Painting at the Threshold: Color, Space, and Liminality in the Art of Frans Francken II

• In Event: Cabinetization and Compartmentalization in Early Modern Art and Science I

Abstract

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Antwerp painter Frans Francken II and his studio produced a diverse range of works that engage the beholder through the use of various kinds of thresholds. From the juxtaposition of archaic grisaille vignettes and illusionistic naturalism in biblical scenes to the interplay of different scales, media, and pictorial categories in collaborative painted garlands and constcamers to the architectonic divisions of cabinets (kunstkasten) that served as frameworks for his miniature oil paintings, Francken exploited material, metaphorical, and epistemological interfaces. This paper explores how such thresholds mediate the experience of the viewer, by facilitating transitions between disparate objects, media, narratives, and real and experiential spaces. Moreover, by locating Francken’s threshold paintings within a broader context of ‘compartmentalizing’ images and objects, it aims to propose new theoretical and methodological ways of thinking about the agency of liminal spaces.

Author

• Nadia Baadj, University of Groningen