Portret van Nicolaas Blanckaert 1667 - 1703

Curator: Oh, there’s something incredibly compelling about this portrait of Nicolaas Blanckaert. Made sometime between 1667 and 1703, it’s an engraving, a print, which immediately gives it this intriguing sense of remove. Editor: It's like looking at a ghost! The starkness of the line work, the way the light seems to catch his face… gives him an ethereal quality, as if he is just about to dissolve back into the paper itself. Curator: Exactly! There is so much artistry to unpacking its layers. Blanckaert, we know, was a physician and historian from Zeeland, and the artist—anonymous—immortalizes him with an almost Roman gravitas. Look at the carved stone frame, the inscription… very consciously placing him in a lineage of learned men. Editor: Though there’s also an interesting tension in it. Engravings, prints, these were means of reproduction. They speak to a burgeoning culture of accessibility— knowledge becoming less precious, more readily circulated. Blanckaert, the scholar, becomes Blanckaert, the commodity, to some extent. Curator: I suppose it depends on the purpose of the engraving, and to whom was its final ownership bestowed upon. And, yet, that accessibility allows us to gaze upon his likeness centuries later. I’m also fascinated by the lines above his head—"Incertum Quo Fata Trahant"—a sentiment of uncertainty about the whims of fate. Does that resonate with you given Blanckaert's standing as a physician at that time? Editor: Perhaps. Given the social currency bestowed upon doctors nowadays and at the time that the print was crafted, it seems difficult to apply those feelings toward its subject. Curator: Perhaps. It is rather interesting to me nonetheless! There’s something eternally resonant in the artist’s statement: "we are suspended in time." This print reminds me we are but players. Editor: It certainly prompts us to consider the different kinds of labor involved—from Blanckaert’s intellectual work, to the engraver’s skill, and our own efforts to find meaning in its existence. A curious confluence of artistry, material, and fate indeed.