Matthew Lincoln Guest Lecture March 28 2016, 4:00 pm Frick Fine Arts Seminar Room, Room 108

Continuity/Discontinuity: Network Dynamics in the Golden Age of Dutch Printmaking

Matthew Lincoln

Jan Collaert, after Jan van der Straet, published by Phillip Galle, New Inventions of Modern Time, engraving, 10 5/8 x 7 7/8 in, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.

Existing museum collections databases and computational network analysis can be harnessed to analyze large-scale changes in the organizational patterns of artistic printmakers and publishers in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lincoln will discuss the importance of formal network concepts to understanding artistic print production, and demonstrate how multiple analytical perspectives, including both descriptive analysis, as well as some simple simulation modeling, suggest new ways of thinking about both continuity and discontinuity in our histories of printmaking. This attentiveness towards computational modeling provides more than just new questions. It also compels us to attend to the most basic historiographical problem:

How do we weave fragmentary evidence into histories?