3.3 Branding irons in use by the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke: identification, classification and dating
From 1617 until roughly 1650 a considerable number of Antwerp panels bear the quality hall mark of the Guild of Saint Luke and/or the mark of a panel maker. After this period, such marks become increasingly sporadic, and the practice appears gradually to fade out. The reasons for this decline, as well as its precise chronology, remain unclear.
During this period, the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke had multiple branding irons with the hands and castle in use, as explicitly mentioned in a guild record of 1663: “the old container with the painted shield of St. Luke, in which the branding irons (plural) are kept with which the works are to be marked and branded.”1 The exact number of branding irons remains unknown, but based on systematic comparison of hundreds of rubbings and photographs of the Antwerp guild brand, twelve distinct brand-types with motif variations can be distinguished. These variations concern the relative position and orientation of the hands (for example side-by-side or angled, with thumbs pointing inward or outward) and the rendering of the Antwerp castle (from detailed architectural forms to simplified silhouettes). In the present study, the catalogue of branding irons as published in ‘The Antwerp Brand on Paintings on Panel’ (1998) has been revised in light of the vastly enlarged dataset.2
The branded letter ‘A’ occupies a distinct position within this guild system [1-2]. Found on forty-eight panels, it frequently appears in combination with both a panel maker’s mark and the Antwerp guild brand, indicating that it formed part of the official marking practice. Van Damme first interpreted this letter as referring to the guild year of inspection, a practice known from silver guilds.3 In 1998, based on its occurrence on fifteen securely dated paintings, I proposed that ‘A’ on panels refer to guild year 1621–1622, a dating that has been confirmed by more than thirty additional examples that has surfaced since.4 No convincing examples of later year letters have been found, suggesting that the system of alphabetic year letters was short-lived, perhaps confined to a single year of experimental use.5 The letter ‘A’ thus provides a fixed chronological anchor within the Antwerp branding system, particularly helpful for dating earlier branding irons, nos. 1 and 3 (see next page for an overview of the twelve identified branding irons and their dating).
A third type of brand has been documented on a three seventeenth-century panels, consisting of a stylised Antwerp castle, two hands above, and a pair of dividers beneath [3].24 Notably, this brand does not occur in combination with a panel maker’s mark. By analogy with the Brussels mark that incorporates a divider (see §3.1), this brand might indicate a joiner-related origin, but no parallel has been identified on securely documented Antwerp joinery. The hypothesis therefore remains tentative.
1
The year letter 'A'’
2
The year letter ‘A’ upside down, visible on X-radiograph, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Alte Pinakothek München
3
Brand with Antwerp castle, two hands above, and a pair of dividers below, possibly a joiners’ mark
Notes
1 From Van der Stock 1990, p. 137, note 26: “...ouden koker waer oppe staet geschildert de waepen van Ste Lucas, waer inne waeren berustende de marck ijsers waermede de wercken der aen(legge)ren [= dekens van de St.-Lucasgilde en beeldsnijders] plachten geteekent ende gerant te worden...”
2 Wadum 1998.
3 Van Damme 1990, p. 198-199. The idea of annual letters has historical precedent: in 1493 the Guild of Saint Luke briefly considered introducing a rotating alphabetic system to indicate the year of production, although this was never consistently implemented. A rare survival of this concept is the Saints Altarpiece in the Savigny Chapel in Trier, which bears a stamped letter ‘A’. De Boodt 2000, p. 26.
4 Wadum 1998, p. 198. These new examples include paintings dated by the artists, such as Frans Francken’s The Idolatry of King Solomon (1622), Pieter Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Bird Trap, and Thomas Morren’s Portrait of Arnold Van Elsrack (1573-1637) (1623), and paintings securely dated to these years, including Rubens’ The Death of Maxentius on the Milvian bridge (312 A.C.) (1622). Other paintings could be dated thanks to dendrochronological examination of the support, such as in the case of Rubens’s An Old Man in Profile, Turned to the Right, (ca. 1622–25).
5 Two alleged ‘B’ brands published in the past differ in design and bear no relation to panels datable to the following guild year 1622-1623. Cardon 1987, p. 40, fig 14A/14B; Van Damme 1990, p. 198-199, fig. 5.
6 The mark is found on Cornelis de Vos’s Calvary (1623), a Death of Saint Martin attributed to Maarten Pepijn and a small copy after Van Dyck’s Christ collapses carrying the cross. Schuster-Gawłowska 1992, p. 175, fig. R 5-31, refers to an identical brand recorded in the archive of the ‘Museum in Antwerp’.