The Art of Producing Unique Copies in the Workshop of Marten van Cleve : Contextualizing a Technical Examination of one Massacre of the Innocents

Sammanfattning: This paper examines the Massacre of the Innocents attributed to Marten van Cleve, located at the Scheffler Palace in Stockholm, through a technical examination done in the spring of 2020. The results will be contextualized through the economic-historical context of 16th century Antwerp and its affiliated art market. By applying the theoretical approach put forward by Michael Yonan in his article “Materiality as Periphery”, the aim of this study is to investigate how van Cleve’s workshop customized its working methods of the Massacre of the Innocents to fit the dynamics of supply and demand. A thoroughly study on the correlation between the painting’s technical as well as visual features with its contemporary context within the open art market in Antwerp will be conducted in order to answer such question. One of the key ideas that will be followed throughout this study is the idea of the Massacre of the Innocents as a workshop production which cannot be understood through an examination of the artwork alone, but which requires to be viewed in relation to its characteristics as a serialized copy, mass produced for the market on spec. The paper concludes that the transferring technique of the motif, although reproduced numerous times, was not consistent with every figure’s and object’s contours, as many had been painted at first. As van Cleve’s workshop prolifically produced versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, its way of building many parts of the image in the painting phase may have been an intended act in the making of unique copies.