Visualizing Visions: Re-viewing the seventeenth-century genre of constcamer paintings

Constcamer paintings or pictures of collections were created almost exclusively in Antwerp, and to a lesser extent in Brussels, in the seventeenth century. Until now, no attempt had been made to collect all known examples, partly because of the contemporary distribution of such works across collections throughout the Western world. Another difficulty in studying constcamer paintings is the great complexity of the rich variety of subjects, objects, and concepts on display in the images that combine many disciplines separated today.

Advances in the field of computer science have made it possible to systematically collect, archive, and analyze artworks and associated information on a large scale. My digital approach to the genre aimed to determine what a constcamer painting is, in terms of form, content, and meaning. In addition to looking at pictorial features and cognitively identifying what we see, contextualization played a key role in achieving understanding.

Pictorial, historical, social, cultural, and intellectual contexts served as the framework for interpretation. Special attention has been paid to the interplays between collecting and recollecting, art and science, and physical and metaphysical vision.

This thesis argues that pictures of collections primarily lay claim to the active intellect to generate insights by uncovering the multitude of meanings embedded in the seventeenth-century genre. The examination of constcamer paintings through a dataset led to enhanced perception and highlighted the prominence of visuality in the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, both then and now.