The interplay between social structure, collaboration, creativity and innovation in Antwerp and Brussels painting and tapestry design (1600-1650) through formal art historical network research (Coral)

Under the umbrella of 'Project Cornelia' the international and interdisciplinary research project 'Coral' analyzes the interplay between ever-changing social structure on the one hand (“art worlds”), and the dynamics of collaboration, creativity and innovation in Antwerp and Brussels baroque painting and tapestry design on the other.

In order to reconstruct this part of the "coral reef of culture" (Gombrich), 'Coral' aims to collect a wide array of both attribution and relational data found in Antwerp and Brussels archives. This data is arranged in 'Cornelia' and processed in such a way that an international team of scholars working in various fields can reconstruct and analyze the networks through interactive datavisualizations and formal art historical social network research. Thus, Coral will not only shed new light on the “art world” of the Flemish baroque and its iconographic and stylistic developments, but will also serve and further a methodological goal, i.e. to demonstrate that (traditional, analogue) qualitative approaches and questions on the one hand, and (new, digital) quantitative approaches and questions on the other must be combined in order to come to a better understanding of the interplay between social structure and creativity and innovation in the early modern period.