ECARTICO

Editors-in-chief: Marten Jan Bok, Judith Brouwer and Harm Nijboer

ECARTICO is a comprehensive collection of structured biographical data on painters, engravers, printers, booksellers, gold- and silversmiths, dealers, (art) collectors and others involved or working in the ‘cultural industry’ of the Low Countries in the early modern period (c. 1475-c. 1725). In addition to these individuals, people can be found with a great variety of other occupations, such as grocers, sailors, midwives, civet traders and bakers.

The database contains biographical data on more than 66,000 people and is updated almost daily. ECARTICO aims to map the entire ‘cultural industry’, not only well-known artists and stakeholders but also unknown persons we might only know through archival research. After all, the cultural success of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not exist only through a single art form or craft but arose and was sustained by the entire art production and cultural industry. Thus, the individuals within ECARTICO are linked to each other, making social, artistic and genealogical networks and environments visible and enabling analysis.

The database is largely based on biographical and genealogical studies published in recent centuries. In addition, much data comes from original research using primary sources such as archives. A lot of biographical details included in ECARTICO thus cannot be found anywhere else. ECARTICO began as a database containing data on Amsterdam’s history of painters from the seventeenth century. This data was then supplemented with sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century visual artists such as painters, engravers, glass painters and tapestry weavers from the Northern and Southern Netherlands. Later, the database was boosted by adding other cultural industries such as printing, sculpture, gold- and silversmithing and theatre. ECARTICO is a prosopography and is thus a group description: it is a systematic overview of people, their skills and their relations.