A Thousand Words
The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting the Collection of Pierre Roose
by Hieronymus Francken II & Jan Brueghel the Elder
In this picture, painted in 1621–1623, the archdukes Albert and Isabella, the Hapsburg regents of the Southern Netherlands, have come to pay a visit to the collector Pierre Roose. More specifically, they have come to pay a visit to Roose's cabinet of curiosities. With the rise of bourgeois wealth and the mania for collecting and investing in art in the Low Countries, pictures like this became a minor specialty, and they often involved the collaboration of several artists. Not all of these paintings (in fact, very few) can be connected, as this one is, with a specific collector. Rather, such paintings often stood in for the actual assembly of such an encyclopedic collection: if you couldn't afford to build a collection yourself, you could at least have a painting that stood in for everything such an assembly implied.
For this painting is more than just a catalogue of Roose's holdings, or a pictorial guest book of an important visit; instead, the formation of such a collection and its organization carried a weight of (to us) hidden meaning. The encyclopedic collection of the seventeenth century was meant to represent the full scope of human knowledge, a rational, graspable reproduction of the world at large, a microcosm of the universe. The collection embraced art and science. In the ideal collection, Naturalia, viewed as the handiwork of creation and thus ultimately of God, were gathered from all the known seas and continents, as represented here by the map, the atlas, and the book of geography on the table at the right. The natural specimens themselves, flowers, plants, fruit, animals, a stuffed bird of paradise, seashells, coral, and mineral samples, range across the foreground from left to right.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on art from the online archives
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
The Diabolical Failure of Leaders in the Present Crises by James M. Kushiner
32.4—July/August 2019
Will Islamicization Become Its New Future by Peter Riddell
24.1—January/February 2011
Ruminations on the Monstrous Envy of the Soul-Devouring State by Anthony Esolen
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
