Netherlandish Group Portraits (1400-1700) as a Serial Source

Netherlandish art of the centuries between 1400 and 1700 is world-famous. We now consider group portraits like Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) as the signature pieces of this artistic heyday. In this project, we study Early Netherlandish and Renaissance group portraits as a serial source type to gain new insights into the functions they fulfilled within pre-modern political culture.

In the project, we focus on the meaning of painted group portraits. We look at double portraits and family portraits, ‘institutional’ group portraits such as regents group portraits and militia portraits, as well as hybrid genres such as the altarpieces by Jan van Eyck and Jan van Scorel. For group portraits, meaning is on the one hand strongly related to the question of who initiated these works: what reasons did patrons have for doing so, what did they want to achieve with them? On the other hand, meaning is about what can be seen in the paintings: how were pre-modern preoccupations with rank and seniority expressed, and how, in these portraits, does the representation of the collective relate to that of the individual?

Of course, the meaning of Netherlandish group portraits has already been the subject of much research. However, this concerns a small range of paintings that have been found worth investigating from an aesthetic – and therefore commercial – point of view. Moreover, the study of meaning in Dutch painting has long been dominated by iconography and iconology, which as scholarly methods have their origins in the early twentieth century. These approaches have brought us much, but are now beginning to hold us back, because they were developed at a time with different norms, values, and technical possibilities.

Also persistent is the focus on the genius of the individual artist: the ‘hand of the master’. While understandable from the point of view of museums in search of blockbuster exhibitions, this focus gets in the way of our understanding of meaning. Premodern painters were (exceptionally gifted) craftsmen who worked on commission. The imagery they used to convey meaning had to be able to be understood by those viewing the paintings, as their patrons intended. If we want to see what contemporaries saw, we must put ourselves in the shoes of the commissioner, who had no interest in obscure representations. The imagery had to be recognisable. This presupposes conscious reuse of motifs, so we need to study paintings as serial sources more than has been done so far.

Group portraits functioned within (semi-)public contexts such as churches, militia headquarters and the representative rooms of mansions, and served family dynastic purposes. They thus reveal valuable information about the prevailing political culture. A systematic reconsideration of the portraits additionally provides us with new insights about involvement in the commissioning of, among others, female sitters, and sitters of whom this was not previously suspected based on their hierarchical position in the painting. These aspects tie in directly with the mission of the Political Culture and History research group, in which this project is embedded, and the institute-wide focus on inclusive history. Within the research group, moreover, this project is illustrative of our renewed focus on the Netherlands in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period.

Dutch heritage institutions are renowned for making their art collections digitally available and fostering initiatives such as Iconclass. Within the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, we have in recent years gained experience with the unlocking of large datasets through a combination of AI-driven methods and citizen science. In this project, we want to explore how we can use these preconditions as a steppingstone for innovative research into the meaning of art.

Related publications (open access)

Joris Oddens, Gloria Moorman en Alessandro Metlica, ‘Representing Power in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic’, in: Joris Oddens, Alessandro Metlica en Gloria Moorman (red.), Contending Representations I: The Dutch Republic and the Lure of Monarchy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023) 6-36.

Joris Oddens, ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On: Men’s Portraits, Power, and Identity in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic’, The Seventeenth Century 36:5 (2021) 797-853.