XIMENES · Art, Natural Science, Local History, and the New World in Counter-Reformation Antwerp: The Collection of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Manuel Ximenes (1564-1632)

Art, Natural Science, Local History, and the New World in Counter-Reformation Antwerp: The Collection of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Manuel Ximenes (1564-1632).

The project investigates one of the most splendid collections in early seventeenth-century Antwerp, that of the Portuguese merchant-banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632). Ximenez was praised by his contemporaries for his ‘universal knowledge of the sciences’, and his collection linked the spheres of art, alchemy, medicine, commerce, and religion. Our aim has been to investigate the possessions, collecting activities, and intellectual pursuits of Emmanuel Ximenez (1564-1632) within Antwerp’s mercantile, artisanal, and learned culture and within a larger network of cross-cultural commercial exchange, using the 1617 probate inventory of the moveable goods belonging to Emmanuel and his wife Isabel da Vega as a point of departure. The Ximenez d’Aragão were among the great Portuguese New Christian merchant houses whose overseas trading network extended to India, Africa, Brazil, and the Spanish Americas. The involvement of the Portuguese merchant community in maritime trade was instrumental in the rise of Antwerp as a ‘world city’ where new goods, new merchandise, and new knowledge and information were circulated and exchanged. Located in close proximity to the stock exchange (the city’s economic center) and the Sint-Jacobskerk (Antwerp’s wealthiest parish church), the Ximenez house, with its impressive façade, was a major landmark on Antwerp’s most splendid street, the Meir. The 1617 inventory offers a window onto the rich material and intellectual environments of the early seventeenth-century Antwerp merchant elite, of which Emmanuel Ximenez was an important member. Most noteworthy among the almost fifty rooms of the house recorded in the inventory are the library of almost 1000 volumes, with its emphasis on “chymical,” medical, and astrological works, as well as a significant number of books on architecture and fortifications, long-distance travel and exploration, and spirituality and religion; the “Distilleer- oft Alchimiecamer,” used predominantly for the making of medicinal waters and oils; and the “Porceleynkamerken,” the first space dedicated to the storage of porcelain documented for Antwerp. Particularly noteworthy among the luxury objects were the mathematical instruments, some created by the Antwerp mathematician and instrument maker Michiel Coignet; the rich and varied holdings of silverware; the fine collection of jewelry and of sumptuous clothing items; and the works of art, which includes Rubens’s first maritime allegory, a “Birth of Venus” that was most probably designed according to Ximenez’s wishes. The inventory provides a unique opportunity to study the interrelationships between mercantile activity, intellectual inquiry, practices of kinship and religion, and engagement in conspicuous consumption within the cosmopolitan urban culture of early modern Antwerp. Moreover, this is the first study of a collection of a converso merchant-banker whose family was intimately involved in Antwerp’s history of global trade. The project has been conducted in collaboration with Sven Dupré, Professor of History of Knowledge at the Institute for Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Research Group Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Project website: http://ximenez.unibe.ch/

Data: CORDIS, © European Union