Brill Jacob Campo Weyerman and his Collection of Artists Biographies: An Art Critic at Work: 309/43 (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 309/43)

Weyermans art critical jargon and ideas on art theory are analysed in this study of his artists biographies (1729). Weyerman pays much attention to the artists lifestyle. They should live and think as merchants: a bohemian life style, he found, was pernicious. Review "The fact remains that, whatever [Weyerman's] motivations, he demonstrated (and de Vries amply acknowledges it) that he had an art critic training, that he mastered a technical vocabulary that deserves to be studied precisely because it is specific to a reality and an era and, in short, that he was a man fully immersed in his time. Probably these findings (and the many references to the situation of the art market in the Netherlands [...] would today satisfy more those who deal with social history of art, rather than history of art in the strict sense; however, they allow us to reconsider the importance of a work that, in Schlosser's time, seemed inevitably destined for oblivion and ignominy." Giovanni Mazzaferro in Letteratura artistica: Cross-cultural Studies in Art History Sources, August 2020. https: //letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2020/08/campo-weyerman_30.html#!/2020/08/campo-weyerman_30.html About the Author Lyckle de Vries (*1937) retired from Groningen University in 2000. Apart from writing monographic studies on 17th-century Dutch artists, he analysed contemporary printed sources on Dutch art and art theory, Gerard de Lairesse (1998, 2011), and Johan van Gool (1990).