The Dutch Global Age
The art of the Dutch ‘Golden’ Age has many non-Western elements, from the Islamic scarf of Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Earring to Rembrandt’s Chinese porcelain. The project, The Dutch Global Age: Worldly Images and Images of the World in Netherlandish Art, examines how Netherlandish art has contributed to a global worldview and demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Netherlandish Old Masters in a globalising world. The research team explores interactions between the arts of the Netherlands and the world beyond Europe. It combines different approaches, from technical art history to iconography and economic art history.
Histories of Global Netherlandish Art, 1550-1750
The project explores the global dimensions of early modern Netherlandish art, with Antwerp and Amsterdam as hubs of global exchange. Everyday lives changed as foreign luxuries, and their local imitations, became a household presence. Images of real and imagined foreigners circulated on an unprecedented scale. Travelers and scholars pondered unknown iconographies, which sometimes threatened to unsettle Eurocentric perspectives. The project’s key question is: how did new artistic media, materials, and meanings emerge in the wake of European expansion?
Confronting National and UNESCO Regulations: Theories and Policies of Conservation of Monuments in Europe and China
This research will focus on the differences in policies for monument conservation in China and Europe, with a particular focus on world heritage. It will question the implementation of UNESCO regulation and enforcement in China and Europe with the Low Countries in particular. The project will specifically consider buffer zones of urban ensembles (e.g. the Amsterdam 17th century canals and Suzhou classical gardens) where national and UNESCO regulation collide.
- Project leader: Xiaobai Chen
- Supervisors: Prof. Koen Ottenheym and Dr Merlijn Hurx
- Funding: CSC grant for PhD research (China Scholarship Council)
- Duration: 2017 - 2021
Entangled Cultural Histories. Encounters between China and Europe
Cultural encounters between China and Europe are increasingly frequent. With intensifying trade relations, business cooperation, and tourism come meetings of different kinds. Yet preconceptions, stereotypes, and misunderstandings often distort the European perspective. This is not a new dynamic. It is rooted in the first period of intensive contacts, when European trading companies, missionaries, and travellers established contacts with Chinese merchants, scholars, and officials. This seminar, which brings together Chinese and Dutch historians, explores to what extent the approach of cultural history is relevant to the study of encounters between Chinese and Europeans during the late Ming and Qing dynasties.
- Project leader: Prof. Thijs Weststeijn
- Participant: Prof. Dong Shaoxin
- Partners: National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University; University of Amsterdam
- Funding: NWO JSTP Dialogue Seminar
- Duration: 2016 - 2017
The Chinese Impact: Images and Ideas of China in the Dutch Golden Age
The project The Chinese Impact examines images of China in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century. An interdisciplinary group of art historians, historians, and sinologists explores how early cultural contacts gave rise to images that developed into stereotypes, some of which remain relevant to the present day. The European perspective is complemented with an Asian one: How did the Chinese see the Dutch?
- Projectleader: Prof. Thijs Weststeijn
- Participants: Dr Lennert Gesterkamp, Trude Dijkstra MA, Willemijn van Noord MA
- Funding: NWO Vidi
- Duration: 2014 - 2019
