Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Dutch Art ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
Symbolic Economy ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Perspective

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a love of art

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Dutch Art ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
Symbolic Economy ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Economic Rhetoric ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Symbolic Economy ◽  
The Gift

This chapter examines the centrality of gift giving to the developing commercial cultures of early modern Europe and the rise to prominence of works of art, especially paintings, in circuits of gift exchange. Contrary to common assumption, gift giving in the early modern period acquired renewed importance as a mode of negotiating professional, social, and personal ties in a rapidly changing, increasingly commercialized environment. Art also emerged as an essential gift currency for negotiating relationships of patronage and clientage, and highly selfconscious artists increasingly turned to the gift’s symbolic economy to negotiate with patrons and set their transactions apart from ordinary forms of exchange. I probe the interconnections between gifts and art in various overlapping contexts of early modernity.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Art World ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Dutch Art ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
The Gift

This chapter examines Rembrandt’s embrace of gift exchange over his career and analyzes the works he created to function as gifts among favored patrons, collectors, and intimates. Rembrandt’s gifts to important patrons and other figures in the 1630s largely conform to the conventions and courtesies expected of gift transactions. From the late 1640s through the 1660s, as Rembrandt’s primary supporters shifted to liefhebbers, gentlemen-dealers, and cultured members of the burgher class, however, he intensified his engagement and became more experimental with gift giving. Through highly distinctive prints designed to circulate as gifts, Rembrandt enlisted the gift economy to nurture ties with his inner sanctum, harnessing the ethics of gift giving to cultivate a unique position in the Dutch art world.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Dutch Art ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
Gift Exchanges

This chapter explores the distinctive gift culture and the gifting of art in seventeenth-century Holland. Although gift giving has been marginalized in studies of seventeenth-century Dutch art, gift exchanges of various kinds, including art, were widespread in Dutch mercantile culture. Giving gifts was considered obligatory for nurturing burgher professional and personal relationships, and gifts of art played a key role in the Republic’s diplomatic engagements. Like their colleagues elsewhere, Dutch artists mixed gifts with sales transactions by offering their works as gifts to potential and established patrons, contacts, and familiars. Discussion of the special cases of Rembrandt and Vermeer is reserved for later chapters, but here examples of gifts by Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Lievens, Govert Flinck, and others are addressed.

Gift-giving as a Source of International Authority

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorg Kustermans
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
External Source ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
International Authority ◽  
To Come ◽  
Dominant Actor

Abstract This article discusses the diplomatic practice of gift-giving in the Ancient Near East and Early Modern East Asia. In both cases, gift-exchange served to consolidate the dominant polity’s international authority. The causal relation between gift-giving and authority is typically rendered in terms of generosity inspiring gratitude, but a different mechanism connects diplomatic gift-giving and the consolidation of international authority. Diplomatic gift-giving is a ceremonial form of gift-exchange and it as a ritual practice helps maintain international authority. By means of ritualization, diplomatic gift-exchange renders international authority palatable. Ritualization enables both dominant and subordinate actors to come to terms with the ambiguity of the experience of authority. Subordinate actors are at once entranced and frightened by the authority of the dominant actor. The dominant actor feels both pride and insecurity. By defining an identity as participants in a shared ritual, by orchestrating their demeanor during ritual, and by identifying an external source of the dominant actor’s authority, diplomatic gift-giving contributes to the maintenance of international authority. The ambiguity of the experience of authority is probably irreducible. It is therefore to be expected that any case of ‘international authority’ will feature the performance of similar ritualizing practices.

scholarly journals The gift economy and the development of sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 493-509
Author(s):  
Niels Thygesen
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Positive Contribution ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Perspective

This article contends that a new perspective on the economy – a gift economy – would be beneficial to the development of sustainability. The principles and practices of the gift economy (giving, receiving and reciprocating) are exemplified by a case study of the Danish island of Samsø, which has used it to achieve environmental sustainability, improve its economic situation and generate social value. In order to illustrate the values and principles that underpin the gift economy, the article shows the underlying exchange mechanisms used in this modern version of ‘gift-giving’ and contrasts them to using money as the medium of exchange. One of the mainstays of the gift economy is the willingness and obligation to reciprocate, and the case study highlights some of the original ways of organising that have emerged from the gift economy on Samsø and how significantly they differ from organising and managing by budgets. As such, the article attempts to reframe the understanding of the economy and, in particular, to qualify and illustrate the potential of the organising principles behind the gift economy and encourage readers to conduct further research and engage in initiatives that will make a positive contribution to the development of sustainability.

Social networks and language change in Tudor and Stuart London – only connect?

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERTTU NEVALAINEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Linguistic Terms ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Exchange Network ◽  
The City

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.

The Price of Friendship

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Maria Salomon Arel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Networks Of Support

Abstract This article discusses the gift-giving behaviour of English merchants involved in the Russia trade in the Muscovite era. Drawing on a small, but growing body of historical literature relating to the role of gifts in the cultivation of mutually beneficial relations between people across the social spectrum in early modern Europe, it explores the various ways in which the English deployed the practice of giving to their advantage, both in England and in Russia. In particular, as ‘strangers’ in Russia who operated beyond the parameters of traditional kin- and community-based networks of support, English merchants (and other foreigners, such as their Dutch competitors) needed to both ‘befriend’ Russian clients on the ground in every-day trade and nurture relationships in high places to ensure smooth, profitable, and secure business. As the sources reveal, they engaged in a variety of gift-giving behaviours in building relationships with Russians advantageous to their enterprise.

Religious Ethics, Gift Exchange and Capitalism

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCEL HENAFF
Keyword(s):  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spirit Of Capitalism ◽  
Catholic Ethic

This study intends to reread Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with the following question in mind: where is the Catholic ethic with respect to “the spirit of capitalism”? The few short comments that Weber makes on this topic nevertheless suggest an interesting notion which he had developed in earlier texts, i.e., the “religious ethic of brotherhood”. I intend to show here that this notion could be further illuminated by the findings of the anthropology of gift giving since Marcel Mauss. This would enable us to understand how the problem of grace, so central to the debate between Protestants and Catholics, is linked to the history of the transformations in the gift giving practices; we will also discover that this problem was at the origin of the schism. While such a hypothesis leads to a different reading of Weber, it is confirmed by a work of the historian B. Clavero which brings out the complex links that existed in 16th century Catholic Spain between the order of business and that of charity. Besides the antagonism that has marked the two Christian traditions in the West, what seems to be at issue is the way in which economic practices weight on the social bond. These questions invite us to rethink the connections between them.

Bellow's “Indian Givers”: Humboldt's Gift

1981 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-238
Author(s):  
Judie Newman
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Loss Of Face ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Central Activity ◽  
The Gift

Emerson's essay on “Gifts” perceptively highlights the ambivalence felt in gift-giving or receiving, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift. The importance of literal gift-giving has been insufficiently recognised as a factor which governs the action of the novel, our understanding of which is enhanced by an examination and application of the sociological analysis of gift-exchange.Gift-exchange has been most extensively studied in relation to the North-West Coast American Indians, notably the Kwakiutl, in whose culture the “potlatch” is a central activity. The term “potlatch” is applied to a variety of gift-giving ceremonies, involving both the giving away of quantities of possessions and their wilful destruction. The whole of a man's worldly goods may be dispersed or destroyed in this fashion, in an attempt to maintain status. To eclipse a rival chief, for example, a man may destroy all his own accumulated wealth. While in theory the “gift” is spontaneous and disinterested, in practice it is based on political or economic self-interest.The gift of property implies an obligation in the recipient which, if not fulfilled, results in his loss of face.

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