Christine Göttler:
“World” in early seventeenth-century Antwerp (and Florence): Rubens and Ximenes

“World” (mundus) was a complex and emotionally charged concept in the early modern city of Antwerp, described by Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589) as a place containing the whole world because of its “great gathering of so many people and minds” and its “variety of different languages” (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 3^rd ed. Antwerp 1588).  My paper explores the meanings and contexts that “world” could assume in seventeenth-century Antwerp, focusing on two contemporaries who, despite their close ties to Florence and Rome, respectively, chose Antwerp as their preferred home: the Portuguese converso merchant banker Emmanuel Ximenes (1564–1632) and the artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Neighbors and possibly friends, Ximenes and Rubens were both praised for their knowledge, learning, and curious minds, although the direction of their interests diverged somehow. Proceeding from a historical notion of “world” as mundus, I will examine how Rubens and Ximenes—as creators, collectors, and “lovers” of art—imagined a spatially and/or temporally distant “world” at a time when (European) notions of the earth and the universe were changing. Their shared preoccupation with metamorphosis, transformation, and conversion will play an important role.  

Christine Göttler is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern. Her current research interests focus on collecting practices and collection spaces, the intersections between art, natural philosophy, and religion, and the relationship between landscape and nature. She has received fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the International Research Center for Cultural History (Vienna), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington), the J. Paul Getty Research Institute, the Villa I Tatti, and the DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Imaginaria of Force” at the University of Hamburg. In 2024, she was the Robert Janson-La Palme *76 Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her recent publications include two edited volumes, Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature (with Mia M. Mochizuki, 2023); and The Eschatological Imagination: Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800) (with Wietse de Boer, 2025).