International Conference on seventeenth-century sculpture of the Low
Countries from Hendrick de Keyser to Jean Del Cour

[between the opening of the TEFAF Fair at Maastricht and the CODART
conference]

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 11 March 2009

9.45-18.00 Pre-conference excursion to marble quarries and museums at
Namur and Rance (start and finish at Namur station)

Visits to include the only two marble quarries of Belgium still in
operation, by special permission of the owner, Merbes-Sprimont SA: the
famous black marble at Mazy/Golzinne and grey/red marble at Vodelée. The
Musée de Groesbeeck de Croix and the Musée du Marbre, Rance will conclude
the day, led by geologist Dr Francis Tourneur.

[Thursday 12 March, 12.00-21.00: official opening of the TEFAF Fair at
Maastricht]
[Friday 11.00-19.00: first public day of the TEFAF]

Friday 13 March 2009, Royal Academy, Brussels, rue Ducale/Hertogstraat 1

17.00 Welcome reception
18.30 Opening speeches (Rubens Hall)

Chair: Prof Dr Krista De Jonge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Keynote Lecture

18.45 Prof Dr Jeffrey Muller, Brown University, Providence, RI (USA)
Counter Reformation in sculpture: new frameworks for Catholic worship in
17th-century Flanders

19.30 Discussion
[Free evening]

Saturday 14 March 2009, Royal Museums of Fine-Arts, Brussels

9.00-9.15 Registration

Session One - Paradigms

9.20 Dr Kristoffer Neville, University of California Riverside, Los Angeles
The invisibility of Netherlandish sculpture

9.55 Dr Guido Hinterkeuser, Berlin
17th century Netherlandish sculpture and sculptors in Brandenburg-Prussia.
Reflections on a paradigm and its limitations

10.30 Dr Léon Lock, formerly University of London
Bronze sculpture in the Low Countries in the late 17th century: Quellinus,
Del Cour, Grupello. Art historical dustbin or historic reality?

11.05 Luis Luna Martin, former director of the Museo Nacional de
Escultura, Valladolid
Joseph Aerts, José De Arce, sculpteur à Sevilla

11.35 Discussion
11.50 Lunch in the cafeteria [level -1, take the main staircase adjacent
to the Forum]

Session Two - Patronage and potential of sculpture for glorification

12.50 Dr Frits Scholten, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Keynote Lecture: Sculpture and republicanism in the Northern Netherlands

13.40 Jean-Philippe Huys, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Le prince électeur Max Emmanuel de Bavière et l'art de la sculpture dans
les Pays-Bas méridionaux, de 1692 à 1715

14.15 Dr Nancy Kay, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA (USA)
The Virgin of the Antwerp fish market: Sanctifying the city through public
works

14.45 Discussion
15.00 Coffee

Session Three - Sculptors? practices

15.30 Dr Valérie Herremans, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen
Contestation & aspiration. Calvinist iconoclasm and guild regulations:
determining factors of Antwerp sculpture at the dawn of the baroque era

16.05 Dr Aleksandra Lipiska, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Decline, break or continuation? Southern Netherlandish alabaster sculpture
in the 17th century

16.40 Dr Alain Jacobs, Royal Library, Brussels
Les Verbrugghen et le dessin de sculpteur

17.15 Discussion
18.30 Optional Conference Dinner

Sunday 15 March 2009

Visit of the Tour et Tassis chapel dedicated to St Ursula, Notre-Dame du
Sablon / OLV ten Zavel, Brussels

NB Exceptional access before the forthcoming conservation project !
Due to the limited size of the chapel, groups of maximum 20 participants.
Registration: first come first served.
9.00 Group One, in French
9.15 Group Two, in English
9.30 Group Three, in French
9.45 Group Four, in Dutch
Royal Museums of Fine-Arts, Brussels
10.00 Registration

Session Four - Relations with the other arts

10.15 Géraldine Patigny, Université Libre de Bruxelles/Institut royal du
Patrimoine artistique
Le sculpteur, le peintre et l'architecte. Le cas de Bruxelles au XVIIe siècle

10.50 Jan Van Damme, Monumentenzorg Gent
The role of cabinet makers in the production of sculpture

11.25 Wim Nys, Zilvermuseum Sterckshof, Antwerpen-Deurne
Sculptors modelling Antwerp silver

11.55 Discussion
12.10 Lunch

Session Five - Sculpture and its architectural context

13.00 Dr Francis Tourneur, Pierres et Marbres de Wallonie asbl
Les marbres jaspés de Wallonie : les débuts de leur utilisation avant les
grandes commandes pour Versailles

13.35 Fabrice Giot, Université Catholique de Louvain
Pistes et réflexions pour une meilleure connaissance du stuc dans les
Pays-Bas méridionaux au tournant des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

14.10 Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Adam Lottman et le retable de Notre-Dame de Calais

14.40 Discussion
14.55 Coffee

15.25 Prof Dr Arnout Balis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Conclusions

15.55 Final discussion
16.30 Close

[16.40-17.50 Brussels-Maastricht by car]
[17.01-18.46 Brussels Central station-Maastricht by train]
[17.00-19.00 CODART welcome reception at the Maastricht town hall]

[Monday 16 March 2009-Tuesday 17 March 2009: CODART conference]

The present conference wishes to discuss sculpture produced in the Low
Countries and/or by sculptors from the Low Countries in the 17th century.
It will constitute a follow-up from the conference on sculpture from the
previous century held at Mons in March 2008. 16th-century sculptural
production laid many of the foundations for the development of large-scale
sculptural production in the 17th century (particularly with the models of
Jacques Du Broeucq and Cornelis Floris), culminating in Antwerpen in the
second half of the 17th century and allowing the development of a
near-monopoly situation by one consortium of artists, the
Quellinus-Verbrugghen-Scheemaeckers-Willemssens dynasty.

The principal artists concerned have biographies in the seminal Brussels
1977 exhibition catalogue, to which may be added those of the Northern
Netherlands (Hendrick de Keyser, Rombout Verhulst, Bartolomeus Eggers, Jan
Blommendael, etc.) as well as those active in the region of Lille.

Issues to be addressed (non-limitative list):
- Post-Tridentine sculpture: new and renewed iconographies and typologies
- Migration towards the main centres of training and production, such as
Antwerpen
- The institutional context: guilds, academies and the training of sculptors
- New and renewed materials: marble, bronze, etc.
- Patterns in the development of taste
- Relations court artists / sculptors
- Kunstkammer, foreign patronage and collecting
- Emigration to foreign courts
- Exports vs. subsidiary workshops vs. emigration
- Relations painters and architects / sculptors
- Collaborations with other disciplines
- Architectural sculpture
- Initiators and followers : the concept applied to the context studied
here and its limitations
- The concept of schools: localism vs. Italianism
- French Revolutionary destructions, displacements and conservation
- European comparisons on methodological level (France, Spain, Germany)

The conference wishes to discuss the pertinence of this state of knowledge
and create links that might lead to a less fragmented overall view than
the one we have today. Our current view is not so much the fruit of a lack
of archival material, as the consequence of the traditional methods of art
history, that still condition much of our perception of 17th-century
sculpture.

Since the seminal 1977 Brussels exhibition and the exhibitions in 2000 of
the Charles Van Herck collection, a number of students of sculpture,
however, has recently attempted to tackle this subject. These studies may
form a starting point for an integrated reappraisal of sculptural
production in the Low Countries in the 17th century.

The history of Low Countries sculpture of the 17th century, like that of
the 16th, has principally been written in the form of important artists?
monographs. This history was mostly written in-between the two World Wars.
These writings created a system of paradigms (notably about ?Italianism?
and ?Flemishness?), rooted in stylistic analysis that today we have great
difficulty in understanding, let alone accepting. We could call this
system the ?discourse of influence?.

The conference offers a critical review of this discourse, which is sorely
needed in a field dominated by literature written over sixty years ago and
which did not grasp the importance of the field of sculpture.
Appropriately, this field has recently been termed the greatest unknown
product of Low Countries art history, a tradition that had a deep and
powerful impact throughout Europe.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Prof Dr Dominique Allart, Université de Liège
Prof Dr Arnout Balis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Dr Helena Bussers, formerly Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels
Prof Dr Manuel Couvreur, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Prof Dr Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University
Prof Dr ir arch Krista De Jonge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Eymert-Jan Goossens, Stichting Koninklijk Paleis, Amsterdam
Dr Valérie Herremans, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
Dr Alain Jacobs, Royal Library, Brussels
Dr Léon Lock, formerly University of London
Michel Maupoix, Association Rencontre avec le Patrimoine religieux, Orléans
Prof Dr Jeffrey Muller, Brown University, Providence, RI (USA)
Prof Dr Konrad Ottenheym, Universiteit Utrecht
Wim Roels, The Low Countries Sculpture Society
Dr Frits Scholten, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Myriam Serck, Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique, Brussels
Pier Terwen, independent conservator and historian of sculpture, Leiden
Dr Francis Tourneur, Pierres et Marbres de Wallonie asbl

Online registrations on www.lowcountriessculpture.org
<http://www.lowcountriessculpture.org/>

Closing date for registrations: 7 March

Hotel booking information also online.
organised by:
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Université de Liège
Onderzoeksschool Kunstgeschiedenis, the Netherlands
Universiteit Utrecht
The Low Countries Sculpture Society
with the support of:
Royal Academy of Belgium (KVAB)
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
FRS-FNRS
FWO-Vlaanderen
Onderzoeksschool Kunstgeschiedenis, the Netherlands
and other partners to be confirmed

contact:
The Low Countries Sculpture Society
POBox 1304, B-1000 Brussels 1, Belgium
infolowcountriessculpture.org
www.lowcountriessculpture.org