Antwerp Tenebrism in a New Light. Zooming in and out on Stylistic Influences and Social Interactions in Seventeenth-Century Flemish Painting.

Art historical research on seventeenth-century art in Antwerp mostly focuses on big players such as Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Antoon Van Dyck (1599-1641) and Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). Lesser-known contemporaries producing paintings in a derivate style or even completely different styles or genres, as well as their correlations, often remain un(der)studied. As part of project Coral. The interplay between social structure, collaboration and innovation in Flemish painting and tapestry design (1600-1650) through formal art historical network research, this study aims to reveal diversity inside the Antwerp creative community and its artistic output, as well as explore social, professional and family ties between artists.

Based on a stylistic coherent group of artists, i.e. the Antwerp painters of night scenes, this paper addresses these aspects as well as the impact of professional and personal relations on their output. Night scenes produced in seventeenth-century Antwerp are often regarded as a short-lived experiment, as part of the international Caravaggesque movement. Well-known Antwerp artists returning from Italy, such as Gerard Seghers (1591-1651) and Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637) produced art works reminiscing the oeuvre of Caravaggio (1571-1610), before adapting their style to the ruling Antwerp Rubenesque style. Some lesser-known artists nonetheless ventured to produce night scenes, supported by a rich indigenous artistic tradition as well as a strong social network, as part of a phenomenon that proved to be anything but short-lived.

Seventeenth-century archival documents, such as parish records, guild ledgers and notarial deeds, operationalized by the Cornelia database, reveal the structure of this artistic community. Estate inventories, auction catalogues as well as physical art works are analyzed in order to map their artistic output. The research question as well as the methodology of this twofold study intend to demonstrate the strength of combining traditional qualitative approaches with digital quantitative analysis towards a better understanding of the dynamics between social structure, creativity and innovation in early modern times.