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Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. What was a merchant in 16th Century Europe, and what position did he hold? Joanna Woodall, of the Courtauld Institute of Art, looks at three portraits by Mor, depicting English merchants in 16th Century Antwerp and asks what we can learn from them.
First of all, I'd like to thank Gresham College for my invitation to speak in these series on art and money, which I think is the quintessentially good theme for this institute to address. In my lecture today, I want to explore the ways in which merchants were pictured in Antwerp and London in the middle decades of the 16th Century, when these two great cities were closely linked by trade in both basic commodities and luxury goods, and these luxury goods, to some degree, created a common culture.
Now, this area, the relationship between London and Antwerp, is an area which really needs a lot more research and exploration, and so this lecture, in a way, is a foray into that, and so, when I say that there was a common culture between London and Antwerp, I'm really restricting it to the fact that things - that, for example, paintings, tapestries, cloths, were imported, physically, to London from Antwerp, rather than something more general about a common culture.
As a case study in this lecture, I'm going to look in detail at two portraits of Sir Thomas Gresham, which you'll be familiar with if you know anything about Gresham College, and you can actually see copies and examples of them in the room.
