Was there a concept of artistic excellence in premodern Europe? If so, how can we see it? My dissertation, “Valuing Virtuosity,” addresses these questions by means of the goldsmiths’ craft in Paris, London, Dijon, Bruges, Ghent, and smaller neighboring artistic centers. Eye-catching and precious, late Gothic goldsmiths’ work features colorful enameled sculpture, innovatively faceted gemstones, detailed punchwork, and a playful blurring of organic and abstract forms. Long celebrated by collectors and museums, these objects have largely languished in a state of admiration rather than true critical interrogation. My project argues that there is a politics of self-organization, of valuation, and potential ideas about fraudulence inherent in these objects’ materials and forms

Part one, “Virtue in the Guildhall and Market Stall,” investigates the role goldsmiths’ work played in shaping concepts and practices of civic governance. Because alloy standards of precious metalwork objects were shared across regions, a city’s reputation was tied to the quality of goldsmiths’ work. Guild records describe how artisans appointed as craft authorities regularly inspected goldsmiths’ wares for substandard products. The importance of the expert’s skillful eye is evoked by depictions of urban markets, often observed in manuscripts of Aristotelian treatises discussing virtue and governance, in which goldsmiths are shown displaying and selling their work. Close examination of what appear to be orderly market scenes confirms that these images meaningfully fail to disclose whether the depicted goods are, in fact, up to standard. These images belie broader period anxieties about what comprised good governance and how it could be discerned from a deceptive surface. A record of infractions and punishments maintained by the Parisian goldsmiths’ guild (1345–1457) reveals attempts to repair damage to the community and troubling equivalences between the destruction of substandard objects and corporal punishment. Artisans were also analogized to their objects when goldsmiths’ work was used within guild rituals. Things crafted in and/or for the guildhall, like masterpieces (objects created to evaluate aspiring master artisans) and banqueting plate, evince that conformity to a standard was not merely a practical regulatory tool, but an aesthetic strategy. Objects discussed here include a hoard of confraternity plate—the Coëffort treasure—and copper plaques recording hallmarks once displayed in the goldsmiths’ guildhalls in Rouen and Ghent.

Goldsmiths’ guild ordinances forbade the fashioning or use of what were termed “false” gemstones (doublets), combinations of pigments with glass or rock crystal. In some cities, however, exceptions were made when the goldsmith’s client was of royal or seigneurial rank, and elites’ inventories feature scores of precious metal objects decorated with doublets. The second section, “Double Standards,” considers what this apparent contradiction suggests about the politics of artifice, particularly the imitation of gemstones. It also reexamines a goldsmithing technique that enjoyed immense prestige at late medieval courts, émail en ronde bosse, in which a silver or gold sculptural form is coated with enamel without the aid of metallic dividing cells. A virtuosic technical feat, ronde bosse enameling flew in the face of guild regulations since it entailed concealing a precious metal substrate from view. This technique was not only used to craft figural sculptures for elaborate court gifts, but also to fashion artificial diamonds, pearls, and other gemlike elements on crowns, collars, and brooches. Described as “seeds” in period inventories, these enamel embellishments traded in associations between mineral, botanical, and artificial creation, participating in discourses about the generative power of the seed as a metaphor for human creative potential. Objects featuring enamel or glass gems simultaneously harnessed illicit skilled artifice to enhance elite splendor and allowed the same elites to reassert authority over craft guild privileges in a period marked by artisan revolts. Allowing elites to take up practices of close looking typically developed within guild regulatory contexts, this enameling technique also served as a site for the practice of a premodern form of connoisseurship based on visual discernment. 

Part three turns to other artistic media that evoke the surface effects and techniques of goldsmiths’ work. The first of two case studies, a commemorative brass plaque commissioned by the Burgundian duchess Isabella of Portugal (Historisches Museum Basel), was designed to evoke the appearance of an enameled gold surface without attempting to illusionistically imitate it. The second, a wooden gilt reliquary of Saint Hippolyte (Musée Unterlinden, Colmar), is decorated with linear designs in black paint to emulate the effect of engraved metal. By elucidating the specific motivations for calling to mind the art of the goldsmith in each case, I use these objects to revisit a broader taste for visual culture that delighted in confusing the eye. I conclude with a discussion of the context for the rise of the many artists working in print and painting north of the Alps about 1500 who had originally trained as goldsmiths.

University of Chicago
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2023–2026

Rowanne Dean will return to the University of Chicago for the 2026–2027 academic year to complete her doctoral teaching requirements and finish her dissertation.