What does this project do?
This thesis takes a ‘jewellery first’ approach, beginning with surviving objects. These surviving pieces can tell us a great deal about materials, forms, and provide a way of thinking about the pieces of jewellery which no longer survive.
It explores how surviving seventeenth-century jewellery from the Dutch Republic can inform our understanding of jewellery described in contemporary inventories and represented in portraiture.
The project addresses three central questions: which types of jewellery survive, how they are described in inventories, and how these relate to their representation in portraiture.
Resources
Summary of the thesis
This thesis investigates the extent to which surviving seventeenth-century jewellery associated with the Dutch Republic can inform the interpretation of pieces described in contemporary inventories and depicted in portraiture. While jewellery such as rings, chains, pearls, and pendants may initially seem to provide direct access to the past, this sense of continuity is deceptive. The evidence offered by surviving objects, archival inventories, and painted representations is partial and structured in fundamentally different ways. Surviving objects are subject to uneven patterns of preservation, inventories often reduce jewellery to its material or financial value, and portraits translate three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional representations.
In response to the fragmented nature of the evidence, this thesis adopts a ‘jewellery first’ methodology that places material, textual, and visual sources in sustained dialogue. The approach is grounded in a catalogue of nearly two hundred surviving jewellery objects associated with the Dutch Republic, together with a glossary of jewellery terminology compiled from over one hundred seventeenth-century inventories. These resources provide a basis for reconsidering portraiture, not as a straightforward record of actual jewels, but as a visual source that requires interpretation in relation to both objects and archival descriptions.
Chapter 1 examines the surviving corpus and evaluates Mozes Heiman Gans’s influential characterisation of seventeenth-century Dutch jewellery as symmetrical, aristocratic, and focused on the display of gemstones. Although symmetry and the prominence of gemstones are significant features, the catalogue indicates a more diverse material practice, incorporating enamel, inscriptions, figural motifs, reverse decoration, symbolic materials, and personal significance. The chapter further demonstrates that the corpus is shaped by patterns of survival, particularly the predominance of rings and the relative scarcity of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and pearls.
Chapter 2 addresses inventories, demonstrating that these documents primarily record jewellery in terms of material and financial value rather than visual characteristics. The terminology employed is frequently condensed, variable, and reliant on contemporary understanding. As a result, the glossary is intended not as a collection of fixed definitions, but as a tool for tracing possible meanings and linking archival descriptions to surviving objects.
Chapter 3 considers the representation of jewellery in portraiture, arguing that painted jewels are not merely observed but are recognised and understood through interpretive processes. Through case studies and schematic visualisations, the chapter clarifies the ways in which viewers reconstruct painted forms. Pearls represent a notable exception, as their consistent visual properties render them particularly legible, even though few examples survive as objects.
Taken together, the findings of this thesis suggest that seventeenth-century jewellery in the Dutch Republic becomes comprehensible only when its fragmentary traces are considered in relation to one another. Surviving objects do not simply illustrate archival terminology or painted forms; rather, they actively inform and reshape the interpretation of these sources. At the same time, inventories and portraits reveal aspects of use, value, terminology, and bodily display that the material record alone cannot capture. The significance of jewellery, therefore, lies not in its mere survival but in the interpretative process that brings objects, texts, and images into conversation. By placing jewellery at the centre of this analysis, the thesis demonstrates that these pieces are not marginal accessories within seventeenth-century Dutch visual and material culture but serve as essential sources through which the relationships between objects, texts, and images can be examined.
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