EAUH 2018 conference Session M37: New Technologies and Methods for Historical Cadastral Studies (1500-1950) Imitation and emulation in Rembrandt’s neighborhood– deciphering transmission of ideas among artists living around the corner Weixuan Li,a Marten Jan Bok,a Ivan Kisjes,a and Menno den Engelseb a University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands b Islands of Meanings, the Netherlands1 Abstract Historical and cadastral maps can enrich art historical research by allowing to pinpoint the artist’s workshop to a specific location in the city. Cadastral resources, together with historical maps and archival sources, enable us to virtually reconstruct the spatial networks in neighborhoods where artists lived, worked, and socialized. However, the dissemination of artistic innovation through physical contact within the same community has long escaped the art historian’s attention. This research intends to fill this gap through deep-mapping the production and consumption of painting in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, with a focus on Rembrandt’s neighborhood, Sint Antoniesbreestraat. Information extracted from archival documents are layered on top of the historical maps of 1625 and 1724 by geo- referencing the descriptions of locations from the original sources. Wealth distribution in the city based on the 1631 tax registration are visualized which refutes the commonly-held belief that Sint Antoniesbreestraat was crowded with wealthy patrons of arts, who attracted artists to this neighborhood. This research further links the biographical databases of agents in the creative industries in Amsterdam and analyzes the composition of the neighborhood of Sint Antoniesbreestraat, which illustrates that this area continued to flourish throughout Rembrandt’s lifetime. A closer observation of the functioning and evolution of creative industries in a spatial cluster reveals that, as the art market matured, Rembrandt’s neighborhood experienced a ‘reverse gentrification’ -- artistic painters were replaced by the ‘industrial’ painters who painted on spec or participated in mass production. Lastly, by layering paintings created in Sint Antoniesbreestraat onto the map, it shows that, for the transmission of artistic knowledge, physical proximity worked in a similar way as social relation because both provided access to each other’s work and collections for inspiration. Therefore, spatial clustering and the social network of artists will need to be translated into measures of accessibility to reveal the transmission of artistic innovation. Keywords: spatial clustering; knowledge transmission; tax registers; Amsterdam; Rembrandt Introduction In recent years, increasing awareness of the importance of place and space in humanities and social sciences has reinforced a shift of interests from temporal subjects matters to themes relevant to space and place for a deeper analysis of human behavior.2 The phenomenon of spatial concentration of artists and artistic activities, so-called ‘spatial clustering,’ has attracted scholars to probe into the cause and the dynamics of the artistic clusters. The research using contemporary examples emphasizes the importance of face-to-face relations in conveying new and tacit knowledge (such as painting techniques) which drives up the need for physical proximity.3 Economic geographers confirmed that accessibility 1 We thank Claartje Rasterhof, Harm Nijboer, and Gabri van Tussenbroek for their advice. Special thanks go to Clé Lesger, who generously shared his list of the 250 wealthiest Amsterdamers in the 1631 kohier, and Marleen Puyenbroek, who allowed us to use the data she collected for her BA thesis: M. Puyenbroek, Kunstenaars van de Breestraat, BA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2016. 2 D.J. Bodenhamer, J. Corrigan J, T.M. Harris. The spatial humanities. GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, Bloomington, IN. 2010. 3 A.Rallet, A. Torre, On geography and technology: Proximity relations in localised innovation networks. In Michael Steiner (Ed.) Clusters and regional specialisation: On geography, technology and networks. London: Pion, 2008. 1 to other artists ranks as the top factor when contemporary artists make their choice of location.4 However, studies looking into historical evidence of spatial clustering of painters only focused on the most prominent painters across history.5 Due to the difficulty in collecting location-related information from historical sources, existing studies of the spatial clusters in the early modern time are scarce and often restricted to describing the clustering phenomenon at the city level.6 Amsterdam, during its golden age, was known for the size and scale of its creative industries, especially for paintings. At its peak, there were more than 300 painters working in the city, who accounted for the unprecedented painting production in various genres and style.7 Thanks to the 150 years of art historical research on artists and artworks of the Dutch Golden Age, a significant number of artists who lived in Amsterdam are well-researched. The existing knowledge concerning these artists goes beyond the works of art they created and expands to various aspects of their lives, in particular, their residence and social relations. Traditional art historical scholarship has not yet gone into greater detail than using street and/or place names to describe the exact spot where artists lived, worked and socialized.8 Historical and cadastral maps, in this case, can help to contextualize the geographical information that art historians have identified, translating the vague descriptions of location into a more exact geo- referenced representation. This research, as a pilot of the Amsterdam Time Machine project, thus tries to take advantage of the geo-referenced cadastral sources to pinpoint the artist’s workshop to a specific location in the city, to probe into the mechanics of dissemination of artistic innovation within Amsterdam, and to understand to dynamics of artist’s intra-city location choice. In this paper, we focus on Rembrandt’s neighbors and his artistic rivals living in Amsterdam to unfold the patterns of socio- spatial aspects of production, consumption, and innovation of the painting industries of the Golden Age Amsterdam. Therefore, the research question of this project has two objectives: 1) methodological: how can 19th-century cadastral maps assist historical and art historical research of the previous centuries? and 2) art historical: how did geographic proximity within a city facilitate the transmission of artistic innovation? (Deep) Mapping painting production and consumption of Amsterdam Detailed property maps for the entire city of Amsterdam were available for the first time in 1832. This cadastral map, which has recently been digitized and transformed into georeferenced vectors by the HisGIS project, divided Amsterdam into 28,365 lots on which 30,047 individual buildings had been built before 1832.9 Fortunately, as architectural historians have shown, the center of Amsterdam had not changed much since the 16th and 17th century as most existing buildings date from these two 4 Å.E. Andersson, D.E. Andersson, Z. Daghbashyan, B. Hårsman. Location and spatial clustering of artists. “Regional Science and Urban Economics”, 2014 Jul 1;47:128-37. 5 J. O’Hagan, C. Hellmanzik, Clustering and Migration of Important Visual Artists: Broad Historical Evidence, “Historical Methods”, 2010, 121-136. 6C. Rasterhoff, The fabric of creativity in the Dutch Republic. Painting and publishing as cultural industries, 1580-1800. Amsterdam Univeristy Press, Amsterdam. 2017. 7 ECARTICO database: http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/analysis/ 8 A notable exception: Dudok van Heel, SAC. De jonge Rembrandt onder tijdgenoten. Godsdienst en schilderkunst in Leiden en Amsterdam. PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen, 2006. 9 Fryske Akademy. (2014). HISGIS-project Amsterdam. Retrieved from http://www.hisgis.nl/hisgis/gewesten/amsterdam/ 2 centuries.10 It thus allows us to employ the 1832 cadastral map as a geographical anchor to realign other historical information extracted from various archival sources. Information about locations in the pre-cadastral sources is often scattered in the marriage registration (ondertrouwregisters), tax registrations (kohieren and verpondingsregisters), court registrations of real estate transactions (transportakten), notarial deeds, and in all kinds of other archival documents, all of which have not yet been systematically linked. Fortunately, these sources have been well researched by art historians and linked to individual artists. The existing biographies of artists are compiled in the ECARTICO database – a comprehensive collection of structured biographical data concerning painters and other agents in the culture industries of the Low Countries during the 16th and 17th century – including over 6,000 descriptions of locations.11 On the consumption side, numerous probate inventories have described not only the collections of the owners but sometimes, also the location of their property, which enables us to map the consumer’s location in conjunction to the information on artistic production. Within the framework of the Amsterdam Time Machine, this research project aims to systematically link datasets from the aforementioned heterogeneous sources and extracts the descriptions of locations associated with the agents in the art market. Nevertheless, the 17th-century locations identified in the sources cannot be directly plotted on the nineteenth-century cadastral