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  • La Konstkamer italiana: I “Fiamminghi” nelle collezioni italiane all’età di Rubens (Atti delle Giornate di studio: Roma, Academia Belgica, 9–10 dicembre 2004)
  • Roberta Piccinelli
La Konstkamer italiana: I “Fiamminghi” nelle collezioni italiane all’età di Rubens (Atti delle Giornate di studio: Roma, Academia Belgica, 9–10 dicembre 2004). Edited by Pamela Anastasio and Walter Geerts. [Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, Vol. LXXVI.] (Rome: L’Institut Historique Belge de Rome. 2008. Pp. 209. €49,00 paperback. ISBN 978-9-074-46169-6.)

More than forty years have passed since Francis Haskell’s seminal volume Patrons and Painters (New York, 1963) set the stage for the systematic study of art patronage as a “multidimensional” phenomenon and of art collecting as a social phenomenon “coextensive with man in time and space” (p. 27). Haskell acknowledged the crucial role played by historical and archival evidence in generating the methodological and—most important—theoretical framework required for providing a convincing and realistic assessment of art patronage. The complex relations between patrons and artists, Haskell argued, should be understood within the historical, social, and cultural environment in which they developed.

Haskell’s analysis has been supported by the more recent contributions of Krisztof Pomian and has inspired a theoretical and methodological approach that suggests that only a multidisciplinary analysis that draws from different disciplines such as political, economic, and art history can provide a unitary framework for approaching the various facets of art collecting. This methodological approach also inspired the six essays included in the proceedings of the conference organized in Rome on December 9–10, 2004, by the Belgian Academy, focused on the analysis of art collecting (with specific emphasis on painting) in Rome, Sicily, Florence, Mantua, and Genoa at the time of Peter Paul Rubens.

Francesca Cappelletti analyzes the reasons behind the interest in landscape art shown by major Roman collectors in the early-seventeenth century, including Cardinals Francesco Maria Del Monte, Federico Borromeo, and Girolamo Maffei, and emphasizes the role played by late-sixteenth-century religious thought and by the increased appreciation for the mimetic and naturalistic skills of Nordic and Flemish painters. Rosanna De Gennaro also highlights the presence of significant groups of Nordic painters in Italy throughout the seventeenth century in her review of the Flemish works included in Antonio Ruffo’s collection in Messina.

Bert W. Meijer’s essay offers a comprehensive and well-documented overview of Leopoldo de’ Medici’s efforts to purchase Rubens’s paintings for expanding his own collection in Florence. Meijer systematically reviews relevant inventories and correspondence, and provides a wide-ranging and compelling portrait of Leopoldo’s activity as art collector and of his interest in Rubens’s art.

Carla Michelli’s contribution tells the story behind a painting of the Musei Capitolini in Rome—St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata—which had been [End Page 359] attributed to Rubens and his disciples before it was recognized as a copy of one of Rubens’s lost works by an anonymous artist. This analysis allows the author to introduce and discuss the complex theories of imitation of the Renaissance and the concept of “ut pictura poesis.”

In Raffaella Morselli’s essay, the meeting between Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and Rubens in 1599 is portrayed as a crucial event in the development of art collecting. Vincenzo’s collection in Mantua included many Flemish paintings, also because of the presence in his court of many Nordic artists, including Rubens himself (between 1600 and 1608) and Frans Pourbus the Younger. Gonzaga was also impressed, in a journey to Flanders, by the studio of the art merchant and collector Philips van Valkenisse, whose Liber Amicorum is analyzed in the essay together with two unpublished portraits of the latter by Pourbus and Joos de Mompere.

Finally, Carl Van De Velde’s contribution focuses on the presence of sixteenth-century paintings in art collections in Genoa, including the series of paintings on the liberal arts by Frans Floris (originally commissioned by the Antwerp collector Nicolaes Jongeling), besides later works of Rubens and Anton Van Dyck. Van De Velde highlights how the Liberal Arts series, purchased by the Genoan Balbi family in the early-seventeenth century, testifies to...

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