The Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture 2011 Artefacts,art and artifice: reconsidering iconographic sources for archaeological objects in early modern Europe

Abstract

This paper reviews a key dynamic in post-medieval archaeology, that is, the relationship between artefacts and images, and in particular the questions raised in the study of historic domestic material culture depicted in contemporaneous painting and prints. Both media underwent a major transformation from c. 1400. Two main groups of pictorial art containing domestic material culture are reviewed, namely pre- and post-Reformation art in the Netherlands and Germany and genre paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. The historical iconographic record may shed a potentially rich qualitative light onto the quantitative archaeological patterning. Excavations at Duisburg in the Lower Rhineland are selected as a rich source of archaeological correspondence.