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Project

The relationship between the Van Eyck workshop and Petrus Christus

In this doctoral dissertation, the fifteenth-century painter Pieter Cristus (formerly known as Petrus Christus) and other post-Eyckian painters active in Bruges undergo innovative research, both archival and technical. The first chapter investigates the socio-economic circumstances of the painters and their workshop assistands, supplementing previous research with new insights. This prosopographic analysis clarifies Pieter Cristus’s position among the generation of painters, further illustrated by the following chapter, which revealed the location of Pieter Cristus’ residence and studio. A systematic analysis of fifteenth-century Bruges annuity books is employed to examine the social network of post-Eyckian painters based on theirs workshop locations. The innovative methodology followed therein may serve as a model for similar studies in social networks.

The third chapter discusses the family and social background of Pieter Cristus in his birthplace of Baarle, based on numerous unexplored and unpublished archival documents, amalgamated into a coherent, contextual interpretation. This research sheds new light on social elites in rural villages in the duchy of Brabant, more specifically in the Campine area. The discovered social background and the studio location in Bruges have fundamentally broadened and improved our understanding of Pieter Cristus’s social context.

In the final chapter, a fifteenth-century portrait attributed to Pieter Cristus or a contemporary copyist undergoes multidisciplinary examination. Non-invasive imaging techniques, C14 dating, pigment analyses, xylological, iconographic, fashion-historical, and art-historical analyses are combined in a comprehensive interpretation. It emerges that the panel witnesses a Flemish-Tuscan transfer of the Eyckian visual language: a Lucchese businessman in Bruges commissioned a portrait by Pieter Cristus, and when he later decided to continue his career in Lucca, he took the portrait with him and had it copied by a local painter.

These four contributions (each of them published in peer-reviewed journals) thus complement and renew the known understanding of the social context of painters and patrons in Bruges, where, shortly after the influential career of Jan van Eyck, his art further evolved and spread.

Date:15 Jan 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Petrus Christus
Disciplines:History of art
Project type:PhD project