SMOKIN� BEAUTY. ART AND EXPERIMENTATION IN RENAISSANCE WORKSHOPS: KAREL VAN MANDER�S NARRATIVES

Abstract

Along with paintings, drawings, and prints representing workshops and studios in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, written sources also provide important information concerning the different typologies, functions, and organization of the creative and entrepreneurial spaces of the artist in early modern times. These spaces were often the stage of significant social and cultural exchanges with patrons, commissioners, and collectors, in which art-related explorations coexisted with science-oriented experiments, mutually shaping each other. This paper will focus on Karel van Mander�s narratives in Het Schilder-Boeck, i.e., The Book of Painting (published in Alkmaar between 1603 and 1604) in relation to the redefinition of Renaissance workshops as spaces devoted to knowledge, creativity, and experimentation. It will explore the conceptual agenda that lies behind Van Mander�s attentive, yet significantly selective account of the gradual transformation of workshops (such as Jan van Eyck�s alchemical laboratory or Lucas van Leyden�s cabinet de curiosities) into private art galleries, public art markets, and sites for scientific explorations. Eloquently, Van Mander�s pages will adopt a thought-provoking metaphor to describe the workshop�s dynamics, claiming that, in order to produce anything, within the artistic as well as scientific domain, one must, first of all, steal from the models provided by Art and Nature, playing, as the author suggestively puts it, the part of a �thief.�