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Recent research on science and art suggests that artists and artisans con-tributed considerably to what has been called the “scientific revolution” andthe shift from natural philosophy to natural science.While researchers havetraditionally written intellectual, top-down histories of theoretical inven-tions or “discoveries” trickling down to economic actors, recent researchsuggests that handicraft and artistic milieus were indispensable for thetransformations associated with the scientific revolution. Scholars aretherefore increasingly investigating the bottom-up processes that have in-formed these transformations.1 Artisans’ hands-on knowledge of naturalmaterials and their expertise in manipulating them helped lay the founda-tion of modern science, which was, after all, based on observation and

Bert DeMunck is senior lecturer in the History Department at the University of Antwerpand researcher at the Centre for Urban History there. This article was written in the con-text of IAP-project 6/32, “City and Society in the Low Countries, 1200–1800: Space,Knowledge, Social Capital.” The author thanks Hilde De Ridder-Symoens, Anne-LaureVan Bruaene, and the participants of the session titled “The Location of Value in EarlyModern Economic Practices (Late Middle Ages–Nineteenth Century)” at the FifteenthWorld Economic History Conference in Utrecht, 3–7 August 2009, for their commentson an earlier version of this article.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.0040-165X/10/5102-0003/332–56

1. Recent views may be found in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, “Commerceand the Representation of Nature in Art and Science,” in Merchants and Marvels: Com-merce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen(New York, 2002), 1–25; Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and Anne-Françoise Garçon, eds., Leschemins de la nouveauté: Innover, inventer au regard de l’histoire (Paris, 2003); Liliane Hil-aire-Pérez and Catherine Verna, “Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the MiddleAges and the Early Modern Era: New Approaches and Methodological Issues,” Technol-ogy and Culture 47 (July 2006): 536–65; Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, “Technology as a PublicCulture in the Eighteenth Century: The Artisans’ Legacy,” History of Science 14 (2007):135–54; and Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, “Les artisans à l’origine de l’industrialisation: Lessavoirs opératoires dans la quincaillerie en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle,”His-toriens et Géographes 405 (2009): 141–49.

Corpses, Live Models, and NatureAssessing Skills and Knowledge before the IndustrialRevolution (Case: Antwerp)

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experiment. Two groups in particular stand out: artists and medical prac-titioners. Artists analyzed nature in their drawings, attempting to realisti-cally represent the human body, while medical practitioners empiricallyexamined nature in anatomical theaters.2 Both groups can be seen as im-portant mediators in the development of the new natural philosophy.

This is not to say, however, that the social status of manual skills or em-bodied knowledge rose as a result. Historians have rightfully qualified theidea that experimental philosophers merely wanted to dissociate themselvesfrom the mechanical arts; rather, they argue now that experimental philos-ophy appropriated values and specific knowledge from the mechanical arts,because the mechanical arts had increased in status during the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries.3 The artisans themselves did not necessarily fare anybetter as a result, however. According to Pamela Smith, “artisanal bodily ex-perience was absorbed into the work of the natural philosopher at the sametime that the artisan himself was excised from it.” Both uncertainty aboutthe epistemological status of knowledge gained through sensory experienceandmoral distrust concerning the power of the senses to deceive and seduceincited the new philosophers to distance themselves from artisans andtradesmen.4 In the end, new philosophers rather than craftsmen assumedthe place of experts on nature and natural processes. What were the conse-quences of this for the perception of the skills, knowledge, and learningprocesses of artisans? Was practical experience sufficient in itself, for in-stance, or did reading, writing, and designing become more important?

The best way to learn about the perception of skills and technicalknowledge and the process of acquiring them is to examine assessmentprocedures. Remarkably, the procedures for assessing the vocational skillsof artists and artisans remain a blind spot in our knowledge of the prein-dustrial period.5 As children and young adolescents from artistic and arti-sanal milieus learned by doing in the context of a family business or froma master on the shop floor, scholars have viewed this as a self-evidentprocess, the end term of which was the making of a masterpiece, whetherin the context of a guild or an art academy.6 They have treated master

2. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chi-cago, 1983); Pamela H. Smith,The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the ScientificRevolution (Chicago, 2004); Harold J. Cook, “The Cutting Edge of a Revolution? Medi-cine and Natural History Near the Shores of the North Sea,” in Renaissance and Revo-lution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe,ed. Judith Veronica Field and Frank A. James (Cambridge, 1993), 45–61.

3. Pamela O. Long, “Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From MechanicalKnow-how to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age,” Isis 88 (1997): 3.

4. Smith, Body of the Artisan, chap. 6, quote on 186.5. Notwithstanding the recent attention for “la fièvre de l’évaluation”; see the special

issue, by this title, of Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 55 (2008): 4bis (supplé-ment).

6. Bell Gallery, Brown University Department of Art, Children of Mercury: The Edu-


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trials as straightforward tests of the acquisition of the skills required. How-ever, the growing importance of propositional knowledge (theoretical andscientific insights into phenomena of the natural world) at the expense ofprescriptive knowledge (techniques and savoir faire) calls into questionwhether the practice of testing only hands-on skills and the end resultrather than theoretical insights and the learning process is really so self-evi-dent an assessment.7

Assessment procedures created for artisans in the Antwerp MedicalCollege, established in the 1620s, and the Antwerp Royal Academy of FineArts, founded in 1663, suggest that shifts were imminent during the courseof the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 These new educational insti-tutions, seeking novel didactic methods adapted to the transfer of an in-creasingly complex body of knowledge, not only imposed new assessmentprocedures, but also spent time discussing new procedures—which signals,in turn, that views on the value of skills and knowledge were changing.

Both institutions can be considered a meeting ground for differentsocial groups with different ideas on the value of skills and knowledge.Whereas the medical college assembled surgeons and pharmacists on theone hand and university-trained doctors on the other, the art academydirected artisans to the drawing lessons of artists.9 In both cases, we can as-sume that these new institutions answered a changing demand for institu-tionalized learning (either of a theoretical nature or focused on drawing),but, as most historians and sociologists of education will admit, schoolsalso produce perceptions and discourses on the value of skills and knowl-edge.10 In this article, I will examine these two new institutions from a crit-

cation of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Providence, R.I., 1984); BertDe Munck, Technologies of Learning: Apprenticeship in Antwerp from the 15th Century tothe End of the Ancien Régime (Turnhout, Belgium, 2007); Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kap-lan, and Hugo Soly, eds., Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Appren-ticeship (London, 2007).

7. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy(Princeton, N.J., 2002).

8. Other medical colleges followed in 1650 (Brussels), 1699 (Liège), and 1760(Bruges); see L. Th. Van Looij, “De Antwerpse Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kun-sten,” in “Academies of Art between Renaissance and Romanticism,” special issue, LeidsKunsthistorisch Jaarboek v–vi (1986–87). One textbook on academies of art is N. Pevsner,Academies of Art: Past and Present (New York, 1973). For the southern Netherlands, seeGustaaf A. M. De Wilde, Geschiedenis onzer Academiën van Beeldende Kunsten (Leuven,Belgium, 1941).

9. For the medical college, see background information and references in FrankHuisman, “Medicine and Health Care in the Netherlands, 1500–1800,” in A History ofScience in the Netherlands: Survey, Themes and Reference, ed. Klaas van Berkel, Albert vanHelden, and Lodewijk Palm (Leiden, Netherlands, 1999), 239–78, esp. 245ff. On theacademy of art, see De Munck, Technologies of Learning, chap. 6.5; see also DominiekDendooven, “De Brugse Academie in de Achttiende Eeuw” (licentiate’s thesis, VUB[Brussels], 1994), 1:262–75.

10. See, for example (and also for additional references), Steinar Kvale, “Examina-

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ical perspective, inspired by recent trends in social theory. Since the 1960sand 1970s, scholars have tended to be skeptical about the emancipatory ef-fects of schooling, but in the last few decades the structural and post-struc-tural schools of critical theory themselves have become subject to impor-tant criticisms. Under the heading of the so-called practice turn,11 PierreBourdieu in particular has been criticized for his failure to fully considerthe complexity of the experiences and practices of both trainers and train-ees in the context of educational institutions.12 One of the practices that isstill poorly understood, especially in the early modern context, is assess-ment. Drawing attention to the practices of teaching, Élisabeth Chatel,among others, has rightfully asked “how teaching and evaluating mutuallyinteract in practice in the educational system.”13

In the first section, I examine training on the shop floor as practiced inmost urban industries, which was based on apprentice contracts (largely)in the context of a guild-based apprenticeship system. From the seven-teenth century onward, this system seems to have failed in certain respects,especially for theoretical learning and the transfer of design and drawingskills.14 Hence we see the foundation of the art academy, which will be ex-amined in the second section, where we show that the art academy an-swered the need of a broad range of artisans who tried to cope with chang-ing consumer preferences and the related rise of design capacities. Theresult, however, was a radically transformed way of assessing skills. Com-pared to training on the shop floor, even in the context of craft guilds, theart academy was more exclusivist, embodying a new way of perceiving skillsand talent. Finally, in the third section, I argue that the foundation of theart academy was part of a broader shift in which the hands-on skills of arti-sans were gradually devalued. Discussions about the foundation of themedical college show that the establishment of this institution was con-nected with the claim of university-trained academicians regarding thesuperiority of their skills vis-à-vis the hands-on skills of surgeons andpharmacists. The guild-based artisans reacted by emphasizing the impor-tance of both their practical skills and their training on the shop floor, in asense mobilizing the artes mechanicae against the artes liberales—in the

tions Reexamined: Certification of Students or Certification of Knowledge?” in Under-standing Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, ed. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave(New York, 1996), 215–40.

11. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds., ThePractice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Abingdon, UK, 2001).

12. Élisabeth Chatel, “Pragmatiques de l’éducation au Lycée: L’évaluation de l’édu-cation entre la mesure et le jugement en situation,” in Institutions et conventions: Laréflexivité de l’action économique, ed. Robert Salais, Élisabeth Chatel, and Dorothée Riv-aud-Danset (Paris, 1998), 91–118.

13. Ibid., 93: “comment s’articulent en pratique enseignement et évaluation dans lesystème éducatif.”

14. See, for example, Anne Puetz, “Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 217–329.



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process, however, claiming to be a type of artist themselves in response tothese threats to their autonomy.

The first section of this article is based on recent literature, includingsome of my own work on apprenticeship in Antwerp, which is based, inturn, on a sample of 272 apprentice contracts, some 20 judicial proceedingson breach of contract, and a broad range of requests, ordinances, andstatutes from guilds.15 The second and third sections are based on norma-tive sources (ordinances, rules, and so on) and judicial proceedings relatedto the foundation and functioning of these new institutions.16 Intense ne-gotiations between guild boards and guild-based masters on the one handand the proponents of the medical college and the art academy on the othergenerated a wealth of arguments regarding the need for (or redundancy of)these new institutions. Moreover, as the artisans, artists, and academicianswithin the institutions continued to debate the learning practices and as-sessment procedures up to the end of the eighteenth century, the resultingnormative sources and judicial proceedings offer insight into how thesepractices and procedures evolved. Significantly, the debates in questionoften concerned the organization of teaching sessions and evaluation pro-cedures directly, so that the sources provide immediate insight into thepositions and attitudes of the different groups involved. Of course, thesesources tell us nothing about the artisans’ activities and skills as such;rather, they show how teaching and assessment were organized in differentinstitutional contexts, and, above all, how this was perceived and justified.17

Apprenticeship and Embodied Knowledge

On-the-job training in the ancien régime has often been framed by histo-rians in the context of an immobile society of orders. Instruction andtraining were seen as being part of a broader educational system aimed at

15. On the selection and representativeness of these sources, see DeMunck,Technol-ogies of Learning (n. 6 above), 25–35.

16. Some of these sources have been published in, for example, Corneille Broeckx,Histoire du Collegium Medicum Antverpiense (Antwerp, 1858); Frans J. P. Van den Bran-den, Geschiedenis der academie van Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1867); Louis Galesloot, Docu-ment relatifs à la formation et la publication de l’ordonnance de Marie-Thérèse du 20mars–13 novembre 1775 qui affranchit les peintres, les sculpteurs et les architectes, auxPays-Bas, de l’obligation de se faire inscrire dans les corps de métiers (Antwerp, 1867).Others have been traced in earlier research on these individual institutions: BertDe Munck, “Medische praktijken: Conflicten rond competentie in de Antwerpse medi-sche sector, 17de en 18de eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 27, no. 4 (2001):459–84; De Munck, “Le produit du talent ou la production de talent? La formation desartistes à l’Académie des beaux-arts à Anvers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” PaedagogicaHistorica 37, no. 3 (2001): 569–607. In addition, some judicial proceedings related to theGuild of Saint Luke were also used.

17. See, for example, Steven L. Kaplan and Philippe Minard, eds., La France, maladedu corporatisme? XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Paris, 2004).



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reproducing a corporate social order. Apprentices not only learned on theshop floor, they went to live in another household; the master was not onlyan employer, but also a substitute father who disciplined them and guidedtheir socialization in the urban social fabric.18 The corresponding trainingmethod required apprentices to imitate their masters, not only on the shopfloor, but in daily life as well.19 Training was therefore geared less (or at leastnot solely) toward the transfer of technical knowledge, and more to prepar-ing adolescents to take their place in society, as either journeymen ormasters.

How learning worked in practice is still open to debate.20 Some scholarshave argued that learning took place despite, rather than because of, themaster–apprentice relationship. Sven Steffens described learning on theshop floor as “stealing with the eyes,” as masters jealously guarded their tech-nical knowledge (sometimes called “secrets”), which apprentices could onlyacquire by furtively observing how masters and journeymen did the job.21

Analyzing apprentice contracts and judicial proceedings on breach of con-tract reveals another reality, however: apprentice contracts were private,businesslike arrangements between a master and an apprentice (or rather,the apprentice’s parents or guardians) in which the transfer of a certainamount of technical knowledge was jointly agreed on.22 Remarkably, thecontracts hardly ever mention the technical knowledge concerned. Appren-tices were to learn a specific craft or profession, and the contract simply stip-ulated how long the apprenticeship period was to last. This lack of a detaileddescription of the skills involved, however, does not rule out the fact that anapprentice contract, even when it was oral or simply written down on paper,aimed at the transfer of a specific number of skills. In the context of a verysegmented labor market in which guilds carefully guarded what type ofproduct each group was allowed to manufacture, the parties in an appren-tice contract knew perfectly well whether or not the young person was qual-

18. See the references in Maarten Prak, “Moral Order in the World of Work: SocialControl and the Guilds in Europe,” in Social Control in Europe, vol. 1: 1500–1800, ed. H.Roodenburg and P. Spierenburg (Columbus, Ohio, 2004), 1:176–99.

19. See Karl Wilhelm Stratmann, Die Krise der Berufserziehung im 18. Jahrhundertals Ursprungsveld pädagogischen Denkens (Ratingen, Germany, 1967); P. L. Price,“Learning Through Imitation: Some Examples,” in Children of Mercury (n. 6 above),49–58.

20. Patrick Wallis, “Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England,” Journal ofEconomic History 68, no. 3 (2008): 832–61. See also Raoul De Kerf and Bert De Munck,“How Learning Worked: Early Modern Apprenticeship and the Commercialization ofTechnical Knowledge among the Gold and Silversmiths in Antwerp,” paper presented inthe session titled “Apprenticeship, Human Capital and the Social Order in the Pre-indus-trial World” of the Fifteenth World Economic History Conference in Utrecht, 2–7August 2009.

21. Sven Steffens, “Le métier volé: Transmission des savoir-faire et socialisation dansles métiers qualifiés au XIXe siècle (Belgique-Allemagne),” Revue du Nord 15 (2001):121–35.

22. De Munck, Technologies of Learning (n. 6 above), chap. 1.



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ified. Moreover, learning was very much synonymous with “doing the job.”According to Stephan Epstein, “all forms of knowledge have an experientialcomponent,” but especially in an early modern context, implicit, nonpropo-sitional knowledge was essential. As a result, learning was largely informal,while “time and effort” were the basic feature of any agreement on train-ing.23 Apprentices needed practice, but whether the master or a journeymanwas actively involved in instruction seems to have been unimportant.24

This view is confirmed by data from the judicial dossiers. Discussioncentered principally on the kind of work the apprentice was allowed to per-form. Apprentices or their parents not only lamented the household choresexpected from the youth, they also complained about the limited range ofwork the apprentice was to carry out, including the kind of products he orshe was expected to produce.25 In other cases, they protested the lack ofwork altogether.26 The quality and productivity of the learning process ap-pear to have largely depended on the type of work the apprentice was per-mitted to carry out. Practicing on extra or waste material was exceptional.When Françoise Van Ranst, who was an apprentice seamstress at a linenshop, complained that she was not learning much because there was too lit-tle to do, practicing on old rags was not considered a realistic option; it waseven perceived as undignified.27 Nor were strict didactic principles applied;instead, learning appears to have occurred spontaneously, by integratingthe apprentice into the production process. The only “method” involvedwas the gradual character of learning, as trainees went from simple prepar-atory tasks to complex and refined ones. Of course, that is not to say thatlearning on the shop floor was a backward way of being trained; on thecontrary, it appears to have been perfectly in tune with early modern pro-duction processes. As raw materials were generally expensive, rapid inclu-sion of apprentices in the production process prevented those materialsfrom being wasted by apprentices making goods that could not be sold.Moreover, based on apprentice contracts, the assets of masters and appren-tices could be matched perfectly. The apprenticeship term was simply ad-justed to the financial means of the apprentice’s parents, on the one hand,and to the range of skills the master could offer, on the other—long ap-prenticeship terms as a rule being cheaper because of the pupil’s compen-sating for the skills acquired with gratis labor.28

23. Stephan R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds in the Pre-Modern Economy: A Discussion,”Economic History Review 61, no. 1 (2008): 155–74, quotes on 166; De Munck, Technol-ogies of Learning, chap. 1.3.

24. De Munck, Technologies of Learning, chap. 1; Wallis, 847.25. City Archives of Antwerp (hereafter CAA), Judicial Proceedings Supplement

(hereafter PS) 2,209, “Aenspraecke ende conclusie, Françoise Van Ranst,” 14 February1680, art. 8–10, and“Duplicque voor Jan Franchois Vermeulen,” 27 January 1681, art. 6–8.

26. See the additional references in DeMunck,Technologies of Learning, chaps. 1.2–1.3.27. CAA, PS 2,209, “Replicque voor Françoise Van Ranst,” art. 12.28. De Munck, Technologies of Learning (n. 6 above), chap. 1.1.



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As to the institutional context of the craft guilds, it is not entirely clearwhat they added to this type of learning. Over the last few decades, the per-ception of guilds has changed dramatically. While scholars traditionallyviewed guilds as rent-seeking and inefficient cartels, economic historians—using concepts from the so-called new institutional economics and gametheory—now tend to interpret guilds as conducive to economic growth,efficiency, and technological progress.29 According to Epstein, guilds hadcontract-enforcing effects as a result of the masters being vested with thelegal prerogatives of fathers, entry fees (serving as bonds), and end-term re-wards such as privileged entry to the labor market or access to the guild’slabor-market monopsony, which ensured that apprentices would serve outtheir contracts.30 In theory, guilds could keep apprentices on the shop floorlonger simply by prescribing a minimum term for them to serve, whichthey did frequently. Long apprenticeship terms would prevent early depar-ture and result in either a broader range of skills learned or a superiorrefinement of the skills applied. However, the length of the terms was onlypartially related to the difficulty of the craft: longer terms might have beenthe result of masters regulating the labor market, which seems to have beenthe case in some German cities as the early modern era progressed.31 Thismay have resulted in better training at the same time, but in Antwerp, theobligatory apprenticeship terms appear to have been fairly short—typicallytwo years, while four or more was exceptional—and often were evenshorter than what was commonly agreed upon in contracts.32 One reasonfor this may have been increasing specialization, which intensified in thesixteenth century. Still, as far as the quality of training goes, it remains tobe seen whether a fixed term of apprenticeship was beneficial at all.

Were “masterpieces,” then, introduced to improve the quality of train-ing? The manner in which these trial pieces tested skills may be entirelyconsistent with the hands-on nature of the learning-by-doing process. Yethere the question is: To what extent did the trial piece actually serve to as-sess skills? Guild statutes often stipulated that prospective masters whofailed to make the trial piece properly had to apprentice for an additional

29. For a recent superb work with extensive references, see Stephan R. Epstein andMaarten Prak, eds., Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (NewYork, 2008).

30. Stephan R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change inPre-Industrial Europe,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (1998): 684–713, esp. 691–92.

31. Reinhold Reith, “Zur beruflichen Sozialisation im Handwerk vom 18. bis insfrühe 20. Jahrhundert: Umrisse einer Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Lehrlinge,”Viertel-jahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 76, no. 1 (1989): 1–27.

32. De Munck, Technologies of Learning, chap. 2.1, esp. 62–63. Also see Harald De-ceulaer and Marc Jacobs, “Qualities and Conventions—Guilds in 18th-Century Brabantand Flanders: An Extended Economic Perspective,” in Guilds, Economy and Society, ed.Stephan R. Epstein et al. (Seville, 1998), 91–107.



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33. See, for example, CAA,“Guilds and Crafts” (hereafter GC) 4,335, 31 March 1543,fo. 38–40v, art. 3 (cabinetmakers); GC 4,077, 11 August 1435 (3 October 1640), fo. 17(barber–surgeons).

34. In Brussels, for instance, trial pieces of surgeons were said to be meaningless, aseveryone succeeded; see Claude Bruneel,“Du barbier à l’artiste: Les tentatives de réformedu métier des chirurgiens Bruxellois,” Annales de la Société belge de l’Histoire des Hôpi-taux et de la Santé Publique 23–24 (1985): 5–32, esp. 10.

35. For example, CAA, GC 4,112bis, 192–197, 13 September 1774, art. 7.36. CAA, GC 4,344, accounts 1766–71, 1776–83, and 1791–93.37. For this argument, see Bert De Munck, “La qualité du corporatisme: Stratégies

économiques et symboliques des corporations anversoises du XVe siècle à leur aboli-tion,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54, no. 1 (2007): 116–44; see also DeMunck, “Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences: The Decline of Antwerp’sCraft Guilds from the Perspective of the Product Market, ca. 1500–ca. 1800,” Interna-tional Review of Social History 53, no. 2 (2008): 197–233.

38. Exceptions to this rule are those guilds in which large numbers of journeymenwere able to enforce a “right of preference,” preventing masters from recruiting unfreejourneymen (at lower wages). Ibid., 211, and Bert De Munck, “One Counter and YourOwn Account: Redefining Illicit Labor in Early Modern Antwerp,”Urban History 37, no.1 (2010): 26–44.

year,33 but only rarely did they apply this rule in practice, especially duringthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;34 instead, guilds ruled that pro-spective masters had to make their masterpiece themselves.35 Moreover, thedeficient prospective masters who appear in the guilds’ account books(which is possible because expenses related to making the masterpieceswere registered) appear to have failed because they took too long to com-plete their masterpieces, which suggests that they had more importantthings to do and hence had probably not spent as much time on the mas-ter’s shop floor as required.36

Therefore it seems that masterpieces did not so much testify to whatextent skills had been mastered, but served to check whether a would-bemaster had learned at all. The trial was part of a system that served to dis-tinguish masters from “faux-maîtres”—namely, all types of unfree entre-preneurs who wanted to have guild-based products manufactured by usingemployees (instead of subcontracting to or buying the items frommasters),without possessing the necessary skills themselves.37 It did not, or at leastnot directly, serve to improve quality; after all, journeymen, who comprisedabout half of the workforce, were not tested at all in most guilds. Themajority of the Antwerp guilds did not even expect that journeymen wouldhave completed an apprenticeship term;38 most learned via an apprenticecontract, without further assessment procedures.

As a result, these kinds of masterpieces and fixed terms to serve shouldbe understood from the perspective of master status: rather than as entryinto the labor market, masterpieces signified entry into the guilds’ labor-market monopsony, which was legitimized by masters’ superior skills. Farmore interesting than pondering on success ratios, then, is to examine how



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39. CAA, GC 4,341, 31 March 1543, art. 7.40. See references in De Munck, Technologies of Learning (n. 6 above), chap. 2.2. See

also Mokyr (n. 7 above).41. See, for example, Helen Clifford, “‘The King’s Arms and Feathers’: A Case Study

Exploring the Networks of Manufacture Operating in the London Goldsmiths’ Trade inthe Eighteenth Century,” in Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers: Innovation and theTransfer of Skill, 1500–1800, ed. David Mitchell (Stroud, GLS, UK, 1995), 84–95; GiorgioRiello, “Strategies and Boundaries: Subcontracting and the London Trades in the LongEighteenth Century,” Enterprise and Society 9, no. 2 (2008): 243–80; and Hilaire-Pérez,“Les artisans à l’origine de l’industrialisation” (n. 1 above).

42. See, for example, Maxine Berg, “From Imitation to Invention: Creating Com-modities in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 60 (2002): 1–30, andMaxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), esp.chap 3. See also n. 73 below.

43. See the additional references in Hilaire-Pérez, “Technology as a Public Culture”

skills were valued in masterpieces.What sorts of skills were considered im-portant? How were they represented? Remarkably, while trial pieces werealmost exclusively intended to test masters’ skills, their managing skillswere not assessed; pricing, planning, and bookkeeping did not appearamong the demonstrations required. Only once, in all the industriesinvolved during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, were masters requiredto set prices;39 in all other cases, they simply had to make an item that wastypical for the industry in question. However varied the masterpieces mayhave been, the task, as a rule, was to make a common product: a shoe orboot for shoemakers, a table or sideboard for cabinetmakers, crossbeams tosupport a roof or staircase for carpenters, and so on. Nor were masters re-quired to demonstrate any understanding of the production process: guildofficials appear to have been uninterested in whether the artisan in ques-tion knew the reason why what had been completed worked or not. In JoelMokyr’s terms, only prescriptive knowledge was tested, not propositionalknowledge. Thus in terms of the representation of skills, guilds and guild-based artisans seem to have valued only hands-on skills and prescriptiveknowledge, which were considered important up to the end of the eigh-teenth century.40

Still, two elements may have changed in the early modern period. First,as a result of changing labor relations and consumer preferences, artisanalskills may have tended to converge and cross over: on the one hand, grow-ing clusters of production and extensive subcontracting necessitated syn-thetic thought and transversal knowledge for at least some of the artisans(i.e., those who organized production networks);41 and on the other, prod-uct innovation and the notion of shared production among guilds—be-cause of, for example, the involvement of different raw materials in a singleproduct—resulted in the emergence of combined skills and “technologicalinterrelatedness.”42 However, although some artisans consequently tookpart in the development of so-called propositional knowledge,43 a substan-



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(n. 1 above); see also Natacha Coquery, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, Line Sallmann, and Cath-erine Verna, eds., Artisans, industrie: Nouvelles révolutions du Moyen Âge à l’ère indus-trielle (Lyon, 2004).

44. CAA, GC 4,264, 12 November 1523; GC 4,264, 25 June 1705.45. See, for example, CAA, GC 4,334, 14 June 1497, fo. 1v, art. 2; GC 4,335, fo. 1r;

GC 4,334, fo. 8r–8v; GC 4,335, 6 August 1515; GC 4,337, 9 April 1686, fo. 34–34v (cabi-netmakers).

46. OCMW archives, Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Koninklijke Academie voorSchone Kunsten), Inventory Rolland, 293(16); and 317(30), “Naemlijsten.”

47. See, for example, CAA, Notaries’ Archives 667, 30 July 1715.48. CAA, “Collegiael Actenboek,” 1663, fo. 5.49. On “openness” versus “secrecy,” see Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Author-

ship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Balti-more, 2001); Carlo Belfanti, “Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowl-edge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age,” Technology and Culture 45 (July2004): 569–89; and Hilaire-Pérez, “Technology as a Public Culture” (n. 1 above).

tial proportion still did not. Those working as specialized subcontractorsmust thus have experienced a degree of “deskilling.” In addition, the hier-archical relationship between invenit (inventing) and fecit (making) ap-pears to have changed. Up to the sixteenth century at least, artisans of allsorts were not only supposed to make a product, but design it as well.Whereas in 1523 each tinsmith had to make his own mold to cast his potin when making his masterpiece, the mold was to be borrowed from theguild by 1705.44 Other guilds explicitly stated that masterpieces were to bemade according to a model or drawing available in the guild hall.45 Con-sequently, masters appear to have lost control over designing products,which may explain why artisans were eager to learn to draw, and to thatend, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, they turned to theart academy.46 Some apprentices did draw on the shop floor, but on thewhole, this seems to have been the exception.47

The Art Academy and the Emergence of Nurtureand Nature

The Antwerp Académie Royale des Arts de la Peinture et Sculpture wasfounded in 1663, following the efforts of painter David Teniers the Young-er. He modeled it after the art academy in Paris, which contemporaries be-lieved accounted for the success of French art.48 Whether this was the caseis beyond the scope of this article, as are the training methods in this newinstitution. For the artists, the most important element seems to have beenthe availability of models (sculptures, books, and so on), which previouslywere in limited circulation, being the private property of individualartists.49 Additionally, in contrast to (at least part of) the individual artists,the academy could afford live models. Drawing from a live model—some-thing students would undertake after acquiring the basic skills of draw-



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50. Gabriele Bleeke-Byrne, “The Education of the Painter in theWorkshop,” in Chil-dren of Mercury (n. 6 above), 28–40.

51. On geometry, architecture, and perspective, we only have lists with names fromthe last quarter of the eighteenth century; for drawing from plaster or a live model, listsare extant from the end of the seventeenth century on.

52. See De Munck, Technologies of Learning (n. 6 above), 252–53, tables 3.3–3.4; seealso Neil De Marchi and Hans Van Miegroet, “Pricing Invention: ‘Original,’ ‘Copy,’ andthe Valuation of Art in Early Modern Netherlandish Markets,” in Economics of the Arts:Selected Essays, ed. V. Ginsburgh and P. M. Menger (Amsterdam, 1996), 27–70.

53. Bleeke-Byrne, 28–40.54. Of course, apprentices could be declined because of physical inabilities—among

which poor eyesight figured prominently; see De Munck, Technologies of Learning, chap.4.4.

ing—was of growing importance in the early modern era.50 From about theturn of the eighteenth century onward, courses in perspective (or architec-ture) and geometry complemented the live drawing lessons. Youths fromthe wood and building industries who either wanted to learn how to readplans or be able to draw the plans themselves attended these courses.51 Sil-versmiths also attended classes on drawing from live models as well as fromplaster sculptures; they probably wanted to learn how to make their owndesigns.52 Although in both instances the fundamental principle was imita-tion, the method of learning differed markedly from that on the shop floor:to start with, the master in the art academy was actively involved in thelearning process, which was not necessarily the case otherwise; moreover,learning may have taken place in a more systematic way. At least from thesixteenth century onward, the Italians developed a step-by-step method forlearning to draw the human body.53

Less apparent though no less important were the differences related toassessment and selection procedures for apprentices. When learning tookplace on the shop floor, an apprentice succeeded when he served out eitherhis contract or his term (as prescribed by the guild). From both perspec-tives, the idea was that any apprentice who had practiced enough was ableto do the job—as a consequence, “talent” was not an issue.54 Everyone whostarted the training was expected to succeed, provided they endured thediscipline and socialization aspects on the shop floor and/or under the roofof the master. Masterpieces, which were prescribed mostly from the fif-teenth and sixteenth century onward, did not add any substantial elementto this.What masterpieces tested, at best, was whether a prospective mastercould do the job, without any discrimination among those who were suc-cessful. The assessment procedure in the académie des beaux-arts differedfrom this in two respects: first, as the skills of trainees were assessed in an-nual contests—they were given assignments and the results were judged bya jury—not only were the end results tested, but the processes as well; fur-ther, whereas in guilds apprentices either succeeded or not, the directors ofthe art academy developed a ranking system. After evaluating the drawings,



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55. See, for example, CAA, GC, 4,578bis, 1771 (Bruges); J. B. Van Der Straelen, Jaer-boek der vermaerde en kunstryke Gilde van Sint Lucas (Anvers, 1885), 242–43.

56. See François Eymard-Duvernay, “Conventions de qualité et formes de coordina-tion,” Revue Économique 40 (1989): 329–59; Eymard-Duvernay, “Coordination deséchanges par l’entreprise et qualité des biens,” in Analyse économique des conventions, ed.André Orléan (Paris, 1994), 331–58; Pierre-Yves Gomez,Qualité et économie des conven-tions (Paris, 1994); and “La qualité,” Sociologie du Travail 44 (2002).

57. De Munck, “Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences” (n. 37 above),and Technologies of Learning, chaps. 6.3–6.4.

58. Perhaps more important than the masterpiece was the oath sworn when becom-ing a master.

59. Van Der Straelen, 250, 260 (cf. Ordonnantie voor de Conincklycke Academie bin-nen Antwerpen, art. 17).

the jury awarded places, so that the product of every contest was a hierar-chical list of names, from the primus to the last. The “losers” were not ex-cluded, but the winners were glorified at the losers’ expense. Significantly,these contests were important public events: the laureate received a medaland was paraded around the city on a wagon with music and flags; somewere even invited to a meal in the city hall.55

To a certain extent, the ceremonial aspect was similar to what tookplace in the guilds, where finishing a masterpiece was also accompanied bya meal or feast, which might have been a public, or at least a semi-public,event as well. This was not coincidental: as “quality” is not inherent inproducts and as criteria to assess and measure it always differ across time,place, and social group, both guild-based artisans and artists had to objec-tify quality; they had to define what it was before representing their own assuperior.56 For Antwerp guilds, quality was located primarily in the rawmaterials used and hence in the masters’ trustworthiness of not using infe-rior ones. Trademarks consistently signified the quality of wood, leather, ormetal used, and whenever new types of materials were involved, differenttrademarks were applied. Ordinances and statutes were not concerned withthe lack of skills, but with possible fraud by masters deceptively applyingtrademarks.57 This is why notions of skill and talent were not used to dis-tinguish among guild members; if guilds referred to skills, they did so on acollective level. Entering a guild was to become a member of a fraternity inwhich all “brothers,” in theory, were equals.58 The art academy, on the otherhand, located value in the artist’s personal merit and facilities; as a conse-quence, the academy’s members discriminated among artists, rather than,as the guilds did, between insiders and outsiders. The art academy evendeliberately broadened the distinction among artists inside the institution.While they excluded former winners from the contests (thus allowing themaximum number of artists to receive the symbolic capital associated withbeing awarded first prize), the next year’s places in the classroom were allo-cated according to the rank in the contest, so that the best artist could workunder the best conditions.59 As a consequence, the function of this evalua-



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60. See Antoine Picon (“De l’ingénieur-artiste au technologue: Procédures de sélec-tion et notation des élèves à l’École des Ponts et Chaussées, 1747–1851,”Paedagogica His-torica 30, no. 1 [1994]: 411–52, esp. 421ff), who links the necessity of a severe selectionwith a shift toward merit and talent.

61. Van den Branden, Geschiedenis der academie van Antwerpen (n. 16 above), 30,112.

62. “December 4, 1750 (art. 4),” published in Van Der Straelen (n. 55 above), 248(emphasis added).

63. See Galesloot (n. 16 above), 16, 18, 22: “un ouvrage de leur invention; . . . d’ex-clure . . . ceux que leur peu de talent rendroient indignes de cette distinction” (emphasisadded).

tion system was not only to produce skills or to select on the basis of merit,but to create distinction, in this case not between qualified and unqualifiedmasters, but within the skilled workforce itself.60

Not coincidentally therefore, the rules, norms, and discourses of the artacademy reveal a certain tension between nurture and nature: namely, whatcan be learned, on the one hand, and what may be called “talent” on theother. In contrast to the guild system, prospective trainees in the art acad-emy were subject to a selection procedure before being admitted. Accord-ing to an ordinance of 6 November 1690, prospective trainees had to pro-vide a certificate from their master stating that they were capable ofdrawing from a live model, which suggests that apprentices needed to learnsome basics first, either on the shop floor or elsewhere.While this could beseen as corresponding to the idea of acquiring skills via practice, trial-and-error, and experience, in the same ordinance it was also stated that the artacademy’s directors could dismiss anyone who proved to be incapable ofcarrying out the skill.61 Moreover, in the mid-eighteenth century, it was notthe masters but the directors of the academy who decided which appren-tices were capable of following its prescribed courses. Their decisions werebased upon the inspection of students’ drawings, which revealed “howmuch they had advanced.”62 While this may again be viewed as evidence ofthe importance of practice, during discussions on the subordination ofartists to guild rules in 1756, proponents of a strict distinction betweenguild and academy requested that access to the academy be made condi-tional upon the presentation of “a work of their own invention”; the aimwas “to exclude . . . those whose lack of talentmakes them unworthy of thisdistinction.”63 It is not entirely clear whether access to the academy was in-tended to mean access to the courses or instead entrée as a type of “mem-ber” of the corps of academicians—the latter implying that a new type ofmasterpiece had been created—but at least in part the criterion was talent.

At the same time, talent appears to have been to a large extent a culturalconstruct; the criteria by which talent was assessed depended on taste andcultural standards. In the words of the academy’s advocates, its aim was to“form their [the pupils’] taste, to let them sense the nuances of beauty andperfection, to ignite in those who are born with genius the first flames of



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64. Ibid., 14: “à leur former le goût, à leur faire sentir les nuances du beau et du par-fait, à exciter dans ceux qui sont nés avec du génie les premières étincelles de ce feu quiélève les peintres au-dessus d’eux-mêmes.”

65. Cited in Van Der Straelen, 194–97.66. Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton, N.J.,

1987), 11–19; see also J. Woods Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Con-struction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, Conn., 1998), and H.Miedema, “Kunstschilders, gilde en academie: Over het probleem van de emancipatievan de kunstschilders in de Noordelijke Nederlanden van de 16de en 17de eeuw,” OudHolland 101, no. 1 (1987): 1–31.

67. J. Rylant and M. Casteels, “De metsers van Antwerpen tegen Paludanus, Floris,de Nole’s en andere beeldhouwers,” Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis 31 (1940): 185–203; C.Duvivier, “Contestation entre la confrérie des maçons et les sculpteurs d’Anvers (1606),”Revue d’Histoire et Archéologie 3 (1861): 91–94.

68. See E. Levy, “Ideal and Reality of the Learned Artist: The Schooling of Italian andNetherlandish Artists,” in Children of Mercury (n. 6 above), 20–27.

the fire that lifts painters above themselves.”64 In discussions on the aboli-tion of the guild at the end of the 1760s, the Guild of Saint Luke implicitlyreproached the art academy with snobbery; claiming that the presence of“groups of lesser crafts and geniuses” was important from the perspectiveof the common good, the guild’s deans distinguished between common(gemeyne) masters and excellent (uytmuntende) masters. Whereas they al-legedly worried about both categories themselves, the academy was blamedfor being preoccupied exclusively with the latter. In the end, guild officialsrhetorically asked the key question: “Who will be the chosen ones, who willchoose them, and who will pick from the youths and distinguish who ispromising for the future?”65

Clearly, although artists and artisans met in the art academy, behind thefoundation of this institution lies a growing divergence between these twogroups.66While until the end of the sixteenth century, the Guild of the FourCrowned united sculptors and masons and the Guild of Saint Luke unifiedcrafts as diverse as panel-makers and painters, the art academy distin-guished between artisans and artists. The creation of the academy was partof a long-term transformation in which artists saw themselves as distinctfrom those who practiced the “mechanical arts.” An interesting conflict inthis respect occurred between the Guild of the Four Crowned (comprisingthose who worked with stone, such as masons) on the one hand, and thestonecutters (sculptors) on the other: around 1600, the latter aspired to endtheir association with the masons, whose skills they considered inferior.The sculptors deliberately distinguished between “l’officio mechanico” andtheir own “conste,” or art.67 They suggested that their skills included theo-retical knowledge, thereby aligning themselves with the liberal arts. Assign-ing importance to the classical examples and Latin, these artists emulatedthe “men of letters.”68 Significantly, they associated this with the impor-tance of talent. The sculptors claimed that in contrast to masonry appren-tices, who could support themselves by their work from the first day of



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69. Rylant and Casteels, 188; Filipczak, 16.70. It is beyond the scope of this article, but it would be worthwhile to examine how

a new artistic style and the concomitant new standards affected entrance to the academyof specific social groups, as well as their advancement along the successive contests.

71. Elizabeth Honig,“The Beholder asWork of Art: A Study in the Location of Valuein Seventeenth-Century Flemish Painting,” in Image and Self-Image in Netherlandish Art,1550–1750, ed. Reindert Falkenburg, Jan de Jong, Herman Roodenburg, and FritsScholten (Zwolle, Netherlands, 1995), 253–93. Not coincidentally, the price of artworkat the same time became dependent on the reputation of the artist; see Filipczak, 40–45,and Marten J. Bok, “Pricing the Unpriced: How Dutch 17th-Century Painters Deter-mined the Selling Price of TheirWork,” inMarkets for Art, 1400–1800, ed.Michael Northand David Ormrod (Seville, 1998), 101–10.

72. See, for example, Stuart Currie, ed., Drawing 1400–1600: Invention and Innova-tion (Aldershot, UK, 1998).

73. See John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption, and Design in 18th-CenturyEngland,” in Consumption and theWorld of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (Lon-don, 1993), 527–54; John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Pastand Present 168 (2000): 124–70; Berg, “From Imitation to Invention” (n. 42 above).

74. Matthew Craske, “Plan and Control: Design and the Competitive Spirit in Earlyand Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 187–216.

75. Bert De Munck, “La reproduction d’une crise: L’apprentissage des menuisiers etdes charpentiers à Anvers (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in “Formation professionnelle et ap-

their training, “apprentices in sculpture did not know for four or five yearswhether they would be able to continue in the profession.”69 The idea be-hind this reasoning is not only that it took longer to learn the art of cuttingstones than it did to learn masonry, but that it only became apparent afterseveral years whether someone had the necessary talent.

What renowned artists had in common is difficult to define, but in theend, quality seems to have been equated with ingenium (genius).70 Whilethe tension between high- and low-level artists grew, the ingegno e arte (tal-ent and skill) of a few artists came to stand out;71 ingenium, in turn, wasrelated to both inventiveness and drawing skills. As art historians haveshown, after the Renaissance, artistic production experienced a shift towarda greater emphasis on drawing.72 During the seventeenth century, artistsjudged drawing to be superior to color, because it appealed to the mind,whereas color appealed only to the inferior senses. These transformationswere not limited to the art sector; in other sectors as well, designing and“novelty” grew more important.73 Matthew Craske has framed the devel-opment of design in the context of general cultural transformations, rang-ing from the growing variety of retail demand to theological sensitivitiesconcerning the legitimacy of pleasure.74 Moreover, as the collectivist “con-struction” of quality via the guilds waned, the location of value may haveshifted to the individual producer or retailer. Research is still in its infancyhere, but there are indications that the skills and reputations of mastersor retailers as individuals grew more important for the creation of trust inthe quality of specific products;75 in other words, the new emphasis on



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prentissage (XVIIIe–XXe siècles),” ed. G. Bodé and Ph. Marchand, special issue, Revue duNord (2003): 31–51; DeMunck,“Construction and Reproduction: The Training and Skillsof Antwerp Cabinetmakers in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” in Learning on the Shop Floor(n. 6 above), 85–110; Ilja Van Damme,Verleiden en verkopen: Antwerpse kleinhandelaars enhun klanten in tijden van crisis (ca. 1648–ca. 1748) (Antwerp, 2007), esp. chaps. 5–6.

76. See Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy(Los Angeles, 2001), chap. 4, esp. 135–36. According to Filipczak (n. 66 above), 40–45,artists at the upper end of the scale were paid for their “inventiveness.”

77. Van Looij (n. 8 above), 313; Van den Branden, Geschiedenis der academie vanAntwerpen (n. 16 above), 56–57; Frans J. P. Van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerp-sche schildersschool (Antwerp, 1883), 1217–62.

78. Galesloot (n. 16 above), 13–19; CAA, GA, 4,578bis, 22 November and 7 Decem-ber 1770.

79. See Galesloot, 14–15: “d’embellir leurs figures en y ajoutant des beautés, tirées del’antique, qui manquoient au modèle.”

drawing and the assessment procedures related to it in the art academywere part of a broader process wherein the value of drawing skills in par-ticular was increasingly recognized as important. Given that disegno (de-sign) was the visible manifestation of ingegno (genius),76 this process musthave involved the perception of the individual as a whole person.

The Medical College and the Value of Mechanical Arts

To a certain extent, the foundation of the art academy may have beenan answer to flaws in the system of learning on the shop floor, which gen-erally did not include drawing. However, the debates between artists andartisans on the value of skills and knowledge suggest that there was moreto it than this. The art academy did not simply adapt to new tastes and newcultural repertoires. It also produced a certain discourse on taste, quality,and, eventually, skills; the directors not only transmitted knowledge andexpertise, they defined what kinds of these were needed to be a good artist.In the eighteenth century, the members of the academy, represented inaround 1770 by Cornelis Lens, favored a sober, classicist style; in contrast,their most important opponent, Willem Herreyns, promoted the baroque,colorful, Rubenesque style of what was later to be called the FlemishSchool.77 Even within the art academy, the question of style led to discus-sions on didactic methods. Lens criticized the short time in which the samepose was held; while every pose apparently lasted three days (for two hoursper day), he requested that they be extended to four days.78 His criticismwas related to style: the two extra hours were not needed for a more perfectimitation of nature, but only so that trainees could “embellish their figuresby adding beauty from the antiques, which the model is missing.”79 Theissue, then, was neither bodily stance nor the perfect imitation of nature,but acquaintance with a learned culture.

Something similar was at stake when the Antwerp Medical College was



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80. P. H. Brans, “De Collegia Medica in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden,” Pharmaceutischtijdschrift voor België 33 (1956): 121–24; L. J. Vandewiele, “Vergelijkende studie over deCollegia Medica in België,”Pharmaceutisch tijdschrift voor België 33 (1956): 145–69; P. H.Brans, “Les collèges médicaux dans les Pays-Bas Méridionaux,” Janus: Revue interna-tionale de l’histoire des sciences, de la médecine, de la pharmacie et de la technique 46(1957): 30ff; Bruneel (n. 34 above).

81. See Articulen oft conditien van het collegie der medecynen, in Broeckx (n. 16above), 38–40, andWetten ende regulen van het Collegie der medicynen . . ., 12 April 1659,art. 4, in ibid., 81–86. See also the edicts of the central government of 18 April 1617 and12 September 1623. Previously, certifying appears to have been the preserve of the localauthorities aided by the “sworn doctors of the city” (“Report of 13 September 1624,” inibid., 45–46; see also the order of 24 April 1571, in GC 4,515, fo. 1).

82. CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 19 (1641).83. The trial consisted of four different bleedings, to be performed with scalpels that

the prospective master himself had made first; see CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 20.84. CAA, GC 4,515, fo. 2, 6 June 1659 (also in GC 4,513).85. CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 36.86. CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 19, 1641; see also GC 4,515, fos. 4–5, 10 June 1661, and GC

4,513, 7 December 1672.

founded (officially) in 1620 by medical doctors—that is, by academics whohad obtained university degrees. From the very beginning, they tried to usethe institution to control and discipline the city’s barbers, surgeons, andpharmacists (and perhaps also midwives), all being artisans who hadlearned their skills on the shop floor.80 Basing their arguments on classicauthorities such as Hippocrates and Galen, the college promulgated theidea that the “art of medicine” was the preserve of university-trained doc-tors alone, or of surgeons admitted to the college after examination.81

Starting from that time, practitioners not certified by the college were notentitled to practice “the art of healing”; both surgeons and pharmacistswere soon required to attend theoretical lessons for up to six years beforethey were allowed to practice their professions.82 Unsurprisingly, this hadimportant consequences for assessment procedures as well. Certificationdepended on mastering theories; for surgeons, a theoretical examinationbecame a standard requirement, whereas formerly, the guild had requiredonly a practical test—a masterpiece—and two years of training in theshop.83 Pharmacists also had to pass a theoretical and oral exam in additionto their three-year apprenticeship (a masterpiece was not required).84 In-formation on the actual college examination is scarce, but it appears to havebeen exclusively concerned with the college’s canon of authorized knowl-edge. In the lessons, the “prelector” read the subject matter aloud, and thestudents wrote down verbatim what was communicated.85

The artisans vehemently protested these new assessment procedures,arguing that academic and theoretical knowledge was no more valuablethan their own practical knowledge. Both the formal assessment proce-dures and the content itself came under debate. In 1641, the guild deansand elders requested that they be able to question trainees.86 At first sight,



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87. CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 125ff, Grieven . . ., arts. 21–23, 20 May 1756.88. Ibid., art. 35.89. In 1674, some pharmacists wanted to abandon the mercers and form a new

organization together with the doctors. The name of the patron they chose is highlyrevealing: it was Saint Luke, under whose banner artists had distinguished themselvesfrom artisans; see Broeckx (n. 16 above), 138. In general, Saint Luke was also the patronsaint of medical colleges; see Vandewiele (n. 80 above), 150.

90. See J. S. Brubacher, A History of the Problems of Education (New York, 1969), 84.91.Wetten ende regulen (n. 81 above), art. 4.92. CAA, GC 4,515, fo. 2, 6 June 1659 (printed version in GC 4,513).93. CAA, GC 4,513, 7 July 1713, 15 November 1713, Ampliatie . . ., art. 8; additional

references appear in Broeckx.94. Toward the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the guilds of the barbers and

surgeons were subject to the same criticism as the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. In Brus-sels, for instance, attempts were made to turn surgery into a liberal art and to abolish theguild; see Bruneel (n. 34 above).

these deans seem to have adopted the strategies of their opponents, but inthe mid-eighteenth century, they still favored practical skills. The deansthen obtained the right to conceive and ask all questions related to practice,while they were still dubious of the use of theoretical knowledge as such, asthey criticized the speculative character of questions related to theory.87

Referring to their time-honored masterpiece (which the prelector of thecollege appears to have attended as well), the deans argued that “this trialconsists of a practice proper to the art of surgery, and it has nothing incommon with the science of the masters of medicine.”88 Still, this is not tosay that these artisans simply defended the value of their hands-on skills:the guild deans distinguished between art and science, rather than betweenhandicraft and art, claiming that they were a type of artist themselves.89

From a traditional perspective, they aspired to rise in the ranking of me-chanical arts, arts, and liberal arts—in that order.90

This claim was related to the struggle over who was entitled to design aproduct for the medical sector. The principal aim of university-traineddoctors was to reserve the prescription of cures and medicines to academ-ics alone, and to leave only the manual work for the artisans. The latterwere only to administer the cures and manufacture the medicines the doc-tors had prescribed. Surgeons could only decide on cures for severe ill-nesses in the presence of doctors,91 and apothecaries, who were previouslysubject only to the mercers’ guild, could only sell medicines approved by aspecial committee of two doctors and some fellow apothecaries and localofficials. Apothecaries even had to swear oaths that they would preparetheir medicines in the way the medical college prescribed (“in the mannerof Valerius Cordus”).92 In the eighteenth century, apothecaries were actu-ally prosecuted because they had practiced “the art of medicine” (“de con-ste der medecijnen”), rather than simply making the remedies that doctorshad prescribed.93

In the end, therefore, the discussions on and within the medical collegewere similar to those concerning the art academy.94 The apothecaries com-



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95. Requeste vande Apotekers, 1673, published in Broeckx (n. 16 above), 144.96. See, for example, CAA, PS 6,061, “Replicque conventionael ende Antwoorde,

Levinus Van Craeijwinckel,” arts. 9, 22; see also Piet Lombaerde, ed., Hans Vredeman deVries and the Artes Mechanicae Revisited (Turnhout, Belgium, 2005) (among others, seeespecially the contribution of Ria Fabri). Of course, further research is needed here,preferably from a comparative perspective. Tapestry weavers, for instance, used cartonsas a rule.

97. See, for example, Reiner S. Elkar, “Schreinen in Franken: Handwerk zwischenZunft, Kunst und Fabrik,” in Möbel aus Franken: Oberflächen und Hintergründe, ed. I.Bauer (Munich, 1991), 30. See also Helen Clifford, “Concepts of Invention, Identity, andImitation in the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades,” Journal of Design His-tory 12 (1999): 241–56; Styles,“Manufacturing, Consumption, and Design” (n. 73 above)and “Product Innovation” (n. 73 above); and Berg, “From Imitation to Invention” (n. 42above).

98. See, for example, Ria Fabri, De 17de-eeuwse Antwerpse kunstkast: Typologische enhistorische aspecten (Brussels, 1991); Piet Baudouin, “Verkenning van de Antwerpseedelsmeedkunst in de zeventiende eeuw,” in Antwerpen in de XVIIe eeuw (s.l., 1989), 388–91, 395; Piet Baudouin, Pierre Colman, and Dorsan Goethals, Edelsmeedkunst in België:Profaan zilver XVIde–XVIIde–XVIIIde eeuw (Tielt, Belgium, 1988), 20; and Frans Bau-douin, ed.,Tekeningen uit de 17de en 18de eeuw: De verzameling Van Herck (Brussels, n.d.).

99. For the “professionalization” of surgery, see Toby Gelfant, ProfessionalizingModern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institution in the 18th Century(London, 1984), chap. 4, and Willem Frijhoff, “Non satis dignitatis. . . . Over de maat-schappelijke rol van geneeskunde tijdens de Republiek,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 96(1983): 379–406.

pared doctors to “someone who would order a tower built . . . withoutbeing able to build the tower himself, as he has not learned masonry, nor ishe acquainted with the raw material involved”95—in other words, deliber-ately linking the capacity to design to hands-on skills and practical experi-ence. It may, therefore, be worthwhile to connect these debates to changingconsumer preferences and the changing relations between consumers onthe one hand and producers and retailers on the other. Fragmentary datasuggest that the so-called consumer (r)evolution was accompanied by agrowing distinction between invenit and fecit. Up until the sixteenth cen-tury, designing was done by the masters themselves, using examples ofRenaissance designs or of other pieces of furniture, silver, and paintings.96

Books and prints circulated in and among shops, and immigrants not onlybrought skills, but acquaintance with models and new product forms aswell.97 Gradually, however, in order to conceive new products, specializedcraftsmen or artists were used; on the instructions of merchants, mercers,or customers, they designed new pieces of furniture, silverware, and tex-tiles, which were subsequently produced by a range of specialized handi-craft workers.98

To fully understand the debates going on in the medical and art acade-mies, then, we should focus on the economic transformations of the mid-dle class. In addition to the “new philosophers” of the academies appropri-ating elements of the artisans’ practices, some artisans, in turn, may haveappropriated elements from the learned culture.99 Long before the estab-



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lishment of the medical college, the nature of the corporate apprenticeshipsystem and the masterpiece had been debated within the guild. For in-stance, both barbers and surgeons discussed whether their respectiveapprenticeship terms should last either two or three years. The surgeonsfavored three for themselves, arguing that the barber’s craft could belearned in two years, as it was comprised of shaving and bloodletting only,whereas surgery was considered “to depend on medicine, which is to bestudied and practiced long,” thus requiring three years.100 In 1641, somemaster surgeons not only tried to lengthen study at the college to four oreven six years for every prospective master,101 they also requested that thelessons be organized year-round and that they involve more corpses. Simi-larly, in Brussels, apprenticed surgeons quarreled with university studentsover entitlement to corpses.102 All these artisans agreed on the importanceof anatomy, referring to it as “the utmost and principal science of the craftand the fundament of the art of surgery.”103

The most important distinction, then, may have been between masterson the one hand, referring to the collectivist and egalitarian ethos of theirbrotherhood, and on the other, artisans and artists, who desired a more in-dividualistic approach that took into account both nurture and nature.104

For an elite group of artisans, abstract, theoretical knowledge and inven-tion grew more important, as did talent and personal style (i.e., ingenium).Hence the hypothesis I propose is that the Renaissance term ingenium cov-ers what happened in both the art academy and the medical college: for onegroup of surgeons, theory and practice gradually merged, just as it did indrawing—namely, disegno, a term that encompasses both drawing andinvention or planning.105 Designing was an intellectual activity as much as

100. CAA, GC 4,077, fos. 17–18. Some even considered three years insufficient.101. Surgeons who had practiced their profession for less than twenty years would

be obliged to attend the college’s courses for two years; those who had practiced for lessthan ten years had to attend for four, and new masters for six. See CAA, GC 4,077, fos.19, 21, 26–27 (1641).

102. Bruneel (n. 34 above), 20–21.103. CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 21ff, 21 February 1641.104. As such, it may be interesting to trace the origins, diffusion, or at least the co-

existence of the assessment procedures contested by the artisans; prize and rankingmechanisms, for example, also existed in Jesuit schools. See M.-M. Compère, Du collègeau lycée (1500–1850): Généalogie de l’enseignement secondaire français (Paris, 1985), 83,and A. D. Scaglione,The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam, 1986), 74.The oral exam and recitation of a theory or canon by heart, along with the public char-acter of the examination, can be traced back to the medieval universities.

105. As a result of the growing discrepancy between the barber’s craft on the onehand and surgery on the other, a new status was created, the “half mastership” (halfambacht). Surgeons entering into that status were not allowed to perform shaving,bloodletting, dentistry, and cupping; they did not have to undergo a practical exam, butmay have been required to orally answer some questions. See CAA, GC 4,077, fo. 17v;Noodighe oprechtinghe van ’t collegie der medecyne . . . (dr. Sophie), in Broeckx (n. 16above), 17. Elsewhere, the split-off of surgeons from the barbers resulted in more com-



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plex and theoretical exams for the former; see Th. Boesmans, De examens in de chirur-gijnsgilden (Utrecht, 1942), chap. 5.

106. Syson and Thornton (n. 76 above), 135.107. See, for example, Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early

Modern Era (New York, 1970); Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972); and Ru-dolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York, 1988).

108. Anne-Laure Van Bruane, “‘A wonderfull tryumphe, for the wynnyng of apryse’: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries,”Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 374–405; Arjan Van Dixhoorn, “Writing Poetry as In-tellectual Training: Chambers of Rhetoric and the Development of Vernacular Intellec-tual Life in the Low Countries between 1480 and 1600,” in Education and Learning in theNetherlands, 1400–1600: Essays in Honour of Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed. Koen Goudri-aan, Jaap van Moolenbroek, and Ad Tervoort (Leiden, 2004), 201–22.

109. See Stephen Wood, Degradation of Work: Skill, Deskilling, and the BravermanDebate (New York, 1981).

110. William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor

a practical skill, but above all it was related to ingegno, which was a virtuethat could not be learned. Although ingegno could be further developedand exploited if one possessed it, it was something an individual was eitherborn with or not.106

Others clung to their tradition of hands-on practices and refused to ap-propriate elements from the learned culture, which they considered alien totheir own. In this case, neither talent nor emulation was an issue. Hence thediscussions analyzed in this article should best be associated with the emer-gence of strategies from a learned Renaissance and humanist culture dis-tinguishing itself from the “traditional” guild-based economic middle class.While artists construed disegno as an intellectual activity, humanists tendedto abstract and codify practical knowledge, thus imposing text-based, the-oretical versions of expertise—albeit without dismissing practical knowl-edge as obsolete—from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward.107 Asa consequence, it may be worthwhile in future research to examine similarprocesses and debates in organizations such as chambers of rhetoric inwhich the artisan elite became acquainted with humanist traditions, whileat the same time attaching importance to both art and practice. In theirtheater and poetry competitions, for example, the idea that contests pro-duced symbolic capital may thus have gained ground, artisanal hands-onpractices and a learned culture of texts and words intimately merging.108

Conclusion

Research on skills and the perception of skills has traditionally empha-sized the Industrial Revolution as a watershed, with both new technologiesand the growing division of labor resulting from the changing organizationof production and new managerial practices leading to “de-skilling.”109

Consequently, artisans represented their hands-on skills as superior.110



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from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980); John Rule, “The Property of Skill in theAge of Manufacture,” in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge,1987), 99–118.

The value and representation of skills, however, changed well before theIndustrial Revolution, which can be deduced from discussions on the as-sessment procedures in different institutional settings.

In the guild system, virtually every prospective apprentice who wantedto start training could do so. Apprentices in guilds had to pay a registrationfee, which was generally fairly low, in contrast to the master fee. It washarder for apprentices to pay their masters, but empirical research hasshown that they worked to pay for their training. The longer the appren-ticeship period, the less expensive the contract. Hence, theoretically, mostapprentices could learn the trade they wanted, provided they were preparedto work long enough without any pay (only for board and lodging). More-over, so-called masterpieces cannot be considered as distinguishing be-tween qualified or unqualified work or as a necessary prerequisite to enter-ing the labor market. At least in principle, therefore, every individual couldbegin and succeed, provided the socialization that took place under theroof of the master also was successful. Those who wanted to become mas-ters themselves not only had to pay an additional, higher fee, they also hadto make a masterpiece. But these masterpieces did not really discriminatebetween highly skilled persons and others, serving only to test whetherprospective masters had learned at all.

The assessment procedures in the art academy were very different.Permission to enter the art academy could only be obtained by submittinga drawing, which had to be assessed (at least during the eighteenth century)by the professors or directors of the institution—consequently, not everyprospective student was admitted. Nor did all admitted students emergefrom these assessment procedures as equals, as was the case in craft guilds.In its annual contests, the art academy ranked its students, relying on prin-ciples of merit and talent to discriminate among prospective artists. Thishierarchical stance was not unintentional; rather, it was central to the acad-emy’s functioning. Because the winner of the annual contest automaticallywas granted the best place to draw during the next year’s course, he couldagain progress more rapidly than others. As a result of these assessmentprocedures, social advancement, in least in theory, became more difficult.There is as yet no firm empirical research on this, but an interesting work-ing hypothesis could be whether it became easier or more difficult to enterother social groups via vocational training: Did the growing importance ofdrawing and talent create opportunities for those eager to learn, or did theassociation of style and taste with specific social groups prevent (or hinder)upward social mobility for those born outside the trendsetting classes?Whatever the answer, talent and principles of merit were much more im-



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111. Compare with Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “On the Use and Abuse of Handicraft:Journeymen Culture and Enlightened Public Opinion in 18th- and 19th-Century Ger-many,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the NineteenthCentury, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (New York, 1984), 275–300.

portant in the art academy than within the guild context. Remarkably, bothtalent and merit emerged simultaneously, without the one substituting forthe other.

The rationality behind this becomes clear when juxtaposing the debateson and within the medical college with those on and within the art acad-emy. Ostensibly, the struggle of guild-based artisans in the medical sectorseemed very different. From the foundation of the Antwerp Medical Col-lege in the second decade of the seventeenth century to well into the eigh-teenth, the legitimacy of theoretical knowledge and concomitant assess-ment procedures—notably, an oral exam testing knowledge of the canon—continued to be contested by artisan surgeons and apothecaries. Instead oftheoretical knowledge, they emphasized the importance of hands-on skillsand practical experience—in short, prescriptive and embodied knowledge.However, the tension between surgeons and doctors trained in the collegehad much in common with that between artisans and artists. Both the artacademy and the medical college illustrate the growing dichotomy betweenthe making of products and the designing or inventing of them. Whereasartisans in a broad range of industries needed drawing skills to developtheir own designs to survive in the context of a diversifying material cul-ture, the surgeons and apothecaries also contested their loss of autonomyin the prescription (invention) of medical cures. Perhaps their protestingconfirms the importance of practical and empirical knowledge, but it alsosignals a kind of “symbolic violence” on the part of elite groups. Moreover,in both cases, a learned culture of intellectuals and artists discredited pre-scriptive knowledge, and possibly a wider popular culture of commonworkers as well.111 There was, of course, a growing attention to nature, ex-emplified in the live models of the artists and the cadavers studied by themedical practitioners, but in the assessment procedures of the new institu-tions examined here, the hands-on practices of artisans were discredited.

In sum, the emphasis shifted, not only to nature as a material thing, butto nature in the form of talent—ingenium in the Latin of Renaissanceartists and humanist scholars. Ingenium encompasses both drawing andinvention and is related to both theory and propositional knowledge. Theterm is full of paradoxes, of course. While it was linked to merit, ingeniumwas, above all, what could not be learned; and while it was an individualasset, it was also connected to the manners and style of a certain socialgroup. In academic discourse today it is largely considered a myth and dis-counted, but for the early modern artisans opposing “modern” assessmentprocedures it was a harsh reality, ingenium being what was henceforth con-sidered alien to them. While most (at least guild-based masters) had been



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112. An interesting perspective might be the one developed by Hélène Vérin (“Laréduction en art et la science pratique au XVIe siècle,” in Institutions et conventions [n. 12above], 119–45), who identifies a shift toward “la science pratique” (practical science) inthe second half of the sixteenth century, when the routines of artisans (“le sensible-par-ticulier”) were replaced by the abstraction and systematization of engineers and archi-tects. This was accompanied by a process in which the engineer, the architect, and theentrepreneur evolved from artisans cooperating in an atelier to supervisors and man-agers. In contrast to the apprentices, the journeymen, and the traditional masters, theyconceived products and production processes rather than manufacturing products. Seealso Vérin, “Généalogie de la ‘réduction en art’: Aux sources de la rationalité moderne,”in Les nouvelles raisons du savoir: Vers une prospective de la connaissance, ed. ThierryGaudin and Armand Hatchuel (La Tour d’Aigues, France, 2002), 29–41, and Pascal Du-bourg Glatigny and Hélène Vérin, eds., Réduire en art: La technologie de la Renaissanceaux Lumières (Paris, 2008).

113. Among others, see Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobio-graphy and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Oxford, 1997).

114. See, for example, Bert De Munck, “Fiscalizing Solidarity (from Below): PoorRelief in Antwerp Guilds between Community Building and Public Service,” in Servingthe Community: Public Facilities in Early Modern Towns of the Low Countries, ed. Manonvan der Heijden and Griet Vermeesch (Amsterdam, 2009), 168–93, and Bert De Munck,“From Brotherhood Community to Civil Society? Apprentices between Guild, House-hold, and the Freedom of Contract in Early Modern Antwerp,” Social History 35, no. 1(2010): 1–20.

self-confident artisans before, they were bound to become, at least from theseventeenth century onward, mere workers devoid of any talents.

This process was probably related to a shift in the early modern mate-rial culture that favored novelty and fashion, but more research is, ofcourse, needed here. Moreover, from an economic perspective, further re-search may link the changing perception of skills to changing labor rela-tions: namely, the growing dichotomy between producing on the one handand designing and managing on the other.112 From a cultural perspective,changing assessment procedures linked to vocational training can be asso-ciated with transformations in the urban social fabric, which may in turnhave been part of a changing perception of the self.113 In the long run, themost important distinction may have been between a traditional, collectiveculture of guilds as brotherhoods on the one hand and an individualist cul-ture of humanistic elites on the other.114


Skill and Knowledge Before Industrial Revolution, Munck

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