Many Antwerp Hands

Artists everywhere and across all time periods have collaborated with one another. Yet in the early modern Low Countries, collaboration was particularly widespread, resulting in a number of distinctive visual forms that have become strongly associated with artistic - and especially painterly - practice in this region. While art historians long glossed over this phenomenon, which appeared to discomfitingly counter nineteenth-century notions of authorship and artistic genius that have long shaped the field, the past few decades have seen increased attention to this rich and complicated subject. The essays in this book together constitute a current state of the question, while at once pointing the way forward. In broadening the art historical lens on this subject, they draw upon economic and social history, current interests in immigration and mobility, print studies, and technical analysis, embracing a range of literary and archival sources along the way. Interdisciplinary in their perspectives and methodologically diverse, these essays present both theoretical reflections on artistic collaboration and in-depth studies of particular artist-partnerships and collaboratively made objects.