Art and Corporate Identity:
Guild Patronage in the Early Modern Netherlands
Charlotte Houghton
cmh17@psu.edu
This workshop explored
the role of artwork in promoting corporate interests
among trade and shooters guilds. James Bloom discussed
appropriations from elite traditions of tapestry and
manuscript illumination in the Master of Frankfurt's
Festival of the Archers, suggesting that this
work offered unexpected insight into the progress
of panel painting's status among the arts. Anne Woollett
explored the Oude Voetboeg's 1590 altarpiece as a
commission crafted to underscore the guild's orthodoxy
in Counter-Reformation Antwerp and, in so doing, to
bolster its political prominence. Natasja Peeters
analyzed the choice of artists for Antwerp's St. Luke's
Guild altarpiece commission of 1602, and posed the
intriguing problem of why the guild waited so long
after 1585 to undertake this important project. Ron
Spronk offered a caution against too hasty assumptions
that St. Luke imagery (such as Rogier van der Weyden's)
was always a product of St. Luke's Guild commissions.
Joost vander Auwera urged us to look beyond paintings
when considering corporate collections, and demonstrated
that documentary sources often reveal the greater
relative value of media such as silver work and regalia
related to ritual and ceremony. Charlotte Houghton
discussed the functional nature of the collection
of the Antwerp Butchers' Guild as inventoried in its
Vleeshuis in 1641, and related the guild's patronage
patterns to moments of political crisis for the organization.
Alison Kettering noted striking differences in corporate
group portraiture traditions between the Northern
and Southern Netherlands, and suggested that this
cultural divide merited more focused study. Ensuing
discussion raised A? though by no means resolved A?
such issues as the differing needs and patronage patterns
of militia versus trade guilds, the varying function
of works aimed at self-identification within the organization
or at external group promotion, and the extent of
corporate resources invested in artistic production
and consumption.
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