Making and Valuing Reproducible Metalwork in the Early Modern Low Countries

06.06

M Leuven

Hans Jamnitzer the Younger after Maarten van Heemskerck, 'The Forge of Vulcan', about 1573, bronze with traces of gilding, Roger Arvid Anderson Collection – 250th Anniversary Gift, 1769¬2019, Hood Museum of Art, 2016.64.55, photo: © Sara Jamback for the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Reproducible metalwork like medals, plaquettes, roundels, and statuettes circulated widely from the late fifteenth century onward. While produced in multiples, these small-scale objects—cast in lead, bronze, copper, or even silver and gold—were valuable personal objects of daily life. In comparison to the unique carvings of sculptors such as Conrat Meit or Lucas Faydherbe, these small, replicable images have been overlooked in recent studies of Netherlandish sculpture. During this lecture Elizabeth Rice Mattison, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and Curator of European Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, will explore their roles and meanings in the early modern Low Countries.

This Food for Thought lecture is organised in collaboration with Illuminare and ARDS, the centre for medieval sculpture at M. M coordinates and funds ARDS, an international network around research on sculpture from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

About Elizabeth Rice Mattison

Dr. Elizabeth Rice Mattison is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and Curator of European Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. A specialist in sculpture, she has recently published on Netherlandish reliquaries, palace decorations, women sculptors, and fifteenth-century woodcuts. Her book, Living with Sculpture: Presence and Power in Europe, 1400-1750 appeared this year, alongside an exhibition of the same title, the first to showcase the Hood’s important collection of small-scale early modern sculpture. She earned her PhD at the University of Toronto and has previously held posts at the Yale University Art Gallery, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and Musée du Louvre.