Verzamelband met de prentwerken: Les Forces de l'Europe, Asie, Afrique et Amerique en Les costes de France et d'Espagne, ca. 1702 1702 - 1703

Editor: Here we have Pieter Mortier's "Verzamelband met de prentwerken: Les Forces de l'Europe, Asie, Afrique et Amerique en Les costes de France et d'Espagne," created around 1702. The work utilizes print and engraving. It's clearly an aged collection, the cover worn and marked by time, a little ravaged. How do you approach a piece like this? Curator: Considering this "Verzamelband" through a materialist lens requires us to really focus on the tangible. The book’s very existence speaks to specific means of production, and social consumption habits of the 18th century. Editor: Social consumption habits? Can you expand on that? Curator: Certainly. Think about who would commission, produce, and ultimately consume such a collection. Engravings were reproduced, thus available to many. Maps, history-paintings... they offered knowledge and also propaganda. We must ask, who had access to them and what messages were disseminated through the book form itself? Consider too, the labor involved: the engraver, the printer, the binder, all contributing their skills. Editor: It's interesting to think of this object as a nexus of different types of work and levels of access. I was mainly drawn to the decay of the book, the imperfections revealing the work’s past and process of aging. Curator: Precisely. The very wear and tear of the book bears witness to its material life. It’s not simply about what’s depicted, but how that content circulated within a society. Can that inform our own experience of art history today? Editor: Absolutely. Examining it through that lens makes you think about the tangible circumstances that surrounded the work's creation and distribution. I hadn't considered the multitude of hands involved.