Object and Affect in the Early Modern Period: Anthony van Dyck’s Oil Sketches for the Iconography
Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2023-2024
This study constitutes the first in-depth analysis of a unique group of paintings comprising no fewer than forty-one grisaille oil sketches. These oil sketches, painted on small oak panels as models for the print series known as the Iconography (Boughton House, Northamptonshire), came from the studio of one of the most famous artists of the early modern period, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). Van Dyck is best known for his sophisticated life-sized portraits of aristocratic sitters but the Iconography, a speculative venture with a print publisher that remained unfinished upon the artist’s death, has long been considered one of his ‘chief enterprises’ as a portraitist (Jaffé, 1992). The series revolutionised the ancient de viris illustribus (On illustrious men) tradition by expanding the canon of ‘greats’ to include women, artists, and, for the first time, connoisseurs and the prints were widely collected throughout Europe. The significance of the Iconography, however, far exceeds Van Dyck’s innovation of a traditional portrait genre: its complex production process involving drawings, oil sketches and prints, expanded notions of authorship, inverted conventional hierarchies of media, and explored material engagement in a new way. Through the examination of a critical and until now overlooked aspect of the Iconography project—the oil sketches at Boughton House—my study offers a significant reassessment of the artist’s contribution to seventeenth-century visual and material culture.
The remarkable history of the oil sketches, which have remained together and largely untouched in the same collection since 1682, makes them a rare repository of both historical and material evidence. While this study unearths previously unknown documentary evidence critical to understanding issues of provenance and reception, at its heart is a focus on materiality, that of the oil sketches themselves and of the larger material networks to which they belong. Dendrochronological (tree ring) analysis undertaken by Ian Tyers as part of this project has revealed remarkable material relationships between the panels allowing us to identify groups of panels that come from the same larger ‘donor panels’ and even from the same trees. However, the question of materiality is key not only because the Iconography is the result of an elaborate multimedia production process or because we can trace the materials employed to a complex network that sheds new light on historical biomes and environments; it is the very typology of the oil sketch, its long-standing association with the direct visualisation of thought, that raises the problem of agency in an intensely material context. Indeed, the traditional location of artistic agency in the earliest stages of the creative process—in the production of drawings and/or oil sketches— becomes intensely problematic when applied to the Boughton panels which were produced by Van Dyck and members of his studio. This dissonance between typology and material evidence, theory and practice, has left the sketches in a kind of scholarly limbo, reduced to a series of individual works categorized in strictly qualitative terms, thereby ignoring two of their most important qualities: their collective identity and the remarkable material relationships of the individual panels to one another.
This study moves beyond the exercise of locating artistic agency or assigning authorship, reframing the problem of the oil sketches as one of material agency. Engaging with scholarship in the fields of Ecological Anthropology and Neuroarchaeology, I propose a model of agency that accounts for the collaborative collective nature of studio production and the broader material trajectories to which the oil sketches belong, thus complicating traditional notions of cognition and acknowledging the critical role played by the material register. The dichotomies of material versus social, thing versus object, unfinished versus finished, and meshwork (Ingold) versus network (Latour, Malafouris) will be bridged with a new theory that accounts for the importance of material flows and the hypothesis of extended cognition as well as the social and political networks to which works of art inevitably belong.
