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The weighing scales held by the female figure in Maarten De Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint are attributes of both Justice and Moneta. This chapter expands on the conventional interpretation of the picture as a “justice panel” by comparing it to the precious coins on which the Minters relied. Like a coin, the picture was not only a quasi-sacred entity but also a form of rhetoric designed to achieve specific ends at particular moments of exchange. The image solicited trust in absolute authority but was also evaluated and used by all-too-human subjects. The chapter opens up the interpretative space of an ideal courtroom, in which the picture has previously been sequestered, to the complex politics and ethics of the Mint in 1594, when the new Habsburg governor Ernest of Austria made his Joyous Entry into Antwerp.

This contribution focuses on a superb Dutch wine glass or roemer engraved by Maria Roemers Visscher (‘Tesselschade’) with the Latin motto, Sic Soleo Amicos (‘Thus am I accustomed to treat friends’). Roemers’ roemer is shown actively to have participated in a coterie of cultured men and women initially centred on her father Roemer Pieterszoon Visscher, whose friendly gatherings in the 1610s were animated by wine, song, emblems, poetry and comic and satirical literature. The roemer’s inscription characterises it as a speaking subject within this milieu and evokes the intersubjective character of friendships that were enacted through puns, metaphors, ironic wit and at times amorous play. The performance of mixed friendship through the gendered artistic practice of glass-engraving is compared with the pleasurable game of connecting word and image in emblems. Such activities both gave rein to, and reined in, embodied friendships between elite women and men within a pleasure-loving yet patriarchal society.

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 focuses on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in early modern arts. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europe’s power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes essays by interdisciplinary scholars on five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. An Afterword on a contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.

Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers & Joanna Woodall: Introduction

Joanna Woodall: De wisselaer. Quentin Matsys’s Man weighing gold coins and his wife, 1514

Drawing on Michel de Certeau's account of the microfreedoms that can be realized by ordinary people in the practice of everyday life, this contribution discerns a radical potential in seventeenth-century Dutch still life. The argument is made through an exploration of the character of still life as parergon and a consideration of the physical and hence conceptual arenas in which the still life scenario was situated. It is suggested that still life constitutes a virtual world in which there is a delicate and shifting interaction between the table of consumption, the tableau of artistic production and the light painted on the tabula of the camera obscura. The manifold satisfactions of still life lie in the thoughts provoked by these shifting and interpenetrating spaces of human consumption, production and perception. The article proposes an historical appreciation of still life in relation to the ongoing, everyday activities and labour of a broad human community and as membranes that sustain the diverse physical and symbolic effects of light.

Van Dyck: Paintings by Arthur K. Wheelock Jnr., Susan J. Barnes, Julius S. Held, Christopher Brown, Carol Christensen, Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Oliver Millar, Jeffrey Muller, J. Douglas Stewart, Washington, Brussels and London: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in association with Thames and Hudson, 1991, 383 pp, 120 col. plates, 186 b. & w. illus., £48.00