The Antique Dealer's Shop

Francken Frans the Younger

(Antwerp 1581 - 1642)

The panel is mentioned in the collection from 1650 onwards as a ‘Painter's Studio’. However, the subject is more likely to be an antique dealer’s shop or a collector's studio. Frans Francken the Younger specialised in this type of composition in which, with consummate skill, he created ‘pictures within a picture’. Often, the masterly, meticulous representations of statues and paintings, among which one can recognise landscapes, caricatures and paintings of religious stories, are complemented by still-life elements, such as the vase of flowers on the right, and allegorical elements, such as the monkey tied to a chain, a symbol of the imitation of nature that must be tamed, in the artist's poetics, by intellect and culture.

Object details

Commentary

The panel bears the signature of Frans Francken the Younger. Born into an artistic family, Francken distinguished himself by specialising in the creation of interiors enlivened by objects and curios, a veritable 17th-century Wunderkammer. Here we see a room, a kind of picture gallery: the walls are covered with works of art, from a still life to religious and mythical scenes, as well as some portraits and animated landscapes. But it is not only this that catches the eye: all manner of items are to be found, from shells to small antique marbles, from sculptures above the woodwork to a small dog and a monkey tied to a possibly Turkish stool, a reminder of the travels of the anonymous owner of the place. The small macaque may have been intended as an allegory of painting (‘naturae simia’). On the left, two figures, one of them opulently dressed, are arguing animatedly, perhaps over a book of accounts, while behind them a third figure stares at them in astonishment.

The panel was already in the Borghese collection when it was described by Giacomo Manilli as a ‘painter's study’ (1650, p. 109). A more detailed description can be found in the inventory of 1693: ‘a panel painting three spans high with a depicted gallery with many paintings with an Astrologer sitting at the table with the Map of the World with a monkey tied to a stool...’ (inv. 1693, no. 29). (inv. 1693, no. 29). The subject matter is still unclear: by some it is considered to be a depiction of a painter's studio, by others ‘a picture dealer’ (Venturi 1893, p. 137; Longhi 1928, p. 200; Della Pergola 1959, p. 163; Hermann-Fiore 2006, p. 85; Moreno-Stefani 2001, pp. 358-359) or even a ‘Galerie de Tableaux’ (van Puyvelde 1950, pp. 74, 202).

Gabriele De Melis