Browsing by Subject "Sixteenth century"

During the 1550s, a warehouse was constructed in Antwerp with funds from both the city government and a private investor. This building, the Tapissierspand, became the global center for selling and distributing tapestries of extraordinary beauty, exquisite craftsmanship, and exorbitant cost. The construction of the building indicates that the very nature of how tapestries were made and purchased was changing in the 1550s. Although Antwerp's fairs had long been convenient locations for agents to find luxury items that might please their wealthy clients, like with many luxury trades, tapestry sales were shifting from strictly commissioned sales to include on spec sales. The Tapissierspand was the ideal place for a dealer to purchase multiple already-made tapestries and load them onto the waiting ships in Antwerp's busy harbor for export and resale abroad. The city's export registers document that thousands of yards of tapestry were shipped this way.

The regulatory environment in Antwerp was much less strict than in other cities and this permitted freer interactions within guilds and across industries. The city was for this reason a desirable location for craftsmen to work and sell. But because the strict royal ordinances delivered throughout the 1530s and 1540s were frequently uninforced, workers in the industry were forced to find other ways to manage the large risk inherent in the tapestry trade. The development of the Tapissierspand in Antwerp was an effort on the part of merchants and the city to abate risk. The city could continue to entice merchants if it could provide the right opportunities and environment. However, by the sixteenth century, the constant hyper-vigilance the city had experienced throughout the fifteenth century during frequent times of war and financial difficulty shaped the way the city and its occupants viewed business. In a large sense, everything came down to risk, and how to manage it and minimize it.

At a time of upheaval and mismanagement, survival and financial success through the reduction of risk became of primary importance. Tapestry weaving carried inherent--and large--risks. Raw materials were expensive, and workshops often did not have the capital needed for on spec weaving. The purchase of on spec tapestries without any guarantees of quality or origin was risky for buyers. Thus the Tapissierspand's story is one of people seeking to maximize economic advantage and minimize risk. The Tapissierspand allowed buyers and sellers to minimize risk by facilitating exchange of knowledge, assessment of quality, negotiation of prices and commissions, and extension of credit.

This dissertation will examine the historical precedents in Antwerp that allowed the Tapissierspand to develop, and the ways in which the Pand functioned to expand trade while reducing risk for both buyers and sellers by reducing the risks inherent in the industry.

Marinus Van Reymerswaele's painting of 1542, The Lawyer's Office, was a completely new type of image in the history of art. It shows a lawyer and his assistant behind a desk strewn with briefs, wax seals and money. A complex set of historical circumstances at the interface of art, economics, and legal history in sixteenth century Antwerp explain this painting's appearance and significance. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp became a locus of unprecedented artistic production caused by the dramatic growth of its mercantile population, its highly organized commercial infrastructure, and its competitive business atmosphere. These developments stimulated a new sophistication in the art market and an energetic approach to acquiring and collecting, supported by publicly-funded venues to mass-market paintings. Over the course of the sixteenth century, artists invented new subjects to meet public demand. Many of these were radically new. One of these artists, Marinus Van Reymerswaele (c. 1490-1546) made distinctive paintings of lawyers, bankers, and moneychangers which relate to fundamental changes in the legal and commercial infrastructure in the sixteenth century. In just one generation, the Habsburg authority centralized the political and legal landscape in the Netherlands. As the prized economic and cultural center of Habsburg territories, Antwerp was transformed.

This dissertation links the development of consumption practices and the rise of new pictorial subjects introduced in Antwerp with the changing business and legal climate of the city during the sixteenth century. Through an investigation of unpublished home inventories recorded between 1528 and 1588, it clarifies the acquisition preferences of the Antwerp public at large, considering both changing preferences for panel and linen paintings as well as for novel and traditional images alike. This reassessment of painting consumption reveals a starkly more conservative approach to buying images than previously assumed, underscoring the rarity of everyday life subjects in Antwerp domestic spaces. As a painter operating within this market, Marinus van Reymerswaele invented a new brand of painting -- the new old master painting -- that not only addressed broad social concerns sparked by Habsburg political, mercantile, and legal reforms, but also built on long-established Netherlandish visual traditions. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, his paintings became more desired by collectors but lost their topicality as memories of Antwerp's political anxieties faded into the past.

The objective of this thesis is to examine seventeen Venetian church ceiling cycles and to demonstrate how many of them, particularly the ones painted from the 1550s onward, corresponded to Catholic reform and the decrees set forth at the Council of Trent. Demonstrating the importance of the partnership between traditional methodologies and digital applications as an approach to art historical research and presentation, this thesis determines that the subject matter and display of the ceiling cycles after 1550 shifted due to the decrees related to imagery. The first chapter provides an overview of the Catholic Church in Venice and its imagery as well as the controversy over religious imagery in the sixteenth century. Chapter One also provides historical context on the Council of Trent and the decrees laid out on imagery, as well as Venice’s response to the decrees in relation to the ceiling painting cycles. The second chapter focuses on the methodological implementation and implications of digital tools for the art historical analysis. It includes a discussion of the process of building the visualization database in Omeka and constructing three interactive maps in Carto DB that indicate the location of Venetian churches containing the ceiling cycles, where they are placed inside the complex, and the types of iconography depicted. This chapter considers why the exhibitions on the website, Iconography, Placement in the Complex, and Patrons are relevant to the art historical content along with the decisions that guided which tools could best show this content. The chapter also addresses how photographing each church ceiling painting in Venice helped to shape the database and also to reconstruct the experiential mode of viewing these cycles. The third chapter summarizes the findings of this thesis through an analysis of the Overview, Iconography, and Placement in the Complex maps. The digital overview map clearly shows the abundance of church ceiling painting during the sixteenth century, which seems to be a Venetian phenomenon, and a strong affirmation of sixteenth-century Catholic faith in the elaborate decoration of churches. An analysis of the three layers of the Iconography map serves as a synopsis of how the visualization program provides novel, multiple ways of comparing and assessing Catholic reform and Counter Reformation imagery. In addition, an examination of the Placement in the Complex map allows the user to recognize that the decoration of sacristies was probably a direct result of the emphasis on the Blessed Sacrament during the Tridentine period and as such, is an appropriate case study for visualization. The chapter also addresses potential ways to expand this thesis and opportunities for further research.

This thesis explores attitudes of Christians toward Islam and Muslims in Spain in the sixteenth century and intends to destabilize Islam's traditional place as adversary in Early-Modern Spanish history. My research aligns itself with and employs new trends in historiography that emphasize dissent and resistance exercised by individuals and groups at all levels of Spanish society in order to complicate popular notions about the extermination of Islam in Spain. I argue that within Spain there was, throughout the sixteenth century and after the expulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth century, a continued interest in the religion and culture of Islam. I show that, far from isolating itself from Islam, Christian Spain was engaged with Muslims on multiple levels. The voluntary and involuntary migration of Spaniards to Muslim lands, for many emigrants of Christian decent, led to the embrace of a multicultural, multireligious, polylingual and polyethnic reality along the Mediterranean that was contrary to Spanish Counter-Reformation ideology. The dissertation includes textual examples from sixteenth-century Spanish and colonial "histories," and works by Cervantes, to support the argument that this official ideology, which has dominated historiography on this period, does not reflect much of the Spanish experience with non-Christians within and without its borders. My goal is to expose a context within the field of Early-Modern Peninsular studies for alternative forms of discourse that emphasize toleration for religious and cultural difference, interfaith and intercultural dialogue and exchange, and a basic interest in and curiosity about Islamic ways of life.