Besides the official care for cultural heritage on Java, which in the 1920s and 1930s was under the responsibility of the Dutch Archeological Service, different attitudes towards heritage are... Show moreBesides the official care for cultural heritage on Java, which in the 1920s and 1930s was under the responsibility of the Dutch Archeological Service, different attitudes towards heritage are identified of which three are discussed more elaborately using three typical case studies. It will become clear how for the local population on Java statues and sites were still places of worship where offerings were made and rituals performed. This use of heritage often clashed with repairs undertaken by the Archeological Service, for instance, for constructional reasons, but which in practice sealed off the heritage for local people for whom it was a site of veneration still. On the other hand, local people sometimes also deliebrately destroyed heritage such as statues who would have had a negative agency. This chapter aims to contribute to how such responses and attitudes should be explained and what questions need to be addressed further to understand the meaning of cultural heritage for the people living nearby heritage sites to whom they are more than reminders of an ancient past. Show less
Many seventeenth-century Antwerp collections contained coral, both natural and crafted. Also, coral was a pictorial motif depicted by Antwerp artists on mythological scenes, still lifes, gallery... Show moreMany seventeenth-century Antwerp collections contained coral, both natural and crafted. Also, coral was a pictorial motif depicted by Antwerp artists on mythological scenes, still lifes, gallery pictures, and allegories. Coral was many things at the same time: a commodity crafted into jewellery and objets d’art, a popular collectable in its natural shape, a motif for Antwerp painters, an essential commodity in the European-Indian trade network, a naturalia associated with classical mythology as well as with the Blood of Christ, and a problematic naturalia that raised questions about classification, origins and natural processes. This paper provides an itinerary of coral in early seventeenth-century Antwerp. It is argued that collecting in general and collected coral in particular were related to new understandings of matter and material transformation. Coral functioned in the collection as: first, a place of appreciation for artisanal work - or ‘process appreciation’; second, as a conversation piece; and third, as a visual motif related to the understanding of matter and material transformation, the process of petrifaction in particular. Added up, this explains the value attached to this ‘unusual excrescence of nature’. Show less
The starting point for this study is that for a large part of their existence, the paintings belonging to this genre have primarily been seen as export articles without intrinsic artistic value.... Show moreThe starting point for this study is that for a large part of their existence, the paintings belonging to this genre have primarily been seen as export articles without intrinsic artistic value. This fact, and the fact that they cannot be unequivocally classified, explains why this genre has, for a long time, not received the attention it deserves. The label ‘exportware’, though, does not exclude that these paintings can also be approached as ‘art’. They have an historic, an artistic, and a material value, which, as a result of their representative and social functions, over time formed an artistic phenomenon in its own right, and a shared cultural visual repertoire with its own (Eurasian) character. In order to draw conclusions about the appreciation of the extensive and historically valuable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese export paintings in Dutch public collections, this multidisciplinary research follows the entire trajectory of this specific transcultural painting genre in sixteen museums, from the production two centuries ago to the current position. At work in this trajectory are mechanisms between people, institutions and the paintings, which increase or, indeed, diminish the appreciation of this time- and place-specific art. Show less
