Marten de Vos (1531/32–1603) – Antwerp history painter and inventor through the Archival Lens 03/12/2025 | 18:00

Marten de Vos (1531/32–1603): Family, Workshop and Network of an Antwerp history painter and inventor through the Archival Lens.
Lecturer Natasja Peeters

This public lecture reconsiders the career of the Antwerp history painter Marten de Vos by examining a dense cluster of archival testimonies. Rather than focusing on stylistic development or iconography, it approaches de Vos as an important figure within the institutional, professional and social context of the Antwerp artistic milieu. The documents reveal de Vos as a painter, intellectual, guild official and moral witness: a multifaceted role that situated him at the intersection of artistic production, civic authority and professional responsibility.

These documents show de Vos’s connections with major contemporaries, such painters as de Rijckere, Raphael Coxcie and the Francken brothers, and artists from the printing milieu, such as the Sadeler family of engravers and Philip Galle. They also shed light on how dense and complex an extended family the de Voses were, whose professional, artistic, commercial and familial relations casually intertwined. Furthermore, they demonstrate the presence of the networks of his apprentices, such as David Remeeuws. Last but not least, the documents testify to various artistic and commercial contributions made by several enterprising de Vos women.
Through the prism of the archive, Marten de Vos emerges less as a solitary master than as a broker of artistic legitimacy, whose social capital and administrative presence, as much as his artistic vision, shaped the Antwerp artistic milieu in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Natasja Peeters (1969) has a Ph.D. in Art History and a BA in History. Her thesis (2000) dealt with the oeuvre of the late sixteenth-century Antwerp history painters Frans and Ambrosius Francken.
She worked as a post-doc for NWO from 2000 to 2003 at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on Painting in Antwerp Before the Iconoclasm (c. 1480-1566), a Socio-Economic Approach. In 2004, she co-curated the prestigious exhibition De uitvinding van het landschap. Het Vlaamse landschap van Patinir tot Rubens, 1520-1700 (The Invention of Landscape: Flemish Landscape from Patinir to Rubens, 1570–1700), in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien and Villa Hügel, Essen. From 2004 until 2006 she was a researcher for the project Scientific study of the “Rubens group” in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, culminating in the exhibition Rubens: A Genius at Work at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium (RMFAB) in 2008.
Her monograph on the 16th-century Antwerp religious history-painter Frans Francken the Elder, based on her PhD, was published in 2013 by the Royal Academy of Belgium. Her book on his brother, Ambrosius Francken, is in preparation. She is the author and editor of many books and scientific, historical and art historical contributions through the years. Her main interest lies in the use of archival sources for art historical research, the guild of Saint Luke, and the painter’s profession in the sixteenth-century Southern Netherlands from a social and economic point of view.
She has taught numerous art historical courses and seminars at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and Vrije Universiteit Brussels.
In 2006, she became a curator of the arts collection at the Royal Military Museum, Brussels. Since 2017 she has been the Director of Collections of its successor, the War Heritage Institute.
Since 2025 she has been the president of the Royal Academy of Archaeology of Belgium.