Defenders of the Image: the Display of Display in Counterreformation Antwerp: Cabinets and Iconoclasts

The Antwerp-invented genre of the painted Collector’s Cabinet meant that painters played a key role in the conception and disclosure of collections. Strangely enough, artists’ collections in general and painters’ collections in particular, have rarely been studied – Rembrandt and Rubens are the exceptions to the rule. This paper discusses the culture of collecting among Antwerp painters in relation to their concepts on art, artifacts and their display. Objects and artifacts besides paintings are key to understand the culture of collecting in Antwerp in general and the genre of the Collector’s Cabinet in particular. The Francken family is taken a prime example, because of the family’s personal collection (documented in a probate inventory) and their role in the invention of the genre of the Collector’s Cabinets. It is no coincidence that the Franckens depicted collections in association with iconoclasts. Quintessential to both iconoclasm and the display of collections were issues of materiality and the transformation of substances. The display of objects ranging from art and artifacts to naturalia, exotica and scientific instruments has puzzled many, and since Filipczak, plenty of interpretations were proposed. In this paper, the display of collected objects (both painted and as described in inventories) is understood in terms of the fierce debates about materiality and transformation, issues linked symbiotically to artistic, scientific and religious developments. Through their paintings and their collection of objects, the Franckens played a role in these debates