Harbouring Urban Creativity: the Antwerp Art Academy in the Tension between Artistic and Artisanal Training in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries *

This chapter contributes to the historical debates on creativity in Early Modern cities by analysing precisely this artisanal-artistic predicament at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts in a long-term perspective, from its foundation in 1663 until the end of the eighteenth century. It examines the roots of the academic tradition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian cities, the Antwerp institution will be contextualized as one of the oldest transalpine public academies. The chapter establishes as one might expect, in a former commercial metropolis with a rich artistic legacy, by the middle of the seventeenth century the Academy was confronted with a fading painterly tradition and declining art market. It neglects tension between artists and artisans within the walls of the Academy will be critically assessed. The chapter aims to shed new light on the perhaps surprising role of academies of fine arts in harbouring the creative impulses of craftsmen within the changing urban economies of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.