Overview
This lecture will focus on consorts of continental male rulers who played a significant part in shaping displays of power through artistic patronage and collecting. Drawing from examples of those involved in collecting for Kunstkammern (cabinet of curiosities) as well as pretiosa collections (collectibles of precious materials) and their intellectual aspirations through their contact with and contribution to the sciences and scholarship in general. These collections display the splendour, knowledge and ambition intended to gain social and political affluence for the family they came from and married into, not least themselves. With the example of a few German princesses and their collecting activities this naturally also sheds light on the collecting activities later in the British Isles, hence concluding with Queen Caroline in the early 18th century. This lecture will look at collections of sculpture, pictures, jewels, drawings, furniture, books, scientifica, and pretiosa etc and analyse those how such collections fed into wider networks of influences through the knowledge of these learned and often unknown early modern royal women collectors.
This lecture will take place virtually over Zoom and it will be recorded. All registered participants will receive a link to the recording, which will remain active for 14 days.
Dr Lisa de Zoete FSA
Dr Lisa de Zoete FSA is an independent scholar, who specializes in early modern elite political culture and the arts and sciences in reference to collecting history and patronage, in particular, female patronage and Kunst- and Wunderkammer collections. In 2013, Lisa defended her PhD Material Worlds. Queen Hedwig Eleonora as Collector and Patron of the Arts at Stockholm university and published by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. She has worked at the Nationalmuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and most recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London where she led the project “Opening the Cabinet of Curiosities”. She has published and lectured extensively and she is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Currently, she is the editor of the volume Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663). Early modern Polypragmatism for Amsterdam University Press (2025) and a trustee of the Society for the History of Collecting.
Image Credit: Mauritshuis, The Hague.