Claiming commerce, quality and credit: raisons d’être of the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden (16th–18th century)

© Pasold Research Fund Ltd 2018. Literature on the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden tends to give a one-dimensional account of the institutions as very similar commercial enterprises that were embraced wholeheartedly by everyone involved in the Antwerp and Brussels tapestry worlds since they all shared the same concerns and a single goal — namely, to develop and secure a central meeting point and marketplace. This essay, however, adopts a different vantage point. It discusses the tapissierspanden from the viewpoint of the conflicting business conduct and strategies developed by Antwerp city council and tapestry entrepreneurs on the one hand, and Brussels tapestry entrepreneurs on the other. This essay argues that those who founded the institutions in Antwerp and Brussels established and used them to further completely different objectives — and that their strategies, which both manifested themselves and crystallised in the panden, present tapestry scholarship with a fundamental methodological problem, the magnitude of which has yet to be appreciated.

Jaar van publicatie:2018

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Authors from:Higher Education

Toegankelijkheid:Closed