Claudia Goldstein - Böcker

Mining a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources, including stoneware jugs, personal correspondence, paintings, inventories, and literature written for the dining room, this study offers a critical and entirely original examination of the function of early modern images for the people who owned and viewed them. The study explores the emergence, functions and material culture of the Antwerp dinner party during the heady days of the mid-sixteenth century, when Antwerp’s art market was thriving and a new wealthy, non-noble class dominated the city. The author recontextualizes some of Bruegel’s work within the cultural nexus of the dining room, where material culture and theatrical performance met humanist wit and the desire for professional advancement. The narrative also touches on the reception of Northern art in Lombardy, on intersections among painting, material culture, and theater, and on intellectual history.

Sixteenth-century Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer produced dozens of large-scale paintings of contemporary working women and men selling, presenting, and preparing a visually stunning array of foodstuffs for the viewer. These were new subjects in Antwerp and even newer in Italy, where elite merchants and nobles like Margaret of Parma displayed them as they were meant to be displayed: in dining rooms and spaces used for entertaining. This study explores the cross-cultural meanings of Beuckelaer's distinctly Northern European kitchen and market scenes in the context of North Italian dining and food culture. Examining the functions of Beuckelaer's strange and new subject matter, Goldstein situates his paintings and those of his closest Italian follower, Vincenzo Campi, in the physical space of the dining room, addressing dining practice and the class and gender tensions inherent in a setting that placed both elite and non-elite viewers before life-sized renderings of their employees, and themselves.

Mining a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources, including stoneware jugs, personal correspondence, paintings, inventories, and literature written for the dining room, this study offers a critical and entirely original examination of the function of early modern images for the people who owned and viewed them. The study explores the emergence, functions and material culture of the Antwerp dinner party during the heady days of the mid-sixteenth century, when Antwerp’s art market was thriving and a new wealthy, non-noble class dominated the city. The author recontextualizes some of Bruegel’s work within the cultural nexus of the dining room, where material culture and theatrical performance met humanist wit and the desire for professional advancement. The narrative also touches on the reception of Northern art in Lombardy, on intersections among painting, material culture, and theater, and on intellectual history.