 2 (Amsterdam: Museum Het
Rembrandthuis, Rembrandt Information Centre, 1996), 24.
31. On this influence, see Eric Jan Sluijter, “On Brabant Rubbish, Economic Competition, Artistic
Rivalry, and the Growth of the Market for Paintings in the First Decades of the Seventeenth Century,”
Journal of flistorians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 2 (December 31, 2009), doi:10 . 5092 / jhna . 2009 . 1 .
2 . 4; Stephanie Porras, “Repeat Viewing: Hendrick Hondius’s ‘Eigies’,” in Picturing the Netherlandish
Canon, ed. Joanna Woodall (London: Courauld Institute of Art, 2013), http:/ /www.courtauld.org.uk/
netherlandishcanon/groups/essay01.html; Onuf, “Old Plates, New Impressions.”
32. It is also worth noting that, for many foreign patrons, “Dutch” or “Flemish” was a distinction
without a diference. See, for example, Italian disagreement over whether Dutch painter Gerrit van
Honthorst should be referred to as Flemish (“Gerardo Fiammingo”) or Dutch (“Gerardo Olandese”):
113
On the other hand, the distinction was important indeed for Dutch guild leaders
who feared that the sudden influx of well-trained artisans from Antwerp at the turn
of the century would flood the Dutch market. As a result, they planned regulations
to protect native Dutch artists from this new competition.33 The division has also re-
mained undeniably useful for art historians, and is reflected in the datasets used for this
analysis. Both the BM and the RKM database diferentiate between “Dutch”/“Noord-
Nederlands” and “Flemish”/“Zuid-Nederlands” artists.34 For the purposes of this
analysis, I will accept the present database classifications.35 While this is an imperfect
compromise, a benefit to this computational framework is that future, alternative
classification schemes for artist nationality may be quickly substituted in this analysis,
and their ramifications compared to the results presented here.
3.3 Results: Catalysts and Sudden Shifts
Figure 34 plots the changing EI index forDutch, Flemish, French, British, German, and
Italian printmaking communities between 1550–1750, comparing the trends observed
from both the BM andRKMdatasets. As in the study of centralization in chapter 2, we
find that both museum databases return roughly equivalent results for both the Dutch
and Flemish printmaking communities. Expanding our scope to look at other major
Matthew D. Lincoln, “Sources for Gerrit van Honthorst’s Italian Nickname,” Source: Notes in the flistory
of Art, Spring 2016,
33. Sluijter, “On Brabant Rubbish.”
34. While the RKM assigns only one nationality per artist, the BM allows artists to take multiple
nationalities, though only six printmaking artists have been tagged as both “Dutch” and “Flemish”:
Nicolas de Bruyn, Daniel van den Bremden, Egbert van Panderen, Gijsbert van Veen, and Hans Bol.
35. Both the RKM and BM begin to classify artists born in the Austrian Netherlands (post-1715) as
“Belgian/Begisch”, however there are only a small handful of such artists whose work falls into the 1550–
1750 period examined here. For the purposes of this analysis, these few artists will be treated as Flemish.
114
Dutch Flemish
English French
German Italian
−1.0
−0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
−1.0
−0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
−1.0
−0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750
E
I 
In
d
ex
dataset BM RKM
Figure 34: The EI Index for Dutch, Flemish, French, British, German, and Italian
printmaking communities between 1550–1750. At 1, all connections made by an actor
are to actors outside their national group. At 0, they have an equal number of internal
and external connections. At -1, all their connections are to actors within their national
group.
115
European regions, the BM and RKM datasets also roughly agree on the EI index for
French, German, and Italian print production. The only major discrepancy between
the two datasets is for the EI index of the English printmaking community. Given the
vast superiority of the BM’s holdings in English prints (Table 1), the trend observed
from the BM data is likely more representative than that observed from the RKM.
Dutch artists primarily connected to foreign collaborators up until the 1570s,
when they shifted quickly to a roughly even split between domestic versus foreign
connections. After this sudden shift, Dutch artists and printmakers continued to favor
mostly domestic collaborators, hovering around an EI index of -0.5, i.e. making at least
75% of their connections to fellow Dutchmen. The Flemish printmaking community
presents a rough inverse of this pattern, making most of its connections internally in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before quickly shifting around 1675 to
majority-external connections.
These results support the hypothesis that Dutch printmaking experienced a do-
mestic “turn” not only in subject and style, but also in the infrastructure of print
production itself. Dutch artists rapidly shifted in the late sixteenth century to having
their designs reproduced by fellow Dutch printmakers and publishers, rather than by
foreign engravers. Even more dramatically, Dutch printmakers who had worked almost
exclusively with foreign publishers like Hieronymus Cock increasingly began to work
more withDutch publishers, many of whomhad trained as engravers themselves before
opening their own shops. It is somewhat surprising to note that this turn occurred in
the 1570s, well before the commonly-acknowledged burst of particularly “domestic”
subjects in Haarlem in the 1610s. Even more surprising is how swiftly this landscape of
print production changed. Within just a few years, Dutch artists moved from making
over three-quarters of their connections to foreign sources, to a roughly even split. As
with centralization, changes the EI index, when they do occur, are precipitate.
116
The results for the Southern Netherlandish printmaking community further con-
textualize the changes observed in that community’s centralization in the previous
chapter. Around 1660, shortly after the number of print producers in the south-
ern Netherlands began to decrease (Figure 12), Flemish printmakers and publishers
suddenly began to make a great deal more external connections. It is possible that
Flemish print producers began looking for work and collaborators outside their borders
in response to the general stagnation of the Flemish artistic market in the mid-
seventeenth century.
This evidence aligns with the rise in other Flemish luxury exports the latter half of
the seventeenth century. In an analysis of seventeenth-century Zeeland toll records,
Claartje Rasterhof and Filip Vermeylen found that, due to Antwerp’s general economic
downturn and the comparative strength of the Dutch economy, Flemish artists and
book publishers dramatically increased the amount of paintings, books, and tapestries
they exported via the Northern Netherlands in the wake of the Treaty of Münster.36
These results suggest that producers of artistic prints followed a similar pattern.
However, this analysis grants startling insight into the speed of this impact. Rather
than a gradual change in behavior played out over several generations, the shift was
rapid.
One might point to events at particular points in Dutch and Flemish history to
explain these regions’ changing balance of domestic and international printmaking
collaborations. The end of hostilities in 1648 was, to be sure, a significant milestone in
36. Claartje Rasterhof and Filip Vermeylen, “The Zeeland Connection: The Art Trade Between the
Northern and SouthernNetherlandsDuring the SeventeenthCentury,” inMovingPictures: ffintra-European
Trade in ffimages, 16th-18th Centuries, ed. Neil De Marchi and Sophie Raux (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 136–
140; Rasterhof and Vermeylen suggest that the final destinations of many of these goods were actually
markets in Iberia or the Baltic, which were most easily accessed via Dutch trade ships. Also see Bruno
Blondé and Harald Deceulaer, “The Port of Antwerp and Its Hinterland: Port Traic, Urban Economies
andGovernment Policies in the 17th and 18thCenturies,” inMaritime ffindustries andPublic ffintervention:The
ffourthNorth Seaflistory Conference, 10-20August 1995, ed. Randi Ertesvåg, David J. Starkey, and Anne Tove
Austbø (Stavanger: Stavanger Maritime Museum, 2002), 25–27.
117
the history of the Low Countries. However, it is all too easy overdetermine explana-
tions for changes in these types of social networks based on particular events. Indeed,
we can observe rapid shifts from majority-external to majority-internal printmaking
collaboration in the French and English communities that are quite similar to the
pattern seen in the northern Netherlands. Both the French and English communities
also begin this period making most of their connections externally, but each underwent
their own separate, inward shifts at 1620 and 1650, respectively. The German and
Italian print production networks, on the other hand, began this period internally-
connected, only to trend gradually towards more external connections. Neither the
German nor the Italian printmaking communities made changes as drastic as their
European counterparts.
It seems little coincidence that the regional networks that were primarily inward-
connecting or evenly connecting in the mid-sixteenth century (the southern Nether-
lands, Italy, and Germany) also had some of the longest-established printmaking tra-
ditions, dating back to the late fifteenth century.37 Already possessing well-developed
printmaking infrastructure, those regions may have had relatively self-sustaining print
production networks, and artists were free to choose either domestic or foreign col-
laborators. Aspiring printmakers from areas with smaller, less developed printmaking
communities, on the other hand, would have had little choice but to reach out to foreign
centers with more established printmaking infrastructure.
As the analysis in chapter 2 showed, building up a viable regional production
network took time and resources. Over time, these externally-dependent regions
would begin to cultivate more native talent, knowledge, and physical resources, as
experienced printmakers trained new students and transitioned from making prints
to establishing their own publishing firms. As domestic capacity grew, so too would
37. Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, ch 1.
118
the incentive for artists and printmakers to partner with domestic collaborators. The
result: a shared pattern of a sudden “inward turn” at diferent points in time for the
northern Netherlands, France, and England. Notably, the shifts were most abrupt
in communities that were concentrated in particularly small geographic areas (the
Northern and Southern Netherlands, England), with more gradual changes in the
communities spread across a larger area (Italian, French, and German). This pattern
suggests that larger structural and demographic causes may have been at play.
Indeed, the pattern of early printmaking mastery in Italian and German regions,
giving way in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to concentration in the
Netherlands, France, and England, mirrors the general trends in European urban
populations over this same period. (Figure 8) The share of urban populations living
in Italian and German cities decreased between 1500–1800, while the share living in
French and English cities increased. Dutch urban populations peaked in 1650, the
same time that the Dutch printmaking network had the lowest EI index, i.e. the
greatest preference for internal connections. These observed shifts in international
interaction may have been driven less by particular disruptive historical moments or
artistic movements, and more by gradually building structural incentives powered by
changes in populations and the necessarily-collaborative nature of print production.
Although specific historical events may certainly have afected the ways that
printmakers and publishers from diferent countries worked together, political changes
or military conflicts were short-term happenings that occurred within a landscape
of long-term incentives and population trends. The onset of the Dutch revolt, the
blockade of the Scheldt, the end of the English civil war: each of these events may
have tipped the balance of incentives and sparked a sudden shift in print producers’
organization. However, if these events were necessary to cause these organizational
changes, they were not suȬcient. In other words, the efects of one specific conflict
119
or economic shift alone may not have powered the Dutch and Flemish shifts. Rather,
certain events may have catalyzed the organizational transformation that had already
beenmade possible, and indeed inevitable, by the buildup of incentives from prolonged
international interaction. As in chapter 2, relatively simple network efects resulting
from the gradual buildup of printmaking expertise in diferent regions can ofer a
broader explanation for why the internal/external connecting ratios of each of these
national communities changed in the dramatic way that they did.
3.3.1 Random Networks Revisited: Identifying Disruptive Events
But these shifts were not solely due to gradually changing populations. It is possible
to identify unexpected disruptions that signal the influence of shorter-term historical
events, such as a blockade or a new monarch, that made it easier or more di cult for
print producers to work across international borders.
As just noted in the results above, gradual changes in relative community size (in
this case, the relative printmaking capacity of each of these diferent regions/countries)
could produce dramatic shifts in the share of tiesmadewithin, versus between, diferent
artists. Wewant to diferentiate which EI indices of these communities are to be expected
in any community of that size relative to its neighbors, and which are unexpectedly
high (favoring international connections) or low (favoring domestic).38 These baseline
networks will be created in a manner similar to the previous chapter:
1. For each year, generate a series of unconnected networks, each with the same
number of nodes and edges as found in each of the regional printmaking
38. On accounting for these properties of the EI index, see Peter Mariolis, “Concepts, Models, and
Measures: Towards an Analytical Framework for Social Network Analysis,” in Sun Belt Social Network
Conference (Palm Beach, 1985); Hanneman and Riddle, ffintroduction to Social Network Methods, 220–223.
See section 2.4.1 for a review of the rationale for comparing empirical to random graph output.
120
communities in the BM and RKM data. This will result in several national
clusters without any bridging links. (Figure 35(a))
2. Add a second set of “international” edges by choosing several source nodes at
random, and several target nodes based on a power law probability distribution.39
(Figure 35(b))
3. Measure the EI index of each of these resulting communities, and compare with
the results from the BM and RKM data.
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Figure 35: A visualization of the two-stage simulation of international print network
interconnection. (a) shows the first stage of the simulation, in which several regional
communities are created. (b) shows the result of the second stage, in which additional
links (here shown as dotted lines) are added both within and between these regional
clusters based on a probability distribution that favors well-connected nodes.
Figure 36 overlays the EI indices of these simulated networks on the results
observed from the BM and RKM data. By in large, the simulated networks return
39. The importance of a power law probability distribution in random graph generation is explained
in page 65, note 31.
121
similar results to those found in the empirical results. This underlines the major
governing factor that regional print production capacity — in other words, the size of
the network — had on any one community’s balance of international versus domestic
connections. However, there are several notable mismatches between the EI indices
returned by these randomly generated networks, and those found in the BM and RKM
data.
For example, in the northern Netherlands between roughly 1650 and 1675, both
the BM- and RKM-based networks return a lower EI index than are predicted by
randomized networks of the same relative size. In other words, Dutch print producers
were making an unexpectedly large number of internal connections during this period,
given their size relative to other communities. Could this be a consequence of the
oicial end of the revolt in 1648 with the signing of the Treaty of Münster? It is
possible that the close of the war, and a burgeoning sense of national Dutch pride,
may have been expressed in prints through more domestically-centered production.40
Conversely, in the southern Netherlands, a higher-than-expected EI index (i.e. more
international connections than found in a random network of the same size) around
1580–1610 coincides with the Spanish invasion of Antwerp and the accompanying
exodus of Flemish artists, including printmakers.41
Onemay also point (albeit with slightly less certainty, given the dissimilar results re-
turned by the BM andRKM) to the possible influence of English and Frenchmonarchs’
artistic priorities on their countries’ printmaking communities. An unexpectedly high
40. On the growth in privileges issued by the States General at this time, see P. G. Hoftijzer,
“Nederlandse boekverkopersprivileges in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” Jaarboek van hetNederlands
fienootschap van BiblioȪelen, 1993, 49–62; Nadine M. Orenstein, “Sleeping Caps, City Views, and State
Funerals: Privileges for Prints in the Dutch Republic, 1593–1650,” in ffin flis Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish
Art in Memory of John Michael Montias, ed. Amy Golahny, Mia M. Mochizuki, and Lisa Vergara
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 313–346.
41. Sluijter, “On Brabant Rubbish.”
122
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Figure 36: Random graph EI indices. The black lines show the EI indices observed in
the BMandRKMdata, while the gray ribbons show the range of results returned by the
simulated networks. Some areas with diverging results are highlighted and annotated
with some possible explanations.
123
number of international connections in the English printmaking community between
1625 and 1649 coincides with the reign of Charles I, who imported a wide range of
both continental artworks and artists to London during his rule. In France, far more
internal connections between French printmakers are found than expected are found
during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643 and 1715. In 1655, the Académie royale de
peinture et sculpture began to admit printmakers, legitimizing the medium as a fine art
rather than a mechanical craft.42 Moreover, the Sun King issued a large number of print
privileges during his reign, and may have gone a long way towards promoting French
artistic talent.43
Both the German and Italian printmaking communities show consistently fewer
international connections in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than
are found in simulated communities of equivalent size. (Again, these trends ought to
be treated with more skepticism, given the somewhat diferent results returned by
the BM and RKM.) The privations of the Thirty Years’ War, which persisted in the
German region long after the nominal end of the conflict in 1648, may have inhibited
theGerman print production industry from establishing asmany international contacts
as a market of their size would have suggested.44 As for Italian printmakers, their
unexpectedly low number of external connections may have been due, in part, to
42. SueWelsh Reed andAlvin L. Clark, eds., ffrenchPrints ͒om theAge of theMusketeers (Boston:Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998), 18–19.
43. Peter Fuhring, “The Market for Prints under Louis XIV: Charles Le Brun,” Print Quarterly 19, no.
1 (March 2002): 3–11.
44. Theodore K. Rabb, “The Thirty Years’ War and the German Economy,” The Journal of Modern
flistory 34, no. 1 (March 1962): 40–151.
124
the plague of 1656 and the economic collapse that followed in its wake. The Italian
peninsula would still be recovering from this disaster a century later.45
3.4 Case Studies of Traveling Printmakers
This long-term view of print production is a challenging one for traditional, artist-
based perspectives on the history of artistic printmaking. At the scale of hundreds or
thousands of artists working over two centuries, the broad contours of international
print production appear to be determined more by demographic changes, rather than
the impacts of specific artists, or turning points in political or military history. And yet,
the individual experience of international collaboration and exchange varied widely in
this period. Several case studies of artists hailing from both the southern and northern
Netherlands will illustrate just how diverse these interactions could be.
3.4.1 The Sadelers’ International Connections
Section 2.5.4 noted the core role that family dynasties played in the Flemish print
production network. This broader European perspective reveals important distinc-
tions between the comparative international reach of these families. While prominent
engravers in the Galle, Wierix, and De Jode families tended to make most of their
connections to Flemish collaborators, members of the Sadeler family consistently rank
among the more internationally-focused Flemish print producers, with Jan (Johann) I
Sadeler and Aegidius II Sadeler maintaining a roughly even split between collaboration
with Flemish and artists and publishers versus foreign ones. (Figure 37)
45. Guido Alfani, “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe and the Decline of Italy: An Epidemiolog-
ical Hypothesis,” European Review of Economic flistory 17, no. 4 (November 2013): 408–430, doi:10.1093/
ereh/het013.
125
1560
1585
1615
1645
1675
1715
Pieter van der Heyden
Johannes Wierix
Philips Galle
Maerten de Vos
Frans Floris (I)
Johann Sadeler (I)
Lambert Lombard
Hieronymus Cock
Johannes Wierix
Hieronymus Wierix
Antonie Wierix (II)
Maerten de Vos
Philips Galle
Johann Theodor de Bry
Johann Sadeler (I)
Aegidius Sadeler
Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert
Raphaël Sadeler (II)
Cornelis Galle (I)
Pieter de Jode (I)
Anthony van Dyck
Peter Paul Rubens
Hieronymus Wierix
Aegidius Sadeler
Paulus Pontius
Pieter de Jode (II)
Cornelis Galle (II)
Coenraet Waumans
Peter Paul Rubens
Pieter de Bailliu (I)
Anthony van Dyck
Michel Natalis
Pieter de Jode (II)
Cornelis Galle (II)
Erasmus Quellinus (II)
Gaspar Bouttats
David Teniers (II)
Gerard Edelinck
Cornelis Martinus Vermeulen
Adam Frans van der Meulen
Caspar Jacob van Opstal (II)
Jacobus Harrewijn
Philibert Bouttats
Guillaume Duvivier (18e eeuw)
Jan Baptist Xavery
Frans van Stampart
Peter Paul Bouché
Richard van Orley (II)
−1.0 −0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0
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Figure 37: The individual EI scores of highly-central Flemish printmakers and
publishers in 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, 1715
126
The Sadelers leveraged their early displacement from Antwerp in 1586 into a highly
successful dynasty connected not only to their original home in Flanders, but also to the
Hapsburg court in Prague and to Italian circles in both Venice and Rome. In 1586, Jan I
and his brother and fellow engraver, Raphael I, along with their nephewAegidius I, fled
political turmoil in Antwerp for Mainz, followed by Frankfurt and then to the court of
Duke Wilhelm V in Munich.46 The Sadelers continued to engrave and publish prints
in each of these cities, as evidenced by the constantly changing addresses inscribed on
each print.47 Aegidius would travel to Italy between 1591–1593, possibly inspired by the
Dutch engraver Hendrick Goltzius, who had visited Aegidius in 1590 during his own
trip to Rome.48
Aegidius found his greatest success in Prague as a court engraver for the Hapsburg
emperors Rudolf II, Matthias, and Ferdinand II.While there, he produced prints after
court painters Bartholomeus Spranger, Joseph Heintz, and Hans von Aachen. Aegidius
also exhibited his versatility of subject matter, engraving landscape prints after Paul Bril
and Jan Brueghel (with whom he may have had contact when visiting from in 1593) as
well as Roelandt Savery and Pieter Stevens, who had crafted many landscape drawings
while working at Rudolf II’s court.49 (Figure 38) Even in his late career, however, Sadeler
maintained an awareness of developments in Antwerp; his original print Charity, or
46. See Dorothy Limouze, “Protestant Madonnas Revisited: Iconographic Duality in Works by Jan
Sadeler and Joos van Winghe,” in A Tribute to Robert A. Koch: Studies in the Northern Renaissance, ed.
Barbara T. Ross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), for an account of Jan’s early work in
Mainz and Frankfurt; on Munich, see Dorothy Limouze, “From Bavaria to the Veneto, and Return: The
Sadelers, Jacopo Bassano, and Italian Art in Munich,” in München - Prag um 1600, ed. Beket Bukovinská
and Lubomír Konečný (Prague: Artefactum, 2009), 117–124.
47. All of their impressions from this period list a Sadeler (usually Raphael) as executor; Limouze, “From
Bavaria to the Veneto, and Return: The Sadelers, Jacopo Bassano, and Italian Art in Munich,” 117–118.
48. Dorothy Limouze, “Aegidius Sadeler, Imperial Printmaker,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bu͜etin 85,
no. 362 (April 1989): 4–6. doi:10.2307/3795429.
49. Ibid., 10.
127
Maternal Love, may well have been inspired by Rubens’ own approach to rendering
feminine beauty.50 (Figure 39)
Figure 38: Aegidius Sadeler after Roelandt Savery, Man and four goats before a waterfa͜,
from a series of six landscapes, 1597–1629. Engraving and etching, 22.2 x 28.6 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Though he does not rank among the most central Flemish print producers of
the seventeenth century, Jan Sadeler’s son Justus also played a significant role in
building the family’s ties to Italy.51 Born in Antwerp 1583, a surviving contract places
50. Limouze, “Aegidius Sadeler, Imperial Printmaker,” 16.
51. On Justus, see Philippe Sénéchal, “Justus Sadeler: Print Publisher and Art Dealer in Early Seicento
Venice,” Print Quarterly 7, no. 1 (March 1990): 22–35.
128
Figure 39: Aegidius Sadeler, Charity, or Maternal Love, c. 1620. Engraving, 30 x 21.4 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon.
129
Justus in Venice as early as 1599. There he established and engraving and publishing
business that left a significant mark on Venetian print culture of the early seventeenth
century.52 Justus inherited most of his father’s plates, and would continue to publish
impressions of these older designs while working in Italy. Aegidius Sadeler even
ensured that the print privilege he acquired from Emperor Matthias would extended
to Justus’ publications in Venice.53 These bonds of family, combined with their shared
talents with the burin, allowed the Sadelers to patch together a remarkably successful
printmaking dynasty in spite of their itinerant lives.
3.4.2 Cornelis Bloemaert
In the north, traveling printmakers were also an exception to the overall preference by
Dutch print producers for domestic collaborators in the seventeenth century. Figure
40 shows a sample of the most central participants in the Dutch printmaking network
across several diferent periods.54 While the overa͜ Dutch EI index was negative in the
mid-seventeenth century, it is easy to find examples ofDutch artists who did a great deal
of international work, just as it is common to find ones who worked almost exclusively
with other Dutch artists and publishers. That said, artists who were remarkably central
in the European network at large tended to be ones that were also central “at home”.
No matter which nationality one looks at, the more central an artist was, the more
likely they were to make most of their connections to artists from the same region.
For example, major Dutch publishers like Hendrick Hondius I and Crispijn de Passe
I increasingly turned to native Dutch artists for designs, while applying to the States
52. AnnaOmodeo,Mostra di stampe popolari venete del ’500: catalogo (Florence:Gabinetto disegni e stampe
degli Uizi, 1965), 8–9.
53. Sénéchal, “Justus Sadeler,” 28.
54. Influence is ranked by degree centrality, the metric used in chapter 2, figures 15 and 22.
130
General, rather than foreign sovereigns, for privileges.55 Only a handful of the most
active and influential Dutch printmakers during the seventeenth century did much of
their work with foreign artists and publishers. And still, interesting exceptions stand
out.
1560
1585
1615
1645
1675
1715
Willem Thibaut
Joannes van Doetechum (I)
Maarten van Heemskerck
Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert
Cornelis Cort
Cornelis Ketel
Joos van Winghe
Dirck Barendsz.
Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem
Jan Harmensz. Muller
Jacob de Gheyn (II)
Jan Saenredam
Zacharias Dolendo
Jacob Matham
Dirck Barendsz.
Crispijn van de Passe (I)
Jan van de Velde (II)
Jacob Matham
Claes Jansz. Visscher (II)
Abraham Bloemaert
Cornelis van Dalen (I)
David Vinckboons
Hendrick Goltzius
Crispijn van de Passe (I)
Jonas Suyderhoef
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
Cornelis Visscher (II)
Salomon Savery
Cornelis van Dalen (I)
Pieter Nolpe
Reinier van Persijn
Cornelis Bloemaert (II)
Hendrik Bary
Adriaen van Ostade
Abraham Bloteling
Gerard de Lairesse
Jonas Suyderhoef
Wallerant Vaillant
Pieter Schenk (I)
Jacob Gole
Adolf van der Laan
Jacob Houbraken
Matthijs Pool
Pieter van Gunst
Nicolaas Verkolje
Pieter Schenk (I)
Jacob Gole
Bernard Picart
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Figure 40: The individual EI indices of highly-central Dutch printmakers and
publishers in 1560, 1585, 1615, 1645, 1675, 1715
55. Orenstein, flendrick flondius, 47.
131
One such printmaker was Cornelis Bloemaert the Younger, who was born in
Utrecht around 1603.56 He initially studied painting with his father, Abraham Bloe-
maert, but would later train as an engraver withCrispijn de Passe.57 Bloemaert produced
several prints after designs by his father during his early years in Utrecht, including
both single-sheet prints as well as a series of small peasant scenes (Figure 41). He
left his hometown for Paris in 1630, where he would work for three years engraving
designs after various French masters. By 1634, he had arrived in Rome, where he joined
the “Bentvueghels”, an expatriate fraternity of northern European artists working in
Rome. He was one of a handful of engravers who would come to join the group,
including the Flemish engraver Michel Natalis, and Reiner Persijn from Alkmaar, who
studied with Bloemaert while in Rome.58 Following the tradition of members of the
Bentvueghels, Bloemaert adopted the playful alias “Winter”.59 While in Rome, hemade
a living producing engravingsmostly after Italian works. Bloemaert contractedwith the
Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani to produce a series of plates depicting the Marchese’s
collection of antique statuary (Figure 42). Though this project was cut short by the
Marchese’s death, Bloemaert would continue to produce engravings primarily after the
art collections of major patrons, producing prints after diverse Italian masters such as
Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi, Guido Reni, and Raphael. He would work in Rome
until his death in 1692.
56. Marcel Roethlisberger and Marten Jan Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and flis Sons: Paintings and Prints
(Doornspijk: Davaco, 1993), 513–526.
57. Filippo Baldinucci, Cominciamento e progresso de͜’ arte de͜’ intagliare in rame co͜e vite di molti de’ più
ecce͜enti maestri de͜a stessa professione (Florence, 1767), 131–138, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/
t4gm9289m.
58. G. J. Hoogewerf, De Bentvueghels (’s Gravenhage: M. Nijhof, 1952), 71.
59. While themeaning of some of these nicknames has been preserved, Bloemaert’s remains amystery;
ibid., 132.
132
Figure 41: Cornelis Bloemaert II after Abraham Bloemaert, title page forOtia delectant,
c. 1625. Engraving, 10.8 x 15.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
133
Figure 42: Cornelis Bloemaert II after a drawing by Giovanni Citosibio Guidi, River
fiod fromfia͜eriafiiustiniana delMarchese Vincenzofiiustiniani (Rome, 1636). Engraving,
23.1 x 21.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
134
Bloemaert’s unsurpassed commercial success in foreign territory can be ascribed to
his professional networking prowess. Lacking the established professional network
he could have accessed through his father had he remained in Utrecht, Bloemaert
cultivated his own transnational network at each step in his career. Notably, many
impressions of the Italian prints that Bloemaert engraved bear the address of Pierre
Mariette I, a Parisian publisher Bloemaert had published with during his time there
between 1630 and 1633.60 Bloemaert would also build on his success making engravings
for elite Roman collectors, contracting with the Barberini as well as with Cardinal
Giulio Cesare Sacchetti. Surviving documents of Bloemaert’s interaction with the
cardinal reveal how detailed the breakdown of engraving expenses could be. A surviving
letter from the painter Pietro da Cortona to Cardinal Sacchetti’s steward enumerates
separate line items owed to Bloemaert for the figural illustration of a particular
engraving, listing a charge for the decorative border, another for the inscription, one for
the coat of arms, as well as a line for the copper plates themselves.61 Bloemaert’s prints
were valued enough to be displayed not only in albums, but also on walls: a series of
illustrations Bloemaert engraved for Sacchetti’s thesis would later be set in an elaborate
frame in the Palazzo Sacchetti.62
3.4.3 Abraham Blooteling
Another of the handful of influential Dutch engravers who made most of his connec-
tions to foreign collaborators in the late seventeenth century was Abraham Blooteling,
60. Mariette probably traveled to Rome in 1634 around the same time that Bloemaert arrived in the
city; R.-A.Weigert, “Le Commerce de la gravure au XVIIe siècle en France: Les deux premiers Mariette
et François Langlois, dit Ciartres,” fiazette des Beaux-Arts 41, no. 6 (March 1953): 171.
61. Ruth Kraemer, “Pietro da Cortona and Cornelis Bloemaert: An Unpublished Document,” The
BurlingtonMagazine 131, no. 1035 (1989): 414.
62. Ibid., 415.
135
who would come to be known for his skill in the novel mezzotint technique.63
Blooteling was born in Amsterdam, where he trained with Cornelis van Daelen I. Like
Bloemaert, Blooteling’s first international destination was Paris; he arrived there in
1660. He apprenticed with Pierre van Schuppen, member of a small group of Flemish
engravers working in the city. Blooteling met another mezzotint innovator in Paris
namedWallerant Vaillant. Blooteling and Vaillant would both return to Amsterdam in
1665, where they continued to work together closely, sharing mode͜i and print designs
that Blooteling had inherited from Van Daelen.64
Blootelingmade his biggest impact, however, in London. Dutch printmaking talent
andDutch prints had been in high demand in England since the sixteenth century, when
Crispijn de Passe sold impressions to the Londonmarketwhile working inCologne.65 In
the wake of the Restoration, Dutch painters and printmakers alike flocked to London
as they followed Charles II (and the patronage of his court) when he returned from his
exile in The Hague. Blooteling moved several years later, leaving Amsterdam in 1673 at
the invitation of King Charles’ cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. The invitation may
have been all the more attractive to Blooteling following the 1672 French invasion of
the Netherlands, which had caused an economic contraction that likely depressed the
Dutch art market. Blooteling was strategic in his planning, however. Mary Bryan Curd
has convincingly demonstrated how Blooteling mobilized his network of students and
patrons in order to establish himself in London. He ensured that his apprentice, Jan
vanMunnickhuijsen, would be able to accompany him to London and provide valuable
63. For Blooteling’s oeuvre, see J. E. Wessely, Abraham Blooteling, Verzeichniss seiner Kupferstiche und
Schabkunstblätter (Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1867).
64. Mary BryanH. Curd, fflemish andDutchArtists in EarlyModernEngland: Co͜aboration andCompetition,
1460-1680, Visual culture in early modernity (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 129–133.
65. Eric Jan Sluijter, “The EnglishVenture: Dutch and FlemishArtists in Britain 1550-1800,” ed. Juliette
Roding et al., Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 13 (2003): 15.
136
Figure 43: Abraham Blooteling, Portrait of Rupert, Prince of the Rhine, 1673. Engraving, 39
x 29 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
137
labor and financial support. Like Bloemaert in Rome, Blooteling also leveraged his
print subjects and patrons to attract more business once in the new city. One of his
first publications were engraved portraits of Rupert and Charles: gifts to those who
had invited him, but also a signal to potential English clients of his ability to engrave
refined likenesses. (Figure 43) Blooteling would continue to diferentiate himself by
introducing print portrait series (a staple of Dutch artistic printmaking) to London
audiences.66
Bloemaert’s other distinguishing trait was his unparalleled skill in mezzotint, from
which he could extract remarkably subtle tonal gradations. Blooteling deployed this
talent to great efect in his reproductive portrait prints after Van Dyck, in which he ex-
pertly captured the Flemish painter’s gauzy brushwork. (Figure 44) The technique took
late seventeenth-century London by storm, as the city lacked the mature engraving and
etching talent that Holland had enjoyed for decades. Interestingly, Blooteling’s patron
Print Rupert was himself an amateur practitioner of mezzotint, and was erroneously
credited with its invention by contemporaries.67 Blooteling hired a range of apprentices
in London who would have provided invaluable help in the laborious process of
preparing mezzotint plates, supporting his prolific output. Like Bloemaert, Blooteling
derived long-term benefits from local networks he worked to establish while abroad.
Even after returning toAmsterdam in 1678, Blooteling continued tomarket his prints in
England via his London contacts.68 However, he clearly understood the distinct tastes
of the Amsterdammarket as well, producing more etchings and engravings after Dutch
subjects in this final phase of his career. (Figure 45)
66. Curd, fflemish and Dutch Artists in Early Modern England , 137.
67. GerdienWuestman, “TheMezzotint in Holland: ‘Easily Learned, Neat and Convenient’,” Simiolus:
Netherlands Quarterly for the flistory of Art 23, no. 1 (1995): 71, doi:10.2307/3780782.
68. Curd, fflemish and Dutch Artists in Early Modern England , 153.
138
Figure 44: Abraham Blooteling, after Sir Anthony van Dyck, The Apostle Paul, 1652–
1690. Mezzotint, 35.2 x 27.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
139
Figure 45: Abraham Blooteling, after Jacob van Ruisdael, View of the Marina Outside
the Blaubrug, from the series Amstelgezichten, 1655–1690. Etching, 16.5 x 21.8 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
140
For all the international connections they made, it is interesting to note that both
Bloemaert and Blooteling relied heavily on fellow expatriates when they made their
moves to Paris, Rome, and London. This nuance is an important to bear in mind
when looking at quantitative results that suggest both engravers did most of their
work with foreigners. Both of these cases also demonstrate the importance of network
connections that do not fall within the set of direct ties of artistic source, printmaker,
and publisher captured by the datasets used for this study. The funding and social
connections of family members, patrons, and even portrait subjects were integral to
both Bloemaert’s and Blooteling’s success.
3.4.4 Turning Away from the Low Countries
While Dutch print producers’ overall preference for domestic connections continued
into the early eighteenth century (Figure 34), some central print producers increasingly
maintained active international business. The French-born Bernard Picart dominated
the print trade in Amsterdam soon after moving there in 1711 at the age of 38. Picart
would train many Dutch engravers in a formally-regulated, French-style academy, the
Amsterdamse tekenschool, emulating his own training in the French academic manner.
And while he would spend the rest of his life building a successful publishing house in
Amsterdam, he would maintain agents in Paris to promote his work; many of his prints
published in the Netherlands have also been recorded in contemporary auctions in
Paris.69 Pieter Schenck is another name that ranks among themost central printmakers
in 1715. He was an engraver and mezzotinter of German birth who came to the
Amsterdam around 1683–4 and built a thriving business split between Amsterdam and
69. Nelke Barthelings, “Bernard Picart, a French Engraver in the Dutch Republic,” in Les échanges
artistiques entre les anciens Pays-Bas et la ffrance, 1482-1814, ed. Gaëtane Maës and Jan Blanc (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2010), 49.
141
Leipzig.70 Though they were comparatively prolific, Picart and Schenck were counter-
balanced by a “long tail” of domestically-inclined printmakers. These domestically-
centered Dutch artists may only have produced a handful of prints each, but their
output, in aggregate, outnumbered that of Picart and Schenck.
In the Northern Netherlands, passing economic depression in the late seventeenth
century, and hence contraction in the local print market, may have spurred some artists
to expand their business beyond the Dutch Republic. Yet, as we saw with Abraham
Bloemaert, some returned home and brought their new international connections with
them. Sustained economic stagnation in the southern Netherlands, on the other hand,
gutted their printmaking industry. Without a critical mass of fellow print producers,
many Flemish printmakers and publishers left the country entirely: AdamFrans van der
Meulen, a painter and draughtsman who made designs for several prints, decamped to
Paris by 1664, joining the service of Louis XIV in designing both prints and tapestries.71
Likewise, Cornelis Martinus Vermeuelen (no known relation to Van der Meulen),
a printmaker born in Antwerp in 1644, moved to Paris to produce prints (mostly
formal portraits) after Pierre Mignard, Hyacinthe Rigaud, among others. Vermeulen
also made several prints after Adriaen van der Werf, a Rotterdam painter heavily
influenced by French prints. These shifts presaged a sea change in the importance of
the Low Countries to European print production. By the mid-eighteenth century the
center of gravity in the world of European printmaking had shifted from Antwerp and
70. Waller, Biographisch woordenboek van noord Nederlandsche graveurs, 287–288.
71. Everhard Korthals Altes, “French Prints in Dutch Collections and their Influence on Dutch
Paintings (1675-1750),” in Les échanges artistiques entre les anciens Pays-Bas et la ffrance, 1482-1814, ed.
Gaëtane Maës and Jan Blanc (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), 181.
142
Amsterdam to Paris, where a regimented system of training, privileges, and regulations
produced a wholly diferent ecosystem for making prints.72
3.5 Conclusion: Tipping Points in International Print Production
While literature on Netherlandish printmaking has plentiful examples of both inter-
national and domestic strains of Dutch and Flemish printmaking, most studies have
focused on subject matter, rather than patterns of production. The detailed case
studies of the sort that comprise most literature on artistic printmaking do not give
clear answers to the simple, yet broad question: did Dutch and Flemish printmakers
make most of their prints in collaboration with domestic partners, or foreign ones?
And how did this balance change over time?
A data-driven analysis of these printmaking networks suggests that printmakers in
the northern Netherlands did a majority of their collaborative work with artists and
publishers outside of Holland, only shifting to majority-domestic work around 1570.
Flemish printmakers and publishers, on the other hand, connected mostly internally
up until around 1675, when they turned sharply outward. These production structure
shifts present an alternative to the traditional stylistic histories of printmaking in
the Netherlands: surprisingly, Dutch print producers inward shift occurred almost
forty years before the “Haarlem pioneers” of the 1610s began to produce local Dutch
landscape prints in large numbers. That both these shifts were rapid, rather than
spanning multiple generations, is notable in itself.
What is more, similar “tipping points” from foreign to domestic production occur
in French and English print communities. This pattern suggests that these inward
72. See Peter Fuhring, “The Print Privilege in Eighteenth-Century France – I,” Print Quarterly 2, no. 3
(1985): 175–193 and Peter Fuhring, “The Print Privilege in Eighteenth-Century France – II,” PrintQuarterly
3, no. 1 (1986): 19–33.
143
turns might not have been spurred solely by disruptive historical events, but may have
been the result of the gradual spread of printmaking capacity across diferent European
communities. Artists in countries with underdeveloped printmaking capacity — few
printmakers producing few prints—would naturally gravitate towardsmore prominent
and established centers, such as a major publishing house or court, outside their
borders. As their home country began to develop more printmaking infrastructure,
those artists could more easily find domestic collaborators. Not all the shifts in
international print production can be explained through the changing size of these
communities. Some historical events, like the invasion of Antwerp or the Italian
plague of 1656, may have had a temporary efect on the ability of print producers to
make either internal or external connections. However, like many complex systems,
most of the larger structural changes these print production networks underwent,
though unpredictable and sudden when viewed in the short term, can be understood as
emergent consequences of slow-moving demographic change and the gradual transfer
of technical and artistic knowledge between diferent European communities.
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4 Diversity, Specialization, and the Uses of Prints
So far, this dissertation has only briefly touched on the question of prints’ subject
matter and how they might relate to the professional strategies of printmakers and
publishers.1 This question has occupied many scholars of painting in this period.
Artistic, social, and economic reasons have been proposed to explain why so many
Dutch and Flemish painters may have elected to concentrate their output in still lifes,
domestic scenes, landscapes, or portraiture.
However, few studies have asked whether printmakers experienced the same pres-
sured to specialize. Did professional printmakers also adopt this specialization strategy
in an attempt to distinguish themselves in a crowded field? Or did the medium, which
was often put to use making reproductions after other artists’ designs, instead favor
etchers and engravers willing and able to render the works of a wide variety of artists
and subjects? Existing case studies of individual printmakers and publishers present
conflicting evidence. How can we test this question at scale?
In a clever twist on Darwin, Larry Silver has referred to studies of artistic genres
as tracing the “origins of pictorial species”.2 While Silver only invokes speciation
as a metaphor, ecology ofers a useful quantitative model for thinking about genre
specialization. A common measurement of species diversity (Shannon’s diversity
metric) can be used to characterize artists’ relative specialization or diversification in
1. See, for example, HendrickHondius’ diversification in the face of a decentralizing print production
network, discussed in section 2.5.2.
2. Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial fienres in the Antwerp Art Market
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), ch. 1.
145
genre, thus allowing us to gain a broader perspective on printmakers’ specialization
or diversification strategies. After demonstrating that this diversity index can detect
Dutch and Flemish painters’ commonly-acknowledged trend towards genre specializa-
tion, the samemeasurement will be used to test whether or not a similar trend towards,
or away from, genre specialization exists among printmakers. Two new data sources
about paintings will be considered alongside the print databases used in the previous
chapters: a corpus of seventeenth-centuryDutch household inventories, and a database
of Dutch paintings in modern-day museum collections.
This broader view of printmakers’ strategies will help contextualize a closer exam-
ination of a few printmakers who had exceptionally specialized or diversified oeuvres.
This analysis will ultimately suggest how not only commercial motives, but also period
views of the use and function of prints in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may
have steered printmakers to select subject matter diferently than did painters, thus
distinguishing the way that printmakers shaped their own professional and artistic
identities.
4.1 Background: Why Specialize?
In the uniquely competitive, open art market in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Netherlands, some painters sought the opportunity to distinguish themselves
from competitors through the subjects they depicted. Karel van Mander identified
this motive in his 1604 Schilder-boek, remarking how the Mechelen artist Gregorius
Beerincx attracted attention, as well as quick money, for the sheer novelty of his “pure”
landscapes:
Gregorius Beerings in de Schaar, from Malines, painter in watercolour;
having been to Rome, he was very accomplished at ruins which he depicted
very attractively. When he was in Rome and had wasted his money he
146
decided, in order to get hold of somemoney quickly, to do the following: he
made a canvas with a Deluge in which there was nothing other than a rainy
sky, water and the ark without a figure in sight. When he was asked what it
was and he replied: The Flood, then followed: Where are the people? He
said: They have all drowned - if the water was to go down you would see
them - and the rest of them are in the ark. Nearly everyone wanted to have
one of these and as such pieces are rapidly completed he soon came into
heaps of money; that was a beautiful stunt.3
VanMander regretted that somany artists pursued this “by-way” of specialization in
real-seeming landscapes, still lifes, or portraiture, rather than striving for the synthesis
of all these modes via history painting.4 Though specializing in particular genres did
not conform to Van Mander’s ideal of painterly achievement, he admits it was a
commercially successful strategy, nevertheless.
Van Mander also recognized the two distinct business advantages that genre
specialization ofered to painters, advantages that John Michael Montias has framed
as the result of product and process innovations.5 Product innovations ofer a novel
product for which the current market had little or no established competition (e.g. we
read that the Roman audience found Beerincx’s paintings intriguing and desirable.)
Specialization also ofered process innovations, allowing painters to produce each
painting in a more eicient manner (“such pieces,” Van Mander noted, “are rapidly
3. “Gregorius Beerings in de schaer, Mecchelaer, Schilder vanWater-verwe, desen te Room hebbende
geweest, was seer aerdigh van Ruwijnen, die hy oock playsant dede. Te Room wesende, en t’ghelt door
ghebracht zijnde, om haest aen ghelt te comen, gingh toe, maeckte eenen doeck van een Diluvie, daer
niet in quam als een regenende locht en water met de Arck, sonder datmen eenige personnagie sagh.
Doe hem gevraeght was wat het was, en hy antwoorde de Diluvie, volghde daer op: Waer is dan het
volck? Hy seyde, sy zijn al verdronken, alst water af soude gaen soudemense sien, en d’ander waren in
d’Arck. Hier van wilde schier elck een hebben: en ghelijck dussche stucken haest ghedaenwaren, raeckte
weder aen den buydel vol ghelt, t’welck een schoon practijke was.” Karel van Mander, The Lives of the
ffi͜ustrious Netherlandish and fierman Painters (1604), ed. Hessel Miedema, trans. Jacqueline Pennial-Boer
and Charles Ford (Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 1994), fol. 228v.
4. E. K. J. Reznicek, “Realism as a ‘Side Road or Byway’ in Dutch Art,” in The Reniassance and
Mannerism, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 247–253.
5. Montias, “Cost And Value,” 456–457.
147
completed.”) For example, a painter who focused largely on landscape would need to
master fewer compositions and techniques than a generalist, and could liberally re-
use practiced visual motifs from painting to painting. These innovations may have
flourished, in part, by filling the market gap left by the decline of systematic church
patronage after the late-sixteenth-century iconoclasm.6 Netherlandish studio practices
also helped foster this turn towards genre specialization. Major workshops, particularly
those in Antwerp, often divided large painting projects among diferent artists, with
flora, fauna, or landscape rendered by one artist, and the human figures by another.
This tradition can be traced back to the collaborations between Quentin Metsys
and Joachim Patinir, and saw its seventeenth-century culmination in the frequent
partnerships between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel I.7 While less common in
the northern Netherlands, this practice can be found among Dutch painters as well.
For example, stafage in the church interiors of the Delft painter Bartholoemus van
Bassen were likely added by Esaias van de Velde after Van Bassen had completed the
main composition.8
6. Hans Vlieghe, “The Fine and Decorative Arts in Antwerp’s Golden Age,” in Urban Achievement in
EarlyModernEurope:fioldenAges inAntwerp,Amsterdam, andLondon, ed. PatrickKarl O’Brien (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 175.
7. On Rubens, Brueghel and the tradition of collaborative painting in Antwerp, see Anne T.Woollett
and Ariane van Suchtelen, Rubens & Brueghel: AWorking ffriendship (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2006).
8. Montias,Artists andArtisans in Del͓, 198; Axel Rüger and Rachel Billinge, “The Design Practices of
the Dutch Architectural Painter Bartholomeus van Bassen,” National fia͜ery Technical Bu͜etin 26 (2005):
38.
148
The climate surrounding specialization in printmaking is less clear. The pictorial
and symbolic roots of particular genres of prints, from landscape,9 to genre,10 to
scientific illustrations,11 have been carefully charted. What evidence we have about
print collecting practices in this period suggests that those who had the means to buy a
large number of prints considered content carefully when they made their purchasing
and display decisions. The Italian collector Giulio Mancini advised that both paintings
and prints ought to be displayed according to subject matter, such that diferent parts
of the collection were arrayed in diferent rooms.12 By arranging their artworks in this
way, the collector could harmonize the varied styles and subjects of their artworks
with the genders and social positions of people inhabiting those rooms, and create an
appropriate environment for the activities therein. In bedrooms: religious paintings;
in garden galleries: mythologies; in rooms for conducting business or receiving visitors:
allegories of war and peace. Mancini suggested that prints be kept in a private study,
and presumably organized so that the owner could have complete control over their
display and viewing. If a collection was properly organized, the owner could easily pull
prints at will to suit the nature and business of his guests.
But did this attention to prints’ subject matter lead to diferentiation by printmak-
ers and publishers? Some evidence suggests that print publishers found an advantage
9. Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints.
10. Linda A. Stone-Ferrier, Dutch Prints of Daily Life: Mirrors of Life or Masks of Morals? (Lawrence,
Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1983); de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday
Life.
11. Dackerman, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.
12. Michael Bury, “Giulio Mancini and the organization of a print collection in early seventeenth-
century Italy,” in Co͜ecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750, ed. Christopher Baker, Caroline
Elam, and Genevieve Warwick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 79–84; on the classification impulse in early
modern collections, also see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Co͜ecting, and ScientiȪc Culture in
Early Modern ffitaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 1.
149
by ofering as diverse a stock as possible. Hendrick Hondius deliberately diversified
both the genres as well as the styles of prints that he published in reaction to a
more competitive and distributed production environment.13 Nadine Orenstein has
also contrasted the varying specialization or diversification of genre in the oeuvres of
Hondius, Claes Jansz Visscher, JacobMatham, and Jacques Razet.14 Orenstein suggests
that print publishers had an incentive to diversify the subjects they kept in stock
because they had to rely on a broad audience, with ever-shifting tastes, rather than
a few select patrons. Because prints could be produced relatively rapidly, however,
publishers could also be more responsive in the types of works that they ofered.
This type of diversified publication was hardly a rule. Though Hondius had
positioned himself as a generalist, there were also examples of specialist publishers
who, instead, chose to distinguish themselves in one particular genre. Claes Visscher
maintained a large stock of prints, but he had a particular strength in landscape prints.
In addition to publishing his own etchings, Visscher was a key distributor for his
Haarlem colleague Jan van de Velde, and became a secondhand distributor for printed
landscapes by Pieter Bast and Willem Buytewech.15 Even as he concentrated in selling
landscape prints, however, Visscher and his progeny still maintained basic coverage
of other print types, carrying a solid stock of genre prints, biblical and mythological
histories, and allegorical series. Orenstein also highlights small publishers like Jacques
Razet, for whom artistic print selling was only one aspect of their business.16 Razet was
also a calligrapher and schoolteacher. Because publishing was a relatively minor venture
13. See section 2.5.2.
14. Orenstein, “Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic.”
15. Ibid., 153–154.
16. On the later Visscher family, see Leeflang, “The Sign of Claes Jansz Visscher and his Progeny.”
150
for him, he may have had more freedom to specialize in the religious engravings of the
Hendrick Goltzius school, including works by Jacques de Gheyn II, Jan Saenredam,
Jacob Matham, Andries Stock, and Willem van Swanenburg.17 As his livelihood was
not wholly dependent on print publishing, he did not face the same pressure to please
a wide spectrum of the market.
Surviving inventories of other print publishers support Orenstein’s hypothesis that
publishers benefitted by favoring diversity over specialization.18 (Note that these
inventories were not made by the publishers themselves, but by third parties such
as estate heirs or notaries.) Though Crispijn de Passe may be best known for his
moralizing print books, a 1639 inventory of his plates shows that he also maintained
a broad stock with strengths in portrait and devotional series, as well as biblical and
scientific illustrations.19 A 1662 inventory of the possessions of Amsterdam publisher
Rombout van denHoeye also lists a broad variety of subjectmatter.20 A section devoted
to Van den Hoeye’s maps opens the inventory, followed by portraits of kings and
17. Orenstein, “Marketing Prints to the Dutch Republic,” 159.
18. Note that, unlike paintings, period documents about prints are sparse. Because prints were
inexpensive, they generally were not documented as precisely as paintings were in commissions, dealer
documents, or collector inventories; Parshall, “Prints as Objects of Consumption,” 20–21. In inventories
of individual households, entire albums of prints might be listed, but single sheets or series were listed
with attributions only when they came from the hand of an acknowledged master. For example, of the
713 individual, attributed prints listed in the Montias Archives (described in section 4.2.1), the top five
most-attributed artists were Albrecht Dürer (448 entries), Hendrick Goltzius (73), Antonio Tempesta
(35), Lucas van Leyden (33), and Bartholoemus Spranger (25).
19. A detailed 1639 inventory of Crispijn de Passe’s plates lists the following: allegory: 30 series
(with 144 plates); biblical: 19 (95); genre: 9 (70); history: 6 (24); landscape: 7 (26); mythology: 16
(90); ornament: 1 (17); portrait: 38 (325); religion: 40 (142); scientific: 8 (266); still life: 3 (20); text:
2 (3); unidentified: 34 (284); Ilja M. Veldman, Crispijn de Passe and flis Progeny (1564-1670): A Century of
Print Production (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Publishers, 2001), appendices 1 and 2; On Van de Passe’s
moralizing books, see Ilja M. Veldman, ProȪt and Pleasure: Print Books by Crispijn de Passe (Rotterdam:
Sound & Vision Publishers, 2001).
20. The inventory was taken on the event of Van den Hoeye’s separation from his wife; Amsterdam,
Gemeentearchief, N.A. 1970A, not. D. Doornick, 2 december 1662, 368–380; van der Waals, Prenten in
de gouden eeuw, appendix 1.
151
princes, followed by a long list of “verscheide historien” (“various histories”) including
bible illustrations, allegories, topographical and landscape prints, and mythological
scenes. Clement de Jonghe’s 1679 stock inventory only divided prints by subject
matter when they were part of large series that could be bought piecewise: “historien”
for a complete set of bible illustrations, “devosie” for a long list of devotional prints,
“sinnebeelden” for moralizing emblems, as well as a handful of portrait subcategories
(“Admirels”, “Coningen”, and “fluys Nassauiae”).21 As a general rule, these inventories
are primarily organized by paper size (e.g. folio, half-folio), before any more granular
subdivision by subject matter. One generally finds subsections devoted to maps and
large illustration series (often for Bibles; these were generally bought piecewise), and
perhaps another section devoted to portraits, while all other types of prints usually fell
under a general heading of “constprenten”, or art prints.
The published catalogue of art prints from the shop of Nicolaes Visscher, dated
around 1680, is the only seventeenth-century stock list of individual art prints known
today that was issued by the publisher himself as a way to advertise his holdings.22
Though ofering more precision than the third-party inventories listed above, Viss-
cher’s list follows a familiar format: maps and topographical views, followed by a
long, mixed list of “kusnt-printen” encompassing genre scenes, landscapes, mythologies,
allegories, and devotional prints. The catalog also has a special section detailing all the
Bible illustrations Visscher had for sale, divided between Old and New Testament sto-
ries. Unlike inventories made by third parties, Visscher’s catalog not only credited the
21. This inventory was taken after De Jonghe’s death in 1677. Notably, the inventory also carries
headings especially for prints by Hans Bol and Rembrandt. Amsterdam, Gemeentearchief, NA 4528,
not. J. Backer, 11 februari 1679, 117–146; van der Waals, Prenten in de gouden eeuw, appendix 3.
22. Catalogus Van groote en kleene Land-Kaerten, Steden, Print-Kunst En Boecken Van Nicolaes Visscher Van
Amsteldam. ’t Amsteldam, Op den Dam, in de Visscher; see van der Waals, Prenten in de gouden eeuw, appendix
5 for a transcription; van der Coelen, Patriarchs, Angels & Prophets, 38–61, discusses the structure of this
catalog and the Visscher family’s marketing strategies.
152
artists whose artworks were being reproduced, but also frequently lists the engraver.23
And, as with all the other major publishers, Visscher ofered a bountiful variety of
genres.
The small number of pictorial print publishers in Antwerp in the sixteenth century
covered a wide range of the emerging market for dedicated “art” prints. Pieter de
Wale turned out a tremendous variety of pictorial prints, from book illustrations to
devotional series and political prints.24 Hieronymus Cock found safety in diversity
as well. Though no published stock list for Cock’s house Aux Quatre Vents survives,
a survey of prints bearing his address illustrates the wide breadth of his oferings.25
Even as he cultivated an image as the premiere provider of fine reproductions after old
masters, he always kept a core stock of maps and reproductions of antiquities and ruins.
Moreover, he cultivated contemporary talent in the emerging specialization of “pure”
local landscapes.26
Producing a wide array of genres did not necessarily ensure a successful printmaking
career, however. Elizabeth Wyckof’s survey of three little-known Haarlem engravers
Willem Akersloot, Cornelis van Kittensteyn, Gillis van Scheyndel, presents examples
of printmakers whose careers failed in spite of the wide range of genres they produced.27
Wyckof suggests that the three sufered financial setback because they all attempted to
support themselves entirely via printmaking, rather than branching out into painting,
23. Jonas Suyderhoef, for example, is frequently cited as an engraver for Visscher’s stock. See chapter
2, page 82, note 52
24. Van der Stock, Printing ffimages in Antwerp, 186.
25. Van Grieken, Luijten, and van der Stock, flieronymus Cock, 23.
26. Ibid., 52–58.
27. Wyckof, “Innovation and Popularization,” 194.
153
print publishing, or art dealing.28 While it is clear from the wild success of professional
engravers like the Wierix brothers or the Sadeler family that it was indeed possible
to build a career entirely as a platecutter, the lives of Akersloot, Van Kittensteyn, and
Van Scheyndel are reminders of the rump majority of artists who would never see great
fortune or fame.
Lorena Baines presents another counterexample in her study of Nicolaes de Bruyn,
a prolific printmaker working between 1592 and 1650.29 De Bruyn, a Flemish-born
engraver who worked in Antwerp and Rotterdam, built an exceptionally long and
successful career by making one particular type of engraving up until his death at the
age of 85. After starting his career by making reproductive prints after designs by Gillis
van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons, virtually all of De Bruyn’s original print designs
made between 1610 and his death in 1656 were large wooded landscapes featuring
biblical scenes. (Figure 46) It would appear that, having successfully defined and filled
a specialized subject matter niche, De Bruyn felt little incentive to diversify his output.
Unlike the engravers cited by Wyckof, De Bruyn found exceptional professional
success by specializing in just one genre, rather than relying on diversification of subject
matter as insurance against changing market tastes.
From these examples, it is clear that a seventeenth-century printmaker could have
found success via either strategy — genre diversification, or genre specialization.
Understanding which strategy was adopted more frequently by printmakers versus
painters will allow us to better understand whether specialists like Dr Bruyn, or
generalists like Hondius, were the norm, and who were exceptions to it.
28. Both engravers as well as print publishers frequently had additional means for supporting
themselves, often as art dealers. On publishers’ alternate careers, see van der Stock, Printing ffimages
in Antwerp, 143–145; Michael Bury, The Print in ffitaly, 1550-1620 (London: British Museum, 2001), 9–10;
Orenstein, flendrick flondius, 12–13.
29. Baines, Nicolaes de Bruyn.
154
Figure 46: Nicolaes de Bruyn after Gillis van Coninxloo (II),Moses found by the daughter
of the pharoh, 1601. Engraving, 65.5 x 41.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
155
4.2 Data on Subject Matter in Painting and Prints
While the RKM database contains subject classifications for prints, one needs to
turn elsewhere to find suitable information about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Netherlandish paintings. This section will introduce two new datasets, the Mon-
tias Inventories and the image database of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische
Documentatie/Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis. For each dataset, I will
describe their origins, potential biases and shortcomings, and outline how one can
reconcile their diferent systems for classifying subject matter. Table 2 summarizes the
numbers of relevant records from each source.30 In addition to presenting these new
datasets, this section will also address how the RKM database, used in earlier chapters,
classifies subject matter for prints.31
Table 2: Number of artists and (in parentheses) number of dated, attributed,
and described artworks in each the Montias, RKD, and RKM databases,
partitioned by artist birth year.
artist birth MDI RKD RKM
1500-24 9 (63) 50 (889) 12 (323)
1525-49 14 (122) 52 (893) 16 (1,150)
1550-74 23 (177) 96 (2,949) 37 (2,821)
1575-99 53 (607) 305 (10,916) 66 (2,302)
30. Because the Montias inventories stop at 1700, they do not contain any entries attributed to artists
born after 1680. Thus, it is necessary to restrict this analysis to 1500–1700, as compared to the range
1550–1750 used in the previous chapters.
31. Because the BM database does not contain consistent descriptions of its prints’ subject matter, it
cannot be used to corroborate findings from the RKM data as was done in chapters 2 and 3. Future
work may involve mapping what descriptive text the BM does provide to larger subject headings used by
other collections. More suggestions for addressing these and other lacunae in artistic print data will be
presented in the conclusion of this dissertation.
156
artist birth MDI RKD RKM
1600-24 104 (1,225) 489 (13,940) 91 (3,103)
1625-49 177 (1,232) 379 (10,525) 72 (4,312)
1650-74 64 (380) 172 (3,799) 50 (2,069)
1675-99 2 (7) 162 (3,014) 17 (156)
4.2.1 The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories
The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories (hereafter MDI), main-
tained by the Frick Art Reference Library, contains information on 1,220 household
inventories fromAmsterdam that were recorded between 1575 and 1700.32 The database
was compiled over several decades by John Michael Montias from his research in the
Amsterdam Gemeentearchief. These inventories come from three main classes of
documents: notarial death inventories drawn up for estate valuations, public auction
records by the Orphan Chamber, and bankruptcy inventories.
It is important to recognize that the Montias database is a sample, not a compre-
hensive repository. Writing in 1991, Montias suggested that there may be on the order
of seven or eight thousand such inventories surviving in the Amsterdam archives today,
at least five times the number indexed in the MDI. Nor can the MDI be considered
an unbiased sampling of all household inventories from Amsterdam in the seventeenth
century. Due to the original purpose of these archival documents, theMDI is weighted
heavily towards well-of households large enough to have warranted attention from
32. JohnMichaelMontias and the FrickArtReference Library, “TheMontiasDatabase of 17thCentury
Dutch Art Inventories,” The Frick Collection, 2015, http://research.frick.org/montias/home.php.
157
creditors. Montias also restricted his sample to households that owned at least one
attributed painting, further skewing his results towards richer households.33
This skew would prove troublesome for a study of low-end, anonymous artistic
production in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. However, because this analysis
focuses on the genre specialization of individual artists, Montias’ focus on inventories
with at least some attributed paintings is a strength, rather than a flaw. That said,
these results will only be relevant for understanding the echelon of painting production
valuable enough to be attributed to named artists, rather than anonymous painters.34
The MDI describes 34,147 paintings, of which 26,349 (about 77% of the total) have
an identified subject (the rest are labeled “unknown”), with 4,377 of those described
paintings (about 13% of the total) attributed to a specific artist. (Table 3) This limited
level of description is common in collection inventories from the seventeenth century.
For identification and valuation purposes, notaries prioritized describing the subject
of the painting and its size, only making attributions if the name of the painter would
have significantly impacted the painting’s monetary value. Montias assigned one of
86 diferent subject headings to each artwork. I have grouped these subject headings
into a more general set that will guide the way subjects from the other data sources are
characterized in this chapter.35
33. Montias, “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” 331–332.
34. On specialization in the low-end of the Dutch painting market, see Angela Jager, “‘Everywhere
illustrious histories that are a dime a dozen’: The Mass Market for History Painting in Seventeenth-
Century Amsterdam,” Journal of flistorians of Netherlandish Art 7, no. 1 (February 2015), doi:10.5092/jhna.
2015.7.1.2.
35. The number of subject headings detailed by Montias are small enough that it was feasible to
manually generate a concordance between the 86 original subject headings and the twelve subject
headings used by Van der Woude in his study of the same database: “old testament”, “new testament”,
“other religious”, “mythology-allegory”, “history”, “landscape”, “genre”, “still life”, “portrait”, “animals”,
“other”, “unknown”; Ad van der Woude, “The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time
of the Dutch Republic,” in Art in flistory, flistory in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture,
158
Because the current study focuses on characterizing artist genre diversity, only
attributed artworks are used when calculating diversity. To understand how this
might bias our conclusions, we can compare the distribution of genres by attributed
versus unattributed artists in the Montias archives. The distribution of genres in the
set of attributed works versus the distribution in the set of unattributed works is
unequal. (Figure 47) For example, portraits, and those artworks with no identified
subject, were significantly more likely be unattributed in the Montias inventories.
It is thus important to note that portraitists will be under-reported in this dataset.
Conversely, genre and landscape paintings were more likely to have been given an
attribution, meaning that painters specializing in those subjects will be over-reported
in the diversity calculations.
Table 3: Number of artworks (and their percent of the total) broken down by
attribution and subject description. Only attributed records with an identified
subject (around 13% of the total number of object records) can be used for
characterizing artist specialization.
MDI paintings unattributed attributed total
unknown subject 6,874 (20.1%) 924 (0.3%) 7,798 (22.8%)
known subject 21,972 (64.3%) 4,377 (12.9%) 26,349 (77.2%)
total 28,846 (84.5%) 5,301 (15.5%) 34,147 (100%)
4.2.2 RKDimages
RKDimages (hereafter RKD) is a database compiled by the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthis-
torische Documentatie. Originating from the original bequest in 1923 of the papers
ed. David Freedberg and Jan De Vries (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art & The
Humanities, 1991), 285–329.
159
0%
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Artist known unknown
Figure 47: Ratio of genres in the Montias inventories broken down by paintings with
an attributed artist versus those without.
160
of Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863–1930), this research collection was expanded and
digitized over the next several decades into a catalogue of primarily Dutch and Flemish
artworks from 1400 to the present compiled from public and private collections around
the world.36 Of the over 200,000 objects documented in this database, there are
47,456 dated, attributed, and categorized paintings made by artists born between
1500 and 1700. Each of these records has been tagged with a series of keywords (on
average between six to seven keywords per painting) describing the artwork’s subject
matter. These keywords have been assigned by hand by researchers at the RKD,
building on the keywords listed on Hofstede de Groot’s original typewritten index
cards. The scale of the RKD database makes it infeasible for an individual researcher
to manually categorize each artwork into a single broad subject category. Computer-
aided classification, however, does allow one to identify clusters of paintings that shared
groups of keywords, thus assigning a single subject heading to each painting.37 These
clusters align relatively well with the broad subject headings used for theMDI records,
roughly encompassing: portraits, still lifes, landscapes, religious paintings, and a final
category of other works that featuredmultiple figures (generally genre scenes or history
subjects).
36. This database is located at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images. On the RKD in general, see Sibylle
Appuhn-Radtke, “Das Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in DenHaag,”Kunstchronik 47,
no. 4 (1994): 181–188; JanH. E. van der Starre, “Automation at the RKD: A Short Overview,”Art Libraries
Journal 23, no. 2 (1998): 15–17.
37. To designate clusters of paintings with related keywords, I created a network graph where each
object was connected to others based on shared RKD subject keywords. A community detection
algorithmoptimized for large graphswas used to partition objects into groups that were highly connected
to each other, i.e., that shared more keywords with each other than with objects outside of those
partitions. I then checked the resulting groups manually to confirm that they did, in fact, correspond
relatively well to common genre categories.
On the community detection algorithm, seeVincentD. Blondel et al., “FastUnfolding ofCommunities
in Large Networks,” Journal of StatisticalMechanics: Theory and Experiment 2008, no. 10 (October 1, 2008):
P10008, doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008; implemented in R by Csardi and Nepusz, “igraph.”
161
Like the MDI, the RKD data is an imperfect reflection of seventeenth-century
painting production. Nearly all of the paintings made between 1500 and 1750 in the
RKD data are attributed, a much higher ratio than the MDI. However, this is partly a
consequence of selection bias. Because theRKDdata has been compiled frommuseum
collection indexes, auction catalogues, and other published sources, it is distinctly
slanted towards those artworks that eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century
collectors found worthy of preserving. However, if both the historical MDI dataset
and the modern RKD dataset reveal similar patterns, this would strengthen the case
for claiming that a trend towards specialization did indeed exist historically.38
4.2.3 Subjects in the Print Data of the RKM
The Rijksmuseum has classified their artworks based on the Iconclass system for cate-
gorizing iconography in European art.39 The Iconclass notation system is hierarchical
by design, with each successive character of the notation defining a more specific
iconographic subject. For example, the notation “71C217” describes, in increasing
specificity:
• 7 (Bible)
• 71 (Old Testament)
• 71C (Genesis: the patriarchs)
• 71C2 (story of Isaac)
• 71C21 (Rebekah sought in marriage)
38. Jan De Vries argues for this approach in De Vries, “Art History,” 259–260.
39. H. van de Waal, fficonclass: An fficonographic ClassiȪcation System, in collab. with L. D. Couprie, Rudi
Fuchs, and E. Tholen (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co, 1973); Jochen Becker, “Review of Iconclass:
An Iconographic Classification System by H. van de Waal; L. D. Couprie; R. H. Fuchs; E. Tholen,”
Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for theflistory of Art 9, no. 1 (January 1977): 45–47, doi:10.2307/3780424. See
section 2.2 for a full overview of the RKM database.
162
• 71C217 (marriage of Isaac and Rebekah).
By grouping objects based on the first digit of their Iconclass label, it is possible
to sort the objects into broad thematic groups similar to those used for the MDI and
RKD. Because this diversity metric is sensitive to absolute numbers of prints made per
artist, multiple impressions of the same print will not be counted, but will instead be
treated as one artwork.40 Similarly, print series will also be counted as single artworks,
which will prevent, for example, identifying an artist as a portrait specialist when they
created just one series of portraits during their career.41 As this analysis is specifically
focused on the decisions of printmakers who actually cut or etched plates, only those
prints for which an artist made a plate (and not, for example, ones that an artist merely
published) will be counted when characterizing their oeuvre diversity.
4.3 Methodology: Characterizing Diversity
Whether looking at the diversity of species within an ecosystem, or the variety
of diferent industries within a state, diversity measures have to account for two
dimensions:
1. Categorical: How many discrete classes are observed?
2. Allocation: How even is the distribution of units among categories?
40. Although the RKM does not explicitly mark which object records are impressions of the same
print, duplicate impressions, or diferent states of the same print, can be roughly grouped when they
share the same title, description, start and end dates, and creators.
41. When RKM objects belong to a larger series, this series title is listed as one of the alternative titles
for the object. Prints that share a series title are treated as one artwork for the purposes of calculating
their maker’s oeuvre diversity.
163
Shannon’s measurement of diversity (Ds), a widely-used metric, captures both
of these dimensions of diversity.42 Originally developed to characterize entropy in
information transmission, this metric of diversity has been applied to the studies as
diverse as ecological diversity, economic specialization, and racial segregation.43 To
measure whether specialization or generalization was more favored by painters and
printmakers, each artist’s oeuvre is treated as a “population” with a single diversity score
calculated per artist. By this measure, a population whose members are distributed
evenly across several diferent species/categories (in Figure 48, artist B, with a Ds of
1.1) will have a higher diversity index than a population whose members are largely
concentrated in just one category (artist C, with a Ds of 0.83).
This method has drawbacks. For example, it cannot characterize whether or not
an artist changed their choices of subject matter over the course of their career. Most
paintings in the RKD database are not dated with the precision that would be required
to claim an accurate measurement of a single artist’s changing specialization over time.
TheMDI data, moreover, includes no dates for individual works. However, by looking
at how artists’ total oeuvre diversity changes based on their date of birth, we can get a
42. Shannon’s diversity index Ds is defined as the negative sum of the proportions of every class size
within the population multiplied by their logged equivalents, where ni is the number of observations in
class i, and N is the total population size:
Ds = −
∑ ni
N
ln ni
N
For the original derivation of Shannon’s diversity, see Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver,
The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949); for the R
implementation of this formula, see Jari Oksanen et al., “vegan: Community Ecology Package” (R
Pakcage [version 2.2-1], 2015), http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=vegan.
43. For an early example, see Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, “Urbanization, Technology, and the
Division of Labor: International Patterns,” American Sociological Review 27, no. 5 (October 1962): 667–
677, doi:10.2307/2089624; more recent work includes: Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano et al., Bio-Ecological
Diversity vs. Socio-Economic Diversity: A Comparison of ExistingMeasures, SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 389043
(Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, January 1, 2003), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=
389043.
164
Ds = 0 Ds = 1.1 Ds = 0.83
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Figure 48: Illustrating Shannon’smeasurement of diversity (D
s
) on sample data. Having
made only landscapes, artist A has a Ds of 0. Note that, although artist B and C
each painted at least one painting with from each category, artist B has a more even
distribution of works across those categories, and so has a higher Ds.
165
sense of generational changes in artistic strategies that would have been driven not only
by changing market demands, but also by habits and norms imparted to young artists
during their training. It is this generational scale that will clarify whether painters and
printmakers did indeed tend to specialize more over the course of the seventeenth
century.
4.4 Results: Specialist Painters, Generalist Printmakers
Figure 49 contrasts the oeuvre diversities calculated from each of these three data
sources across eight 25-year-long periods between 1500 and 1700. Both the MDI and
RKD paintings datasets confirm conventional art historical wisdom: starting with
painters born between 1575–1599, both sources exhibit an increasing skew towards
specialization, or low diversity. Continuing through the entire seventeenth century,
the median of this distribution dropped lower as fewer and fewer painters took the
generalist route, and more and more painters trended towards specialization. That
said, it is also important to note that generalists hardly disappeared from the world
of Dutch and Flemish painting: both MDI and RKD datasets show the consistent
presence of a handful of painters with a high diversity index over this period.
On the other hand, the median oeuvre diversity of printmakers in the RKMdataset
remains consistently higher than that of painters between 1500–1700, with only a
slight downward dip entering the seventeenth century. As with painters, there were
clearly exceptions to the overall average: in each period we do find a handful of
specialist printmakers at the low range of the diversity scale. However, they are far
outnumbered by generalist printmakers with high oeuvre diversity. The results support
the hypothesis that, by in large, printmakers favored making prints after a wide array
of artworks, and that printmakers who did define highly specialized niches appear to
have been the exception, rather than the norm.
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Figure 49: Boxplots showing the distribution and skew of oeuvre diversity for artists
born between 1500 and 1700, based on the MDI, RKD, and RKM datasets. Higher
boxes indicate that more artists born in that period tended to have diverse oeuvres,
while lower boxes indicate a greater number of specializing artists. Longer boxes
indicate that there was a wide range of artistic strategy (many specialists and many
generalists) while shorter boxes indicate that more artists’ oeuvre diversity fell within
a small range of values. (This is a Tukey boxplot, in which the the middle line showing
the median diversity value, and the top and bottom of the box mark the 75th and 25th
percentiles. The ends of the whiskers mark the values within 1.5 times the interquartile
range beyond the box. Outlier values beyond that range are marked with dots.)
167
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Figure 50: Comparing the subjects treated by the top 25% most specialized painters
from the MDI dataset and the top 25% most specialized printmakers from RKM
dataset. Specialist painters overwhelmingly favored landscapes, while specialist
printmakers were just as likely to produce genre prints, landscapes, biblical illustrations,
or renditions of historical or current events.
168
This approach to measuring diversity in the MDI and RKD data validates the
well-established fact that those painters who did specialize overwhelmingly favored
landscapes: of those artists in the bottom diversity quartile (i.e. the 25% most spe-
cialized painters in the MDI database), almost half of their paintings were landscapes.
(Figure 50) Though landscape painting had a wide range of styles and subjects, it was
common for artists like Jan vanGoyen orMeindertHobbema to produce nearly endless
variations on the same general set of tried-and-tested motifs and painterly efects.44 As
a genre, landscape was also amenable to an eicient painting techniques. Certain styles
of landscape could be rendered in broad brushwork with a limited palette and still be
an aesthetic success.45
Still life and genre paintings in this period were also, by in large, the purview of
specialists, though they took a distant second place to the speciality in landscape.
Still lifes may comprise a much smaller share of the total number of paintings in the
Montias database because, unlike landscapes, the aesthetic efect of still lifes was often
dependent on the painter’s mimetic skill and illusionistic finish — not a technique
conducive to speedy production. Nevertheless, still life paintings still comprised
around fifteen percent of archives surveyed between 1650–1670.46
44. On conventionality in Dutch landscape painting, see Lawrence O. Goedde, “Naturalism as
Convention: Subject, Style, and Artistic Self-Consciousness in Dutch Landscape,” in Looking at
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne E. Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 129–143.
45. Montias has argued that, whatever its additional aesthetic attractions, the tonal style of landscape
painting popularized in the 1630s and 1640s by Van Goyen and Pieter Molijn, among others, was a type
of process innovation that gave its adherents a business advantage: Montias, “Cost And Value,” 460;
Jonathan Israel has suggested, furthermore, that painters may have favored these restricted palettes at
this particular time because of the increased price of vibrant, foreign pigments during the continuing
war between the United Provinces and Spain: Jonathan Irvine Israel, “Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch
Art During Its Period of Crisis and Restructuring (c. 1621 - c. 1645),” Art flistory 20, no. 3 (September
1997): 449–476
46. On the market for still life painting, see Alan Chong andWouter Kloek, Sti͜-Life Paintings ͒om the
Netherlands, 1550-1720 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1999), 87–102.
169
These data also support the unsurprising conclusion that generalist painters pro-
duced largely figurative, narrative paintings. A painter who rendered New Testament
scenes was also likely to produce mythological images, and portraiture, too. Among
these highly diversified artists, we find figural masters such as Jan Lievens, David
Teniers, Gerard Honthorst, Caspar Netscher, and, of course, Rembrandt van Rijn and
Peter Paul Rubens. Artists capable of painting classical mythologies or biblical stories
would have needed enough mastery of the human figure to create a portrait, enough
understanding of perspective and color to produce a convincing landscape, and enough
facility with brush work to render convincing representations of diverse materials.
Karel vanMander recognized this, enumerating in his Schilder-boek all the elements that
this highest form of painting required, including “Concerning the Attitude, Fitness,
and Beautiful Execution of a Figure”, “Of the Ordering and Invention of Histories”,
“About Reflection, Reverberation, Glittering, or ‘Return-Seeing’ ”, and “Concerning
Landscape”.47
4.4.1 Specialist Printmakers
But what of specialist printmakers? Of those printmakers who did concentrate in
particular subjects, landscape does not dominate as absolutely as it did with specialist
painters. Rather, specialist printmakers were inclined towards a variety of subjects: not
only landscapes, but also genre prints, historical prints on political or military events,
and portraiture. Table 4 lists the ten most prolific Dutch or Flemish printmakers
with a below-median oeuvre diversity index; in other words, printmakers with a sizable
production who were more specialized than most of their colleagues. This section will
briefly explore the similarities and diferences between this sample of artists.
47. Den firondt der Edel vry Schilder-const in Karel van Mander, flet schilder-boeck (Haarlem, 1604), fol.
1r-57v.
170
Table 4: The most productive Dutch and Flemish specialist printmakers
(those falling above the 80th percentile of works produced, and below the
45th diversity percentile) arranged in order of decreasing diversity. Note that
the count of “works” treats print series as a single work (see section 4.2.3).
artist name works div subjects
Allaert van Everdingen 113 0.77 landscape, animals
Cornelis Dusart 57 0.76 portraiture
Abraham Dircksz Santvoort 123 0.74 topographical views, history prints
Theodoor van Thulden 52 0.68 antiquity, mythology
Adriaen van Ostade 85 0.67 genre, low-life
Anthonie Waterloo 35 0.67 landscape
Cornelis Pietersz Bega 36 0.62 genre
Reinier Nooms 72 0.58 seascape
Isaac Vincentsz van der Vinne 82 0.23 heraldry
A common trait shared by the most specialized etchers and engravers is that
printmaking was, by in large, not their main occupation. The landscapist Allaert
van Everdingen, for example, did not support himself primarily through printmaking,
but rather through painting. Van Everdingen was born in Alkmaar in 1621, and,
according to Houbraken, studied with Roelandt Savery in Utrecht and Pieter deMolijn
in Haarlem.48 He traveled to Norway and Sweden in 1644, a trip he documented in
extensive annotated sketches. On returning to the Netherlands, he settled in Haarlem,
where he joined the St. Luke Guild in 1646 along with his brother Caesar. In his
early landscapes, Van Everdingen used a bright and diverse color scheme, coupled
with compositions dominated by dark repoussoirs reminiscent of Savery and the
48. Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (Amsterdam,
1718), 2:95–6; Alice I. Davies and Frederik J. Duparc, A͜art Van Everdingen 1621-1675: ffirst Painter of
Scandinavian Landscape: Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings (Doornspijk: Davaco, 2001), 24–25.
171
Flemish landscape tradition. In his mature works he transitioned to a more muted
palette of pastels and browns, and distinguished himself through his specialization
in Scandinavian landscapes, particularly waterfalls in vertical format.49 Although Van
Everdingen did not work with a known publisher, his production of plates was
voluminous. His prints also enjoyed posthumous popularity.50 Van Everdingen favored
etching entirely over engraving, and in a few highly experimental, brooding prints, he
even tried his hand at an amateurish form of mezzotint.51 (Figure 52) However, he did
not produce his prints with an eye towards large-scale distribution: none of his etchings
bear the address of a publisher.
AnthonieWaterloo is yet another landscape painter and draughtsman who invested
heavily in etching. He was born in 1609 in Lille, but was living in Amsterdam by
1640.52 Inmore than 130 prints,Waterloo depicted themost unremarkable subjects and
scenery — simple buildings, bridges, and fences, and unassuming rivers and forests —
with a remarkable stylistic consistency.53 (Figure 53) Though he is mostly known today
by his prints, he also produced several paintings and was a prolific draughtsman. Like
Van Everdingen, Waterloo did not work with any publishers; many of his prints bear
the inscription AW ex., suggesting that they were self-published. His etched output is
49. Peter C. Sutton and Albert Blankert, eds.,Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 307–312.
50. Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, 6:153–204. In 1696, the Amsterdam publisher P. van de Boom
published a book of Van Everdingen’s landscape etchings; Allart van Everdingen, Recueil de cent paysages
inventées et gravées à l’eau forte par A. van Everdingen (Amsterdam: P. van den Boom, 1696); Davies and
Duparc, A͜art van Everdingen 1621-1675, 37.
51. On Van Everdingen’s experiments in mezzotint, see Elizabeth Mansfield, “Allart van Everdingen’s
Mezzotint Incunabula,” Print Quarterly 12, no. 2 (June 1995): 169–178.
52. B. P. J. Broos, “‘Anthoni Waterlo f(ecit)’ in Maarsseveen,” Jaarboekje Oudheidkundig fienootschap
Ni͓arlake, 1984, 18–48.
53. Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 55–57.
172
Figure 51: Allaert van Everdingen, Seascape with sailing ships, 1631–1675. Etching, 7.4 x
11.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Figure 52: Allaert van Everdingen, Landscape with buildings at night, 1631–1675. Etching
and mezzotint, 12.5 x 16.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
173
only rivaled by his drawings. Some of his largest sheets depicting topographical views
of Amsterdam were not studies or designs for prints, but were rather intended for sale.
(Figure 54) Again, Waterloo’s specialization in painted and drawn landscapes appears
to have driven his subject specialization in etching.
Figure 53: Anthonie Waterloo, View of a vi͜age with a water mi͜, 1630–1633. Etching,
9.8 x 14.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
What prints Reinier Nooms made were exclusively devoted to seascapes. Nooms
was a painter who centered his professional identity on his preferred subject matter,
going so far as to adopt the surname “Zeeman”. He spent his early career as a Dutch
merchantman, paintingmarine scenes and views of ports in Europe, theMediterranean,
and the North African coast. Nooms’ first-hand experience as a sailor is apparent
in the wealth of, precisely-painted, accurate details that fill his paintings of ships.54
In addition to his large output of paintings, Nooms produced etched series depicting
54. Laurens J. Bol, Die ho͜ändische Marinemalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Braunschweig: Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1973), 289–296.
174
Figure 54: Anthonie Waterloo, fleiligewegspoort, Amsterdam, 1636–1664. Brush in gray,
with black chalk, 40.2 x 64.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
diferent models of ships, as well as two major series of views of Amsterdam. While
Van Everdingen’s and Waterloo’s etchings appear to have been self-published, Nooms
worked with a wide range publishers over his career.55 He produced several print
series with the distinguished Amsterdam publisher Clement de Jonghe, including an
evocative series of the four elements rendered through the idiom of seascape and
landscape. (Figure 55) Nooms also published many of his etchings with Cornelis
Danckerts I of the Danckerts publishing dynasty. In addition to De Jonghe and
several members of the Danckerts family, his contemporary publishers included
55. OnNooms’ prints in general, see Freedberg,Dutch Landscape Prints, 60–61; George S. Keyes,Mirror
of Empire:DutchMarineArt of SeventeenthCentury (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1990), 413;
Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, vols. 56–57.
175
Frederik de Wit (Amsterdam), Gerard Valck (Amsterdam)56, Lodewyck Lodewycksz
(Amsterdam)57, and Jacques van Merlen (Paris).
Figure 55: Reinier Nooms, The ffour Elements, published by Clement de Jonghe, 1651–
1662. Etchings, Air: 8.7 x 20.4 cm.; Earth: 8.3 x 20.5 cm.;Water: 8.3 x 20.7 cm.; ffire: 8.7
x 20.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Adriaen van Ostade was another painter whose etched oeuvre reflected his painting
specialization. Working in Haarlem between 1647–1649, Van Ostade produced prints
of peasant fiugres based on his own paintings and drawings.58 He avoided direct images
of hard labor, instead focusing on moments of leisure and merrymaking. His etchings
feature intimate scenes of village and family life both quiet and boisterous, but always
depicted warmly and with a feeling of dignity, neither lampooning nor criticizing his
56. In 1661, Valck republished the series Nieuwe Scheeps Batalien in het licht gebracht door Reinier Zeeman
that Frederick de Wit had issued in 1656; Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, 1-5(7).
57. Lodewyck Lodewycksz was an Amsterdam broadside publisher, book binder, and art dealer who
published panegyrics of admirals Michiel Adriaansz de Ruyter and Maarten Tromp in 1654 and 1655
featuring portraits engraved by Michiel Mosijn and etched seascapes by Nooms. On this, see van der
Waals, Prenten in de gouden eeuw, cat. 167.
58. Peter van derCoelen,EverydayLife inflo͜and’sfioldenAge:TheCompleteEtchings ofAdriaenVanOstade
(Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 1998).
176
Figure 56: Reinier Nooms, Zaagmolenpoort, from Nieuwe en Eygentlycke A͍eelbeeldinghe
Der Stadts-Poorten van Amsterdam, published by Cornelis Danckerts (I), 1652–1656.
Etching and drypoint, 17.8 x 30.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
177
subjects.59 Two of Van Ostade’s pupils also continued his tradition of painting and
etching low-life genre scenes: Cornelis Bega and Cornelis Dusart.60 Bega produced
several dozen etchings during his career, as well as a few experiments with monotype.61
Dusart was the more prolific printmaker of the two students, with almost 120 known
surviving etchings and mezzotints. His etchings had a markedly satirical bent, possibly
derived from the stock characters found in rederijker plays.62 (Figure 57)
Another specialist painter-etcher was Theodor van Thulden, a Flemish artist active
in Antwerp in the first half of the seventeenth century.63 In his early years in Antwerp,
Van Thulden largely focused on commissions for mythological and allegorical cycles,
most notably collaborating with Rubens on the decorations for the Triumphal Entry of
Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Spain in 1635. Van Thulden is one of the only specialists
here who focused on engravings and etchings of classical and mythological subjects,
many of which were done on commissions from the same patrons who engaged his
painterly services.64
59. De Jongh and Luijten,Mirror of Everyday Life, cats. 55, 63.
60. Ostade’s etchings also had a long afterlife of their own; see S. William Pelletier, “Van Ostade’s
Etchings Published by ‘La Veuve Jean’,” Print Quarterly 11, no. 4 (December 1994): 395–401.
61. According toHoubraken, Bega wasOstade’s “first and best pupil”; Houbraken,De groote schouburgh,
1:350.
62. Stone-Ferrier, Dutch Prints of Daily Life, 89–94; de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, cat.
80.
63. On Van Thulden, see Alain Roy, ed., Theodoor van Thulden: een zuidnederlandse barokschilder: ‘s-
flertogenbosch, 1606-1669 (Zwolle:Waanders, 1991); for his prints, see Hollstein,Dutch and fflemish, 30:101–
134.
64. The town councillors who had commissionedVanThulden to paint Rubens’ designs for Ferdinand’s
1635 entry also commissioned an engraved festival book commemorating the occasion; Stijn Bussels,
“Making the Most of Theatre and Painting: The Power of Tableaux Vivants in Joyous Entries from the
Southern Netherlands (1458–1635),” Art flistory 33, no. 2 (April 2010): 243–245.
178
Figure 57: Cornelis Dusart, The ffamous Shoemaker, published by Pierre François Basan,
1695. Etching, 25.1 x 17.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
179
Two other specialists on this list were not painters. But printmaking also made
up just a part of their artistic careers. Isaac Vincentsz van der Vinne specialized
almost exclusively in engraved heraldic designs, emblems, trademarks, and personalized
imprese.65 (Figure 58) However he, too, made a great part of his income as a bookseller
rather than as a printmaker. Moreover, Van der Vinne appeared to have conducted an
outsize portion of his business with theMennonite community in Haarlem, which may
have contributed to his ability to specialize in his highly particular products.66
Figure 58: Isaac Vincentsz van der Vinne, trademark for Jan van Wesbusch, 1686.
Woodcut, 7.6 x 5.5 cm. Haarlem Municipal Archives. (flo͜stein 36:102, no. 140)
The other, Abraham Dircksz van Santvoort, was an engraver and sometime-
publisher who specialized in topographical history prints, depicting scenes from the
war or other political events. Little is known about his life, though he was likely
the brother of the Amsterdam portrait painter Dirck Dircksz Santvoort. He built
65. Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, 37:75–233; on Van der Vinne’s trademarks in particular, see
Christiaan Schuckman, “Gebruiksgrafiek bewaard: handelsmerken door Izaak Vincentsz. van der Vinne
(1665-1745),” Doopsgezinde bijdragen 14 (1990): 155–176.
66. Schuckman, “Gebruiksgrafiek bewaard,” 172–176.
180
his own print publishing business, issuing many history prints by his own hand from
both Amsterdam as well as Breda, where he was active between 1648 and 1653. Most
notably, Van Santvoort collaborated with Cornelis Danckerts in Amsterdam to publish
a large-scale etched map of Frederick Hendrick’s 1645 siege of Hulst with narrative
and topographical vignettes and a textual narrative. (Figures 59 and 60) Van Santvoort
would etch several printed city-view maps in this vein.67 Producing a satisfactory map
demanded additional skills above and beyond conventional etching skills, requiring
enough fluency in geometry to project a convincing topographical representation onto
a flat plane, as well as experience composing and printing large-scale compositions
across multiple plates.68 In this particular printed genre, unlike others, specialization
may have been all but required.
By in large, however, specialist printmakers tended to fit into Bartsch’s idea of the
peintre-graveur: a painter who produced original designs and also happened to create
their own engravings or etchings. In the case of the landscapists above (Nooms,
Van Everdingen, Waterloo) and the genre painters (Van Ostade, Dusart, Bega) their
concentration in particular print subjectmatter largely paralleled their painting careers.
4.4.2 Generalist Printmakers
Such specialized printmakers were outnumbered, however, by those who were able
and willing to render a wide variety of subjects. Table 5 shows the top ten most
generalist printmakers from the RKM dataset. As with Table 4, this is not intended
67. Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, 23:173–175.
68. It is notable that even the prolific se͜er of maps Hendrick Hondius did not cut the plates himself,
but rather published maps rendered by others; On printmaking challenges peculiar to mapmaking, see
Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas
Expansion During the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998), 42–49, 246–
249; Marco van Egmond, “The Secrets of a Long Life: The Dutch Firm of Covens &Mortier (1685-1866)
and Their Copper Plates,” ffimagoMundi 54 (2002): 67–86.
181
Figure 59: Abraham Dircksz van Santvoort, Siege and Capture of flulst by ffrederick
flendrick, 1645, 1646. Etching and textblock, 100 x 122 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Figure 60: Detail of Siege andCapture offlulst showing the publisher’s credit to Abraham
van Santvoort in cooperation with Cornelis Danckerts.
182
to be a comprehensive list reporting on the oeuvre diversity of all well-known Dutch
and Flemish printmakers. (Rembrandt, for example, ranks 90th in diversity out of
420 diferent printmakers for whom oeuvre diversity was calculated. He was a diverse
printmaker, but not exceptiona͜y so.) Rather, it ofers a sample of the most remarkably
wide-ranging printmakers in these data.
Table 5: The most generalist Dutch and Flemish printmakers (those falling
above the 85th diversity percentile) arranged in order of decreasing diveristy.
artist name
works
div subjects
Aegidius Sadeler 238 1.80 landscape, portraiture, allegory, mythology,
religious
Hendrick
Goltzius
228 1.80 biblical, portraiture, allegory, antiquity,
mythology, landscape
Crispin van de
Passe (I)
203 1.80 moralizing allegories, portraiture, devotional,
botanical, biblical
Caspar Luyken 454 1.74 bible, landscape, historical, genre, maps
Jacob Matham 229 1.73 allegory, mythology, portraiture, biblical
Abraham
Bloteling
188 1.72 landscape, genre scenes, portraiture,
mythological
Cornelis
Bloemaert (II)
180 1.69 saints & other religious, biblical, portraiture
Jan Luyken 2,047 1.64 bible scenes, seascape, genre, historical,
architecture, titlepages
Raphaël Sadeler
(I)
156 1.57 devotional series, biblical, allegory, mythology,
titlepages
Johannes Wierix 215 1.54 portraiture, biblical, allegory, genre, mythology,
devotional,
The one trait shared by the printmakers in this sample was that they almost
exclusively devoted their careers to cutting plates. Such flexibility may have presented
183
an attractive insurance policy both for printmakers themselves, but also for print
publishers, who had to continually react to the demands of a quickly-moving market
for artistic prints and illustrations. For example, it is hardly surprising to find Abraham
Blooteling among the generalist engravers, given the wide array of relationships he
maintained both in Amsterdam as well as in London. The same can be said of Cornelis
Bloemaert, whose success as an international printmaker working between Utrecht,
Paris, and Rome depended on his willingness to work with a wide array of artists.69
A wholly-market-based explanation for printmaking generalization does not tell
the entire story, however. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes towards
printmaking also contributed to this distinction between specializing painters and
generalizing printmakers. The most diverse printmaker in this analysis, Aegidius
Sadeler, presents an interesting case in point.
4.4.3 Rudolf II, Aegidius Sadeler, and the Use of Prints
The Holy Roman Emperor between 1576 and 1612, Rudolf II is famed for his imperial
kunstkammer, a collection of fine art and curiosities both natural andman-made.70 Many
of the masterpieces in this collection were produced by court artists whom Rudolf
recruited fromPrague, Germany, and the LowCountries. Art from the Rudolfine court
spanned an exceptionally broad range of visual modes, from stylized and idealized, to
highly naturalistic. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has convincingly argued that the key
to understanding this diversity lies in the fact that individual painters at the court
appear to have been assigned to particular genres. Following humanist models of
rhetorical eloquence, where the style of speech is appropriately matched to its content,
69. Further discussion of Blooteling’s and Bloemaert’s careers is found in sections 3.4.2 and 3.4.3.
70. For a general history of Rudolf II and his intellectual sphere, see Robert JohnWeston Evans,Rudolf
ffiffi and his World: A Study in ffinte͜ectual flistory 1576-1612 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
184
Prague painters rendered subjects in styles appropriate to each: learned allegories in a
highly mannered style, and pictures of country peasants in a grittier realism.71
Bartholomeus Spranger, for example, devoted his energies to painting allegories;
Hans von Aachen, mythologies; Josef Heintz, devotional paintings; and Joris Hoef-
nagel, various naturalia. The emperor also recruited separate artists for landscapes,
summoning the Flemish painters Pieter Stevens and Roelandt Savery to Prague in
1604.72
Whereas Spranger, Von Aachen, Savery, and the rest specialized by genre, Sadeler
received the novel designation of imperial kupferstecher. Sadeler came to work for
71. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “The Eloquent Artist: Towards an Understanding of the Stylistics
of Painting at the Court of Rudolf II,” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 1 (1982): 119–148. Kaufmann later
revisited this essay and suggested that specialization by Flemish and Dutch artists should be seen as
parallel to, if not derived from, the early separation of genres in sixteenth-century Prague. However,
he also distinguishes between the eastern European and northern Netherlandish manifestations of
this separation, claiming that the strict hierarchy of stylistic decorum that ruled Rudolfine Prague did
not obtain in the Netherlands. Dutch artists were more likely to produce allegorical or mythological
compositions in a naturalistic mode, instead of adopting the mannered ideal that Prague artists would
have used for the same subjects; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Perspective on Prague: Rudolfine
Stylistics Reviewed,” in The Eloquent Artist (London: Pindar, 2004), 82–83. On low-life pictures at the
court, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “‘fiar lecherlich’: Low-life Painting in Rudolfine Prague,” in The
Eloquent Artist (London: Pindar, 2004), 106–118
72. Rudolf was an ardent collector of both Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son Jan Bruegel the
Elder, and may have admired Savery’s responses to these Flemish forbears. Savery had painted his
own version of Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel in 1602, Ekkehard Mai and Kurt J. Müllenmeister, eds.,
Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit (Köln; Utrecht: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum; Centraal Museum, 1985), no. 1;
Kurt J. Müllenmeister, Roelant Savery: Kortrijk 1576-1639 Utrecht: flofmaler Kaiser Rudolf ffiffi. in Prag: die
fiemälde mit kritischemŒuvrekatalog (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1988), no. 2; on Stevens, see An Zwollo, “Pieter
Stevens, ein vergessener Maler des Rudolfinischen Kreises,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in
Wien 64 (1968): 119–180.
Notably, Savery’s role was codified in a Prague court register that specifically refers to him as “Ruelandt
Seuerin, landscha͓maler”, while another, unnamed artist, is listed as a Conterfetter, or portraitist; Heinrich
Zimmermann, “Urkunden, Acten und Regesten aus dem Archiv des K. K. Ministeriums des innern,”
Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des A͜erhöchsten Kaiserhauses 7 (1888): no. 4706. On the rise of
terms for “painter” tailored by subject matter at the turn of the century, see Lydia de Pauw-de Veen, De
begrippen ‘schilder,’ ‘schilderij’ en ‘schilderen’ in de zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1969), ch. 5
185
Rudolf II from 1597.73 Sadeler set to work producing engravings after paintings, draw-
ings, and designs made specifically for prints, of Spranger’s allegories, Von Aachen’s
mythologies, Josef Heintz’s religious compositions, and Savery’s and Stevens’ land-
scapes.74 (Figure 61) Savery also invented and engraved portraits, a flexibility of subject
matter that may have helped him maintain his position at Prague under Rudolf ’s less
artistically-minded successors Mathias (r. 1612–1619) and Ferdinand II (r. 1619–1637).75
The emperor also directed Sadeler and his assistants to create works after artists outside
the court, including Paul Bril and Jan Brueghel.76 In this way, Rudolf used prints as
a two-way conduit: a medium to disseminate images of court members, events, and
collections to the outside world, as well as a means to assemble images from artists
across Europe within Prague via printed representations.77
Sadeler also made several prints after some of Rudolf ’s most prized collections
of old masters, including drawings by Albrecht Dürer. Sadeler skillfully remade the
calligraphic pen work and subtle, tonal modeling of Dürer’s drawing of flead of the
73. Dorothy Limouze, “Aegidius Sadeler (c. 1570-1629): Drawings, Prints and Art Theory” (PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 1990), 142–143. For a discussion of the larger Sadeler dynasty, see section 3.4.1.
74. Sadeler did not work exclusively for Rudolf while serving as imperial kupferstecher. While at the
court, he fulfilled commissions for the Archbishop of Prague and for Jacob Chimarreus, a Canon of
St. Gereon in Olomouc; Dorothy Limouze, “Aegidius Sadeler’s Post-Rudolfine Career: New Beginnings
in anArtist’s LateOeuvre,” inRudolf ffiffi, Prague and theWorld: Papers͒om the ffinternationalConference, Prague,
2-4 September, 1997, ed. Lubomír Konečný and Beket Bukovinská (Prague: Artefactum, 1998), 211.
Court painters were also not bound to work exclusively with Sadeler. Outside engravers and publishers
were still doing reproductions after painters like Spranger during Sadeler’s tenure. For a discussion
of prints after Spranger in particular, see Strech, “Spranger inventor: Überlegungen zu Entstehung und
Funktion von Stichen nach Sprangers Werken.”
75. Limouze, “Aegidius Sadeler, Imperial Printmaker,” 15.
76. Sadeler may have known both artists personally from his visit to Rome in 1593; ibid., 7–10.
77. Robert JohnWeston Evans and Elišká Fučiková, The Stylish ffimage: Printmakers to the Court of Rudolf
ffiffi (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1991), 21; on printmaking in the Rudolfine court in general,
see Dorothy Limouze, “Engraving at the Court of Prague,” in Rudolf ffiffi and Prague: The Court and the City,
ed. Eliska Fucíková (Prague: Prague Castle Administration, 1997), 172–178.
186
Twelve-Year-Old Christ. (Figure 62) While the work is a brilliant display of Sadeler’s
own technical talent, it also ofers a striking homage to Dürer. Sadeler illusionistically
renders the print’s descriptive text as if carved on a stone plinth. This credits Dürer’s
original invention with far more visual fanfare than the customary invenit text tucked
into the lower corner of a reproductive print. Sadeler also addedDürer’s distinctiveAD
monogram in the upper right corner of his print, although the original drawing does
not include it.78 Even as he celebrates Dürer’s original invention, Sadeler reinforces his
own transformative abilities as an engraver.
Rudolf ’s interest in artistic transformation extended across all media, as can be seen
in the two reproductions he commissioned after another sheet by Dürer in the Prague
collections: a watercolor of theMadonnaAmong aMultitude ofAnimals. (Figure 63) From
this watercolor, Rudolf commissioned both an oil painting from Jan Brueghel the Elder,
who visited Prague in 1604, as well as a print from Sadeler. Unlike his engravings after
contemporary paintings in Prague, Sadeler ensured that his print was the same size
as the original source, compounding the emulative efect.79 Brueghel followed suit,
matching the scale of his panel to the Dürer’s watercolor. Through his commission,
Rudolf celebrated the artistic legacy of Dürer at the same time as he highlighted
the artistic talents he could command as the Holy Roman Emperor. Moreover, the
paired translation from watercolor into both engraving and oil painting rewarded the
78. Evans and Fučiková, Stylish ffimage, cat. 43.
79. Sadeler’s other prints after Dürer’s drawings, including theflead ofChrist, follow the same principle;
Kayo Hirakawa, The Pictorialization of Dürer’s Drawings in Northern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 115–117; Andrea Bubenik, Re͒aming Albrecht Dürer: The Appropriation
of Art, 1528-1700 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 106–109.
187
discerning viewer who could simultaneously appreciate the similarities and diferences
between each of the three artworks.80
Sadeler’s prints after the flead of the Twelve-Year-Old Christ and the Madonna Among
a Multitude of Animals prints carry out two functions. They each reproduce a singular
object, making the quality of Rudolf ’s collection known outside of Prague. At the same
time, they provide the viewer a virtuosic performance of engraving skill, appealing to art
lovers who were just as interested in the artistry of imitation as they were in seeing an
image of the original object. Rudolf was certainly one such viewer.81 To fulfill both these
functions as imperial kupferstecher, Sadeler had tomaster all possible styles, subjects, and
painterly hands.
This dual value of prints, and the dual role of printmakers, is implicit in Karel van
Mander’s 1604 biography of the master engraver Goltzius.82 Van Mander highlights
Goltzius’ ability to seamlessly refashion his own style in the formof the artists he wishes
to emulate, while also praising his ability to invent entirely new artistic techniques that
highlight, rather than subsume, the hand of the printmaker.83
80. Dagmar Eichberger has advanced the argument that, by focusing on a Dürer artwork that
celebrated the harmonious elements of nature, Rudolf was implicitly celebrating his own encyclopedic
collections — a motive that would also have been enhanced by the double commission of engraver and
painter to realize theDürer composition in two diferent formats; seeDagmar Eichberger, “Naturalia and
artefacta: Dürer’s NatureDrawings and Early Collecting,” inDürer and his Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger
and Charles Zika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 36; also Bubenik, Re͒aming Albrecht
Dürer, 108.
81. On Rudolf ’s fascination with engraving techniques and dissimulative artistry, see Lawrence W.
Nichols, “The ‘Pen Works’ of Hendrick Goltzius,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bu͜etin 88, no. 373 (1992):
4–56; Madeline Viljoen, “To Print or not to Print? Hendrick Goltzius’s 1595 Sine Baccho et Cerere ffriget
Venus and Engraving with Precious Metals,” Zeitschri͓ für Kunstgeschichte 74 (2011): 45–76.
82. Van Mander, The Lives of the ffi͜ustrious Netherlandish and fierman Painters (1604), 281v-287r.
83. Further analysis of this biography is ofered by Walter S. Melion, “Karel van Mander’s ‘Life of
Goltzius’: Defining the Paradigm of Protean Virtuosity in Haarlem around 1600,” Studies in Art flistory
27 (1989): 113–133.
188
Figure 61: Aegidius Sadeler after Bartholomeus Spranger, The Triumph of Wisdom, c.
1600. Engraving, 49.5 x 35 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
189
Figure 62: Aegidius Sadeler after Albrecht Dürer, flead of the Twelve-Year-Old Christ,
1598. Engraving, 35.7 x 22.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
190
Figure 63: Three versions ofVirginAmong aMultitude of Animals. (Top) Albrecht Dürer,
1503. Pen and ink and watercolor on paper, 32.1 x 24.3 cm. Albertina, Vienna. (Lower
left) Jan Brueghel I after Albrecht Dürer, 1604. Oil on panel, 24 x 26 cm. Galleria
Doria Pamphilij, Rome. (Lower right) Aegidius Sadeler after Albrecht Dürer, after 1597.
Engraving, 34.3 x 24.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
191
Roger de Piles made explicit these implicit values of prints in a 1699 essay “On the
Usefulness and Use of Prints.”84 He enumerated six core uses:
1. Ofer a way to transmit visual knowledge, rather that text alone: images, in
de Piles mind, were more eicient for teaching and learning. He particularly
advocated the use of prints by young students, on whose malleable minds such
images could be imprinted.85
2. Allow for easier recollection: a collector could index their prints so that they
might quickly locate a relevant image when needed. Monks, for example, should
jog their memories by studying devout histories, while philosophers could use
illustrations of naturalia as memory aides.
3. Represent absent or distant things: travelers, for example, could benefit by
looking at views of far-of cities; artists, by seeing works by the old masters that
they otherwise could not visit.
4. Allow easy comparison: Collectors may easily search for connections between
images by physically rearranging their prints, or flipping through pages in an
album.
5. Give a wide grounding of cultural knowledge: De Piles describes a network-like
approach to building a collection of history prints, starting with a core subject
84. “De l’utilité des Estampes, & de leur usage,” in Roger de Piles, Abrégé de la vie des peintres, avec des
reȫexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un Traité du peintre parfait; De la connoissance des desseins; De l’utilité des estampes
(Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1699), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k111893d, 74–92; translated to English
in Roger de Piles and Bainbrigg Buckeridge,The art of painting,with the lives and characters of above 300 of the
most eminent painters... (London: T. Payne, 1754), 49–60, http://archive.org/details/artofpaintingwit00pile.
For commentary on this essay, see William B. MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern
Perspective,” Art flistory 22, no. 3 (September 1999): 395, doi:10.1111/1467-8365.00163.
85. On the use of engraving as a metaphor for cognition, see ibid., 404. This use also touches on
William Ivins’ thesis that the true transformative power of visual prints in the sixteenth century was
their ability to engender an entirely new system of communication that could depend upon a mechanical
means for disseminating visual knowledge; William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1969).
192
like portraits of kings and their notable deeds, augmenting that with maps of
their countries, and eventually adding all sort of peripheral material like festival
books, and procession prints. The same might be done by a student of the arts,
who should collect a core group of prints after the old masters before branching
out to prints after their students.
6. Provide pleasure by their artistry and ingenuity in making representations: Prints
were worthwhile not only for their content, but for their style. One might
choose to collect prints not according to which artists’ works they reproduce,
but according to the engravers who cut them. De Piles argues that printmakers
themselves could benefit from collecting prints and building a history of their
own profession. Prints could thus constitute a history of their own making. This
underlines the importance of prints’ artistry in addition to their informational
content.
It is striking that all of de Piles’ uses of prints are couched in rhetoric of abundance.
For de Piles, printmaking is distinguished by both its wide adoption, as well as its
representative reach:
Since Marcantonio, a vast number of engravers have made themselves
famous, in Germany, Italy, France, and the Low Countries, and have
published, as well by engraving as etching, and infinite number of prints
on all sorts of subjects, histories, fables, emblems, devises, medals, animals,
landscapes, flowers, fruits, and in general all the visible products of art and
nature.86
Prints, in de Piles’ eyes, are useful in so many ways precisely because they could ofer
the viewer both a world’s worth of subjects as well as a protean showcase of artistic
86. “Depuis Marc-Antonie un grand nombre de Graveurs se sont rendus recommandables, en
Allemagne, en Italie, en France, & dans les Païs-Bas, & ont mis au jour, au burin, & à l’eau-forte une
inifinité de sujets de tous genres, Histories, Fables, Emblêmes, Desvises, Médailles, Animaux, Païsages,
Fleurs, Fruits, & généralement toutes les productions visibles de l’Art & de la Nature.”; Piles, Abrégé de
la vie des peintres, 77; translation adapted from Piles and Buckeridge, The art of painting, 51.
193
styles. It is little surprise that professional printmakers would strive to produce as
many genres as they could when collectors viewed prints as vessels of both encyclopedic
knowledge and stylistic variety.
Hendrick Goltzius embraced and cultivated this identity as a protean artist. His
renowned Haarlem print studio issued a massive range of genres, from formal portraits
and antique sculpture to biblical scenes and allegories, and would continue to do so into
the seventeenth century under the guidance of his stepson Jacob Matham. While he
did not produce dedicated landscape engravings, Goltzius did make several forays into
the genre. In a series of chiaroscuro woodcuts, Goltzius rendered small landscapes in
a manner reminiscent of Venetian vedute.87 His interest in landscape is also seen in his
silvery, panoramic drawings depicting the Haarlem dunescapes, and which anticipated
the etched topographical views of the Haarlem innovators of the 1610s.88 (Figure 64)
And while he did not issue any dedicated still life prints (a rare specialty in printmaking,
anyway), he did producemany drawn nature studies. (Figure 65) Carefully-observed still
life passages also feature prominently in the paintings that he made late in his career.89
That Goltzius mastered a wide array of genres aligns with his carefully-honed artistic
identity as a “Proteus” of art, able to shift his burin technique and graphic manner to
perfectly fit the visual style of any artist.90
87. Nancy Bialler,ChiaroscuroWoodcuts:flendrickfioltzius and hisTime (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1992),
no 49; Leeflang, fioltzius, cat. 70.
88. Leeflang, fioltzius, cat. 74.
89. See, for example, his 1603 portrait of Jan Goverts van der Aar (Museum Boymans van Beuningen,
Rotterdam) as a shell collector; Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, “‘Conchas Legere’: Shells As
Trophies Of Repose In Northern European Humanism,” Art flistory 29, no. 3 (June 2006): 387–413,
doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2006.00507.x; on Goltzius and nature studies in general, see Leeflang, fioltzius,
ch. 7.
90. Goltzius’ friend and biographer Karel van Mander famously refers to him as “a rare Proteus or
Vertumnus in Art”; van Mander, The Lives of the ffi͜ustrious Netherlandish and fierman Painters (1604), fol.
285r. Van Mander derived this imagery from a verse by Cornelis Schonaeus, a poet who provided
194
Figure 64: Hendrick Goltzius, Dune landscape near flaarlem, 1603. Pen and brown ink,
9.1 x 15.4 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Figure 65: Hendrick Goltzius, A ffoxglove in Bloom, 1592. Pen and brown ink on laid
paper, 17.5 x 9.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Image courtesy National
Gallery of Art, Washington.)
195
4.4.4 The Luyken Family’s Diverse Book Illustrations
While Goltzius, Wierix, Van de Passe, and the Sadelers all produced a combination
of standalone constprenten as well as book illustrations, Jan and Caspar Luyken were
exceptional for their single-minded focus on making book illustrations. Jan Luyken
was a prodigious printmaker born in Amsterdam in 1649. Working in the capital of
the European publishing universe in the second half of the seventeenth century, Jan
and his son Caspar established themselves as the most productive Dutch illustrators of
the century.91 Jan produced a wealth of book title pages and author portraits, as well as
innumerable illustrations, mostly as etchings. He worked for over a dozen publishers
across Amsterdam: etching over six hundred plates of biblical illustrations for Pieter
Mortier; more than one hundred maps for Johannes van Keulen; modern histories and
illustrations for anatomical and horticultural treatises for Pieter van der Aa and for
Jan Claesz ten Hoorn; and illustrated histories of the Holy Land for Willem Goeree
and François Halma.92 Most distinctive may have been the series of emblem books Jan
and his son Caspar engraved after designs of Jan’s own invention. One of his most
copied and adapted series was flet Menselyk Bedryf (“The mirror of human trades”),
an illustrated volume depicting a range of professions in emblem/motto pairs in the
tradition of the sixteenth-century books of trade. These designs were first published
inscriptions for many of Goltzius’ engravings: “Just as Proteus, captivated by eager love for the graceful
Pomona, transformed himself in the midst of the waves, so too through his mutable art Goltzius,
astonishing engraver and inventor, transforms himself.” On the importance of this imagery to Goltzius’
artistic identity, see Melion, “Karel van Mander’s ‘Life of Goltzius’”; Walter S. Melion, “Love and
Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus, Bacchus and Ceres of 1606,” Art flistory 16, no. 1 (March 1993):
60–94
91. P. van Eeghen and Johan Philip van der Kellen, flet werk van Jan en Casper Luyken (Amsterdam: F.
Muller & Co., 1905); Hollstein, Dutch and fflemish, 11:118–144.
92. Nel Klaversma and Kiki Hannema, Jan en Casper Luyken te boek gesteld: catalogus van de boekenco͜ectie
van Eeghen in het Amsterdams flistorisch Museum (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999); on Holy Land histories in
particular, see Anemone Bekemeier, Reisen nach Jerusalem: Dasfleilige Land in Karten undAnsichten aus fünf
Jahrhunderten (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1993).
196
in 1694 by Christoph Weigel in Nuremberg, though they would soon be republished
in Amsterdam.93 Caspar spent his early career training with his father in Amsterdam,
before traveling to Nuremberg in 1699 to produce prints for Weigel. Caspar returned
to Amsterdam by 1704, and continued to produce illustrations for a fantastic variety of
publications, though he would not match his father in sheer productivity.
Other printmakers who also focused intently on book illustration also had relatively
diverse oeuvres, such as Romeyn deHooghe or Salomon Savery (bothmore diverse than
67% of all other printmakers in these data). As discussed in chapter 2, sourcing suitably
adaptable engraving talent appears to have been a pressing concern for publishers not
only of constprenten, but also books with intaglio illustrations.94 Given the challenges
of locating a capable and reliable engraver or etcher who could accommodate the
challenging logistics of producing and illustrated book, it would follow that publishers
would have been particularly happy to establish a relationship with an engraver who
could be regularly called upon to produce a wide range of work.
4.5 Conclusion: The Encyclopedic Printmaker
While the phenomenon of seventeenth-century specializing painters in the Low
Countries has been thoroughly studied, existing case studies of printmakers ofered
conflicting evidence about whether printmakers also found it advantageous to distin-
guish themselves from a crowded field through distinctive subject matter. This analysis
suggests that, while an increasing number of painters took the specialist route over the
course of the seventeenth century, the output of most printmakers stayed consistently
diverse over the same period. Publishers’ own desire to produce a wide array of
93. Donna R. Barnes, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker: Jan Luyken’s Mirrors of 17th-Century
Dutch Daily Life (Hempstead, N.Y.: Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, 1995), 16–19.
94. See section 2.1.
197
Figure 66: Caspar Luyken after Jan Luyken, De Pastiebakker, in Spiegel van het menselyk
bedryf: vertoonende honderd verscheiden ambachten, konstig afgebeeld enmet godlyke spreuken en
stichtelyke verzen verryke, published by Kornelis van der Sys, Amsterdam, 1730. Emory
University, Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta.
198
subjects, coupled with the di culty of locating reliable printmakers, appears to have
incentivized artists who made most of their livelihood from producing prints to work
in a wide variety of genres. Those etchers or engravers who did focus one particular
subject shared a common trait: printmaking was not their sole profession. Many of the
specialist printmakers identified in this analysis were also specialist painters who also
produced prints (usually etchings) that went hand in hand with their paintings.
However, it was not only commercial motives that spurred printmakers to diversify,
but also the period understanding of the use and value of prints. Theory and economics
did not always see eye-to-eye in Dutch and Flemish art. Academically-minded writers
likeKarel vanMander orGérard de Lairesse advised artists tomaster the synthesis of all
specialities in history paintings, and denigrated those who specialized in the so-called
“byways” of landscape, still life, or portraiture out of laziness or greed. And yet many
painters, whether responding to economic incentives or to their own artistic interest,
found both financial success as well as acclaim and fame for their prowess in rendering
specialized subjects. With prints, however, commercial and theoretical considerations
converged. An outlook that regarded prints as a medium of universal knowledge also
celebrated printmakers with the technical range to produce and reproduce virtually any
image that was desired, whether by a patron, a publisher, or by the artist themselves.
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Conclusion
This dissertation openedwith two representations of print production: first, a sixteenth-
century anecdote that highlighted the professional interdependence of printmaker,
draftsman, and coordinating publisher; and second, a print that depicted the teaching
of novice copperplate engravers within a thriving print publishing house. (Figure 1)
These representations highlight core, interconnected issues raised by printmaking’s
unique demands as a medium: that of the need for experienced collaborators, and
that of the slow spread of printmaking ability and capacity throughout Europe. The
network analyses in this dissertation have clarified how these simple forces drove a
great many of the seeming-revolutions and disruptions in print production in the
Netherlands, and in Europe more broadly, between 1550–1750.
To produce prints at scale demanded collaboration, or at least co-production. A
printmaker could only get so far based on their individual talent with the block knife,
burin, etching needle, or mezzotint rocker. Printmakers also needed social capital in
the form of connections to publishers who could pay them for their plates, and to
artists with artworks or designs whose reproductions were marketable. Publishers, in
turn, needed access to capable (and reliable — note the constant laments of Christoph
Plantin!) printmakers and artists in order to turn a profit in a di cult business.
Designers likewise relied on printmakers and publishers to promote and disseminate
their artworks such that their name, in Hoogstraten’s words, might “sooner fly over the
world.”1 This need for well-connected collaborators may have driven mid-sixteenth-
century Dutch engravers like Philips Galle to build his career in Antwerp rather than in
1. See section 3.1.
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his hometown of Haarlem, or prompted Cornelis Cort to move his practice to Rome.
Projecting from this incentive alone, print historians have argued that printmaking
inevitably required large centralized houses, like that of Hieronymus Cock, who could
dominate the market through economies of scale, a case of the rich getting richer as
large centers attracted more talent, becoming even larger and attractive in the process.
But this dissertation has shown that this incentive could be persistent and sti͜ result
in a dynamic landscape of print production. The chance for any of these parties to
succeed— to locate capable and well-connected partners — was very much dependent
on the maturity and capacity of the print production marketplace in their immediate
environment. And that capacity was not static. It did not rise up overnight, but instead
was gradually cultivated over generations as experienced engravers, like the one shown
in Stradanus’ print, trained the next generation of artists. While Cort and Galle had
to leave the northern Netherlands to find established printmaking partners, novice
Dutch printmakers in the 1580s could instead flock to Hendrick Goltzius’ Haarlem
studio. They did so in numbers that were exceptional, given the size of the Dutch
print production network at the time.
Even though the incentives for local centralization remained the same, the growing
capacity of both Dutch and Flemish print production meant that a highly centralized
environment dominated by one major house would not be replicated in following
generations. Instead, marginal growth in the number of active printmakers in both
regions meant a precipitate decentralization of both the Dutch and Flemish print
production networks that afected the strategies of publishers and printmakers alike.
Publishers like Hendrick Hondius worked harder than ever to assemble a diverse stock
list, but conversely may also have found it easier than ever to fill those stocks with
plates by and after fellow Dutch artists. Meanwhile, in the southern Netherlands,
a contracting market helped protect long-running printmaking dynasties to a degree
201
not seen in the north. This novel analysis has also highlighted the importance of
professional Dutch engravers like Jonas Suyderhoef in the mid-seventeenth century.
Though largely unnoticed by art historians, thisHaarlem artist produced reproductions
after a wide array of artists and disseminated them via multiple publishers, playing a
crucial, yet unacknowledged, role in disseminating artistic images.
Expanding this view to the wider European network of print production revealed
a similar story, albeit from a diferent perspective. Measuring the changing balance
of domestic versus international printmaking collaborations across Europe again sug-
gested that the gradual spread of print production capacity could result in seeming-
revolutions. Those regions with the longest histories of intaglio printmaking (Flemish,
German, and Italian) made mostly domestic print production connections in the
mid-sixteenth century. By contrast, those regions with less well-established capacity
(Dutch, English, and French) made most of their connections externally, only shifting
inwards, often precipitously so, once they had built up enough printmaking capacity to
support a largely domestic artistic print industry. This analysis ofered two surprises.
First, that gradual changes in relative printmaking capacity, combined with the need
for print producers to seek out experienced and well-connected collaborators, could
drive the rapid emergence of regional printmaking industries and “domestic turns” in
print production more than any one historical event or individual. And second, that
only a few such external events disrupted the ability of European printmakers to work
internationally.
While these continuous incentives in printmaking resulted in discontinuous changes
in production, painters were undergoing their own revolution. Starting around the
turn of the seventeenth century, an increasing number of painters began to specialize
in single genres, producing landscapes, or still lifes, or portraits almost exclusively.
Painters stood to benefit by promoting their mastery of a particular type of painting
202
because it allowed them to stand out in a competitive field. Yet I have shown that this
same incentive did not hold true for professional printmakers. Instead, most remained
generalists who were flexible enough to fulfill the varying demands of publishers and
print buyers. This generalizing tendency must also be understood in the context of
period understandings of the use and function of prints. Prints were held in high
regard for their unique ability to ofer an encyclopedic representation of the world.
One could gather a wide array of subject matter and amass representatives of all kinds
of artistic styles within a few well-composed print albums. Printmakers who could
inventively reproduce myriad artworks and also emulate a broad range of hands and
manners could achieve both commercial success as well as fame in the form of court
postings and laudatory literary recognition. These expectations and demands—unique
to printmaking — helped distinguish the way printmakers defined their oeuvres, and
with it, their artistic identities.
Future Work: Art Historical Data Issues
Data-driven computation enabled these novel approaches to studying artistic print
production in the early modern Low Countries. But, as is well known, an analysis is
only as good the data powering it. In the course of investigating certain questions about
printmaking history, this dissertation has highlighted shortcomings in the way that
museums collect, edit, and publish information about their collections. For example,
as discussed in chapter 2, because the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum follow
diferent spelling conventions, it is di cult to comprehensively cross-reference their
two databases by artist: to the computer, “Hendrick Hondius I” in the Rijksmuseum
and “HendrikHondius (I)” in the BritishMuseum are two entirely diferent individuals.
In chapter 3, we encountered disagreements over assigning a nationality to artists; in
chapter 4, varying approaches to tagging the “subject matter” of a given artwork. These
203
are challenges in museum data because they are challenges in art history, full stop.
However, producing more interoperable and detailed art historical data can support
ever more creative analyses.2 And prints may serve as the most useful object case for
enhanced museum data infrastructure.
Prints have traditionally been a major blind spot in museum databases because,
unlike libraries, which generally deal with interchangeable copies of books, museums
assume the uniqueness of their objects. Thus, they follow description and cataloguing
standards suitable for standalone artworks.3 This approach is clearly lacking in the
description of hybrid objects like engravings or photographs that are both unique
objects as well asmultiples. Neither the BMnor theRKM, for example have structured
their collections data to explicitly link together impressions of the same print. Their
collection management systems simply were not built to track conceptual objects like
“prints”, of which the museum may own several physical impressions.4 This makes it
di cult to track phenomena like the trade of plates from one publisher to another.
2. Two major reviews of art historical research practices and digital technology have been
commissioned in the past five years, both of which comment on the research barriers presented by
siloed data: Diane M. Zorich, Transitioning to a Digital World: Art flistory, ffits Research Centers, and Digital
Scholarship (New York: The Samuel H. Kress Foundation and The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History
andNewMedia,May 2012), http://www.kressfoundation.org/research/transitioning_to_a_digital_world/,
esp. p. 27, and Matthew P. Long and Roger C. Schonfeld, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Art
flistorians, Ithaka S+R (ITHAKA, April 30, 2014), http://sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/supporting-
changing-research-practices-art-historians.
3. Zorich, “Library and Museum Information: Beauty and the Beast,” 3.
4. Jennifer Trant has summarized the genealogy of museum databases as an evolution from:
1) accountability-oriented (ensuring a basic and complete inventory
2) process-oriented (insurance, movement tracking, loans, wall labels, exhibitions)
3) (currently) knowledge-oriented (public access to museum data for unanticipated uses).
The data design and architecture principles that informed the first two iterations ofmuseumdatabases
define the limits of those databases for serving the third purpose, and it is against these limitations and
their technical debt that institutions now struggle. Jennifer Trant, “Curating Collections Knowledge:
Museums on the Cyberinfrastructure,” in Museum ffinformatics: People, ffinformation, and Technology in
Museums, ed. Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones (New York: Routledge, 2008), 277–278.
204
This is not a new problem, of course. The Bartsch and Hollstein series have
provided this connective tissue for more than a century, indexing prints and their
states with a catalogue of locations where actual impressions of a given print state
may be found. But for the museum collections management system, these references
are just human-readable text, rather than structured information that can be easily
computed. However, the technology exists to support an online, openly accessible
digital authority database for European prints. This database could contain unique
identifiers for prints and their states, serving as a digital reference point for museums
when they catalog their print collections.5 (Figure 67) Museums would be able to
focus on the specific description of individual impressions, preparatory drawings or
surviving print plates, including their unique materials, markings, and provenance,
while relying on this authority for larger knowledge about the history of the print
and its other impressions and states. By creating explicit references for prints and
states separate from the physical impressions and related objects, it would become
easier to describe complex relationships such as later reworking and republishing of
plates. In the past, such projects demanded an enormous amount of labor, expense, and
time. However, improved systems for finding matches between images and metadata
promise to streamline much of the monotonous work of matching existing records,
allowing expert researchers to focus on producing new information about prints and
printmakers.
Larger datasets that encompass more than the two institutions used for this project
could bring in the full spectrum of visual print culture, from book illustrations to
fugitive artifacts like broadsides and calendars. Combined with more nuanced and
5. The formal term would be a Linked Open Data (LOD) repository; the same format as used
by the British Museum. On LOD and cultural heritage, see Dominic Oldman, Martin Doerr, and
Stefan Gradmann, “Zen and the Art of Linked Data: New Strategies for a Semantic Web of Humanist
Knowledge,” in A New Companion to Digital flumanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Raymond George
Siemens, and John Unsworth (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2016), 251–273.
205
detailed data, these larger sources could open up new analytical opportunities for the
study of artistic prints. Such a project also ofers a revolutionary opportunity for
bridge-building betweenmany diferent collecting institutions, who deal withmultiples
in photography, sculpture, and the decorative arts as well.
Hollstein Data
Prints
Print States
Institutional Databases
Rijksmuseum
National Gallery of Art
The Louvre
British Museum
Print A
A: State 2
A: State 1
A: State 3
Print B B: State 1
B: State 2
Preparatory drawing
Impression
Impression
Impression
Impression
Impression
Impression
Impression
Print plate
RKM Database
NGA Database
Louvre Database
BM Database
Figure 67: Schematic diagram for a hypothetical “Digital Hollstein” Linked Open
Data authority, and its relationship to museum databases. While museums would still
maintain their own separate collections databases, they would be able to reference their
individual entries on print impressions and other related objects to the unique records
for prints and their states maintained by the central database.
Another promising opportunity is in dealing with the images themselves. This
dissertation has focused on data adjacent to the art object: the print’s creators
and production information, its dating, or textual descriptors like subject keywords.
206
Computer vision (CV) techniques open up the possibility of charting the visual
relationships between hundreds or thousands of artworks in a way that a human
observer, manually comparing pictures, could not. Low-level features like average hue
and brightness have been shown to capture stylistic clusters within artists’ oeuvres,
while higher-level feature detection, such as facial recognition, can be used to measure
facial symmetry, or recognize similar passages present in two otherwise-diferent
artworks.6 With these data, it could be possible to compare the stylistic distances
between these artworks to the network distances of the printmakers who made them.
In turn, one might assess the degree to which the collaborative clusters of artists
described by network analysis align with, or difer from the visual/stylistic clusters of
artworks detected by image processing techniques. In other words, did collaboration
directly afect particular aspects of style?
Higher-level feature detection may also be able to aid the detection of visual
quotations (e.g. a copied figures or reused decorative motif), which could, in turn,
describe a network of visual influence that existed parallel to the production network
considered in this study. In combination with careful metadata processing (common
artists, dates, descriptions, etc.), CV techniques could help automate the matching
of impressions of the same print in diferent collections.7 (Figure 68) It is likely that
this process might also reveal object relationships that have not yet been noted in
the literature, or within museum databases. In particular, automated image matching
6. On low level features, see Lev Manovich, “Style Space: How to Compare Image Sets and Follow
Their Evolution,” Software Studies Initiative, August 4, 2011, http : / / lab . softwarestudies . com/ 2011 /
08/style- space-how- to- compare- image- sets.html; on facial recognition: Javier de la Rosa and Juan-
Luis Suárez, “A Quantitative Approach to Beauty. Perceived Attractiveness of Human Faces in World
Painting,” ffinternational Journal for Digital Art flistory, no. 1 (June 26, 2015), doi:10.11588/dah.2015.1.21640.
7. Such image matching work is already being pursued by the Frick Photoarchive; John Resig, “Using
Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives,” Journal of Digital flumanities 3,
no. 2 (October 14, 2014), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/using-computer-vision-to-increase-
the-research-potential-of-photo-archives-by-john-resig/.
207
might shed further light on under-studied practices such as plate re-use and re-issue
under diferent titles.8
Figure 68: (Left): Cornelis Visscher (II) afterGerrit vanHonthorst, published by Pieter
Claesz Soutman. Portrait of Charles ffiffi, 1650. Engraving, 41.6 x 30.8 cm. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. (Right): Anonymous printmaker, published by Hugo Allard. Portrait of
Wi͜iam ffiffiffi, 1670–1684. Engraving, 41.2 x 30.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The
reused plate was detected via automated image matching by Baumann 2015.
That said, the concept of “vision” in CV can, at times, seem even more alien to
an art historian’s conception of vision than network analysis’ conception of networks
is to our colloquial sense of the term. Seemingly simple visual descriptions such as
“linear”, “idealized”, or “loosely painted” do not have easy surrogates in the world of CV.
Likewise, image properties commonly used inCV such as entropy and spatial frequency
are di cult to map to meaningful concepts in traditional visual analysis. As calls grow
ever louder for museums and universities to incorporate new technologies into their
8. Preliminary work on finding such matches has been done by Ryan Baumann, “Finding Near-
Matches in the Rijksmuseum with Pastec,” Ryan Baumann - /etc, November 3, 2015, https : / / ryanfb .
github.io/etc/2015/11/03/finding_near-matches_in_the_rijksmuseum_with_pastec.html. On the re-use
of portrait prints with diferent inscriptions, see George Somes Layard and H. M. Latham, Catalogue
Raisonné of Engraved British Portraits ͒omAltered Plates, (London: P. Allan & Co., 1927); Craig Hartley and
Catharine MacLeod, “Supposititious Prints,” Print Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1989): 49–54.
208
day-to-day work, art historians must diligently engage with these techniques in order
to ensure they remain useful and relevant for our research.
Digital Scholarship And the Two Art Histories
The challenges facing this research are more than just technical, however. The
collaboration between publishers, academic researchers, and museums that would be
required to support a project like the “Digital Hollstein” suggested here is daunting.9
Indeed, such a project would never be the work on a solitary scholar, but would require
long-term collaboration and funding between multiple institutions.
Perhaps the greatest di culty for an art historical data project such as the one
proposed here will be bridging the persistent disconnect between discussions held in
the sphere of museum technology, and those in the academic “digital humanities.”
There remains a rift between academic art historians’ understanding of the digital
future of our field, and the digitally-inflected work that has been done in museums
for decades.10 Digital strategies in museums have generally been siloed in separate
departments, their brief often focused on visitor services and outreach rather than
producing or supporting art historical research. For example, Peter Gorgels, Internet
Manager at the Rijksmuseum, has explicitly stated that their priority audience is the
“culture snacker” (i.e., the casual visitor), not the academic researcher.11 The digital
9. On the challenge of inter-museum digital infrastructure projects, see Richard Rinehart and
Layna White, “Challenges to Museum Colalboration: The MOAC Case Study,” in Museum ffinformatics:
People, ffinformation, and Technology in Museums, ed. Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 239–266.
10. On this divide, see Sheila Brennan, “DH Centered in Museums?,” Lot 49, March 16, 2015, http:
//www.lotfortynine.org/2015/03/dh-centered-in-museums/.
11. Peter Gorgels, “Rijksstudio: Make Your Own Masterpiece!,” in MW2013: Museums and the Web
2013 (Portland: Museums and the Web, April 2013), http : / /mw2013 .museumsandtheweb.com/paper /
rijksstudio-make-your-own-masterpiece/.
209
“labs” at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum12 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art13 are
likewise focused creative community engagement. These are laudable goals, and
understandable for public-facing institutions, but perhaps not the ones that academic
scholars would see prioritized to the exclusion of all else. TheOnline Scholarly Catalog
Initiative funded by the Getty Foundation is one of the few initiatives explicitly geared
towards producing scholarly research through digital means.14
Meanwhile, universities have continued to invest in so-called “digital humanities
centers” focused on supporting digitally-inflected research and teaching in the hu-
manities. These DH centers may exist as standalone units within the university,
or embedded within the university libraries, or (more rarely) as part of an academic
department. Though these centers have tended to focus on text and literary studies,
many are now striving to connect with a wider variety of departments, including
history and art history.15 However, as Diane Zorich and Neil Fraistat have both noted,
because DH centers are built primarily to service the university, rather than specific
disciplines, they are incentivized to silo themselves of from sustained collaboration
with seemingly-natural extra-institutional partners like museums.16 Without sustained
12. Sebastian Chan, “Strategies Against Architecture: Interactive Media and Transformative Technol-
ogy at Cooper Hewitt,” inMW2015:Museums and theWeb 2015 (Chicago: Museums and theWeb, April 8–
11, 2015), http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/strategies- against- architecture- interactive-
media-and-transformative-technology-at-cooper-hewitt/.
13. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The MediaLab,” 2015, http://www.metmuseum.org/about- the-
museum/museum-departments/office-of-the-director/digital-media-department/medialab.
14. Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, Moving Museum Catalogues Online: An ffinterim Report ͒om the
fietty ffoundation (Los Angeles: The Getty Foundation, 2012), http : / / www . getty . edu / foundation /
initiatives/current/osci/osci_report.html.
15. See, for example, the partnership between theUniversity ofMaryland’s Department of ArtHistory
& Archaeology and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities in hosting a conference
on the Digital Dimensions of Art History in 2016, funded by the Kress and Getty Foundations.
16. Diane M. Zorich,ASurvey of Digital flumanities Centers in the United States (Washington: Council on
Library and InformationResources, 2008), vi–vii, 4–5; Neil Fraistat, “The Function ofDigitalHumanities
210
attention to larger institutional structures in our discipline, it is entirely possible that
new digital approaches may simply re-inscribe the “two art histories” that have long
shaped the practice of art history here in the U.S.17
I argued in chapter 1 that art historians have “always been digital,” in the sense
that we have always collected and categorized information about art objects. Consid-
erations about how, where, and for whom, to compile art historical knowledge have
an equally long history. Future work in data-driven, computational art history thus
transcends particular classes of objects, like prints, as well as particular methodologies
like network or image analysis. As we grapple with new scales of knowledge, and new
approaches for weaving evidence into historical argument, we will also have to face
anew longstanding questions about how to do art history across its diverse institutions.
It is in these core questions that the present “digital turn” in art history may have its
greatest impact.
Centers at the Present Time,” inDebates in the Digital flumanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (New York: City
University of New York, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/23.
17. The existence, and degree, of this conflict between academic and museum approaches to
scholarship and exhibitions was famously debated in a 1999 conference at the Clark Art Institute;
Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art flistories: The Museum and the University, Clark Studies in the
Visual Arts (Williamstown: Clark Art Institute, 2002).
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Appendix A Network Construction Methodology
This appendix discusses several of the technical considerations when projecting an af-
filiation network from historical data. A high-level discussion of network construction
for this study is discussed in 2.3
A.1 Unknown Creators
Because this study is focused on the interactions between individuals, it is not possible
to include artworks that have no identified creators. For example, some artworks in
the RKMdataset are listed with as created by “anoniem” (“anonymous”) or “onbekend”
(“unknown”). These links are ignored. However, if the same object includes links to
any other identified creators, those creators are duly connected in the network model.
The BM dataset does not attempt to mark anonymous or unknown artists.
Similarly, artworks with no date whatsoever cannot incorporated into this analysis.
A.2 Production Roles
There are other avenues for participation in the production of a print besides designer,
platecutter, and publisher. These include a sovereign issuing a privilege to a publisher,
or an intermediate draughtsman, or a calligrapher providing an inscription. However,
it would be di cult to usefully incorporate such orthogonal roles into the macro-scale
analysis that is the subject of this work. For one, the amount of richly described links
between, for example, prints and the poets whose inscriptions have been used for them
212
is small indeed. Moreover, the outputs of network analysis become less intelligible the
more heterogeneous their nodes are.
The RKM uses a more granular set of terms to designate that an artwork was done
after the design of an artist, by a publisher, or by an engraver. For this project, I
categorize these into three major classes:
1. after: “naar ontwerp van”, “naar tekening van”, “naar schilderij van”, “naar
schildering van”, “naar eigen ontwerp van”, “naar prent van”, “naar beeld van”,
“ontwerper”, “cartograaf”, “tekenaar”, “inspirator”
2. printmaker: “prentmaker”, “vervaardiger”, “graveur”, “bloksnijder”
3. publisher: “uitvoerder”, “supervisie”, “verkoper”, “boekverkoper”, “handelaar”,
“uitvoerder”, “prentverkoper”, “boekhandelaar”
The RKM also indicates when associations between objects and artists have been
rejected — these relationships are not incorporated into the network data examined
here. Many of their artist-object links have qualifiers, e.g. “documented on the object”,
or “forgery after”. Of these qualifications, this study has accepted the following:
“vermeld op object”, “eigenhandig gesigneerd”, “mogelijk”, “toegeschreven aan”, “kopie
naar”, “naar”, “mogelijk kopie naar”.
A.3 Link Direction
Networks may be constructed with either directed or undirected edges between nodes.
The decision to construct a network as either directed or undirected will afect many
diferent network metrics, and has a direct bearing on the mapping between network
concept and real-world meaning. A directed edge is appropriate when the relationship
being represented is one-way, or asymmetrical; for example, a letter sent from individual
A to individual B is a directed connection. In an ailiation network such as the one that
213
we have constructed based on artists’ involvement with objects, we are dealing with
symmetric relationships (“printmaker A participated with publisher B” ⇔ “publisher
B participated with printmaker A”). For this reason, the print production networks in
this study will be undirected.
A.4 Link Weight
What of the cases where two individuals are tied together by multiple objects? This is
where edge weight must be considered. As with directionality, the weight, or strength
of connections between any two nodes, can afect many diferent measures of network
properties. The printmaking network presents a challenging weighting problem. On
the one hand, it would be easy toweight each connection between two individuals based
on the number of prints they were both involved in during a certain span of time; 1 for
1 print, 10 for 10 prints, 100 for 100 prints. However, this raises two issues:
1. This analysis is based on two collection databases, therefore the basic object is
not a print per se, but an impression of that print. Because of this foundation,
edge weights based on the number of indexed impressions would be inordinately
sensitive to the vagaries of collecting histories in the BM and the RKM. To claim
an edge weight based solely on the number of surviving impressions would be to
base that weight on a generally arbitrary number subject to a great number of
historical contingencies;1
2. Even if we were able to count how many distinct prints (as opposed to surviving
impressions) connected two individuals, to weight edges based on this number
would be equivalent to arguing that two individuals who happened to be involved
1. Parshall, “Prints as Objects of Consumption,” 20–21.
214
in a book illustration project with fifty diferent prints are, in a directly meaning-
ful way, Ȫ͓y times as connected to each other as two individuals who are linked
by one print alone. This is a dubious claim to make, especially in light of the
previous issue.
Therefore, in this study I will be constructing unweighted networks that describe
only the existence or non-existence of a relationship, and make no claims about its
relative strength. This is, undoubtedly, a simplification of reality. However, I argue
that, within the bounds of the data now available, it is suicient to use unweighted
networks, as it will still capture the most important aspect of the network (when and
between whom a connection existed) while avoiding introducing premature complexity
based on problematic assumptions. This simplified network preserves the basic
network topology (the existence or non-existence of a relationship between two parties
at a certain point in time) while removing the biasedweighting of a particular collection,
which may have many impressions of the same print.
215
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