Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-01, Section: A, page: 0002.

Adviser: Celeste Brusati.

This dissertation explores the ways in which the art of painting represented and mediated the concerns of the market in the Southern Netherlands between 1550 and 1650. Those concerns included the creation of value through desire for displayed objects, the responsibility of the buyer's judgement, and the ways in which social and economic status were invented or enacted upon the marketplace. These issues in turn informed the practice of painting itself, defined its power and determined its validity.

The study begins with a discussion of new economic trends in 16th-century Antwerp, which repositioned the roles of the market in society and of the commodity in exchange. The art market participated in these changes, as paintings took on the status of commodities whose value was determined through processes of the open market.

The discourses of painting and the market first and most forcefully encountered each other in the work of Pieter Aertsen. Chapter II concerns his attempts to justify pictorial art, whose validity was being questioned by reformers and actively negated by iconoclasts. Aertsen embraces the definition of painting as an alluring commodity which arouses in its beholder "desires" at once erotic and economic. Aertsen's nephew, Joachim Beuckelaer, took up picturing the marketplace as a site where these desires occur, and where choices must be made within the Christian morality of proto-economic understanding. Chapter III covers his marketplaces of judgement, and discusses the Christian economics which informed them.

Chapter IV deals with market imagery after the Spanish reconquest of the Southern Netherlands. In this period of economic and social retrenchment the market was again redefined, now as a part of the natural process of provision. Market scenes were produced which embodied the orders of nature, such as the seasons and the elements. Within this context, social orders too became "naturalized," and market exchange ceases to be a dynamic process of self-definition. The dissertation ends with Frans Snyders, in whose work the market-piece becomes a form of still-life painting in which commodities are unambiguously displayed as gifts of nature for the possession of the wealthy beholder.