Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus,eds,Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe

Reviewed by: Michael Auwers, University of Antwerp, Belgium

This volume presents the conclusions of a research project of the same name led by one of the editors, Marika Keblusek. She and her collaborator Badeloch Noldus gathered historians and art historians to study early modern agents, agency here defined as a function rather than a profession. Operating simultaneously in the worlds of political, economic and cultural mediation, these fascinating figures appear throughout the book as versatile, flexible, even ‘chameleon-like’, personalities. These qualities have traditionally incited historians to state that these liminal characters were fundamentally untrustworthy and morally reprehensible. However, apart from Martin Dönike’s concluding contribution on fraudulent artists and art dealers in the late eighteenth century, the essays in this volume redress the negative image of early modern agents, giving them a voice and reconstructing the worlds they operated in.

The editors have structured the contributions to this volume according to the professional spheres of politics, trade and the arts. Keblusek argues that in an age of intensive interactions between the spheres of diplomacy and the fine arts, the connoisseurial qualities and the networks of diplomats in the contemporary art scenes enabled them to further their interests and those of their patrons. Robert Hill’s discussion illustrates this point. His protagonist Henry Wotton, James I’s ambassador to Venice, had the misfortune of serving under a king who failed to appreciate his well-known description of the diplomat as ‘a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ (41). Hill claims that it was timely gifts of Italian paintings to high-ranking courtiers that at least partially remedied Wotton’s crippled career. Hill’s denial of the obligatory reciprocity characteristic of early modern gift-giving does, however, contradict his findings. Bianca Chen, by contrast, fully acknowledges the impact of reciprocity in the construction and functioning of Gisbert Cuper’s network. This mechanism, she posits, allowed the Dutch scholar and politician to move as a spider in the early modern European web of communication. Thomas Kirk’s survey of the Genovese aristocrat Gian Andrea Doria is the only one where works of art are absent. Doria used his financial and military services to the Spanish crown to set himself up as the promoter of Philip II’s interests in his home republic, consequently strengthening the position of his family.

Keblusek introduces the second part of the volume with an analysis of the so-called Mercator sapiens, the merchant who took a great interest in high culture. Tellingly, the person that she labels as the prototype of the intellectual businessman was also a cultural broker and a diplomat, and thus a ‘triple agent’. Maartje van Gelder and Maurits Ebben provide stimulating case studies to support this view. Van Gelder relates how the Flemish merchant Daniël Nijs migrated to Venice and became the maritime republic’s foremost art dealer, while his collection of paintings and statues developed into a locus of trade in political information. Ebben reconstructs the story of García de Yllán, a Portuguese banker who acted as a diplomatic representative for Queen Christina of Sweden and managed her art collection.

The final part of this book investigates artists who became diplomats or political informants. Both Keblusek and Noldus, through a study of the famous painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, and discussion of the engraver, art dealer, diplomat and political informant Michel Le Blon, respectively, argue that these persons could successfully use art ‘as a cloak for political espionage’ (190) because ‘they could plausibly exploit their professional background’ (155). Surely, this was only partly true. In the case of Rubens, for instance, adversary courtiers and diplomats knew perfectly well that he used the pretext of pictures to conceal his diplomatic activities. Rather, and here Keblusek makes a strong case, artists owed their success largely to their high degree of access to the innermost circles of princes. The same held true for musicians, as is claimed by Peter Hauge in his discussion of the lutenist John Dowland, and for court jesters, as Susanne Kubersky-Piredda and Salvador Salort-Pons convincingly argue in their study of Philip II’s dwarf Gonzalo de Liaño.

Double Agents is an exciting book. It contains valuable additions to our understanding of the motivations of individual agents, of the mechanisms of brokerage, and of the cultural contexts in which it took place. Many of these essays provide stimulating analyses and syntheses of how the contemporary symbiosis between the worlds of high politics and the fine arts conditioned the ways that agents adopted strategies of networking and gift-giving to fulfil their goals, which seem primarily directed towards obtaining social mobility. Keblusek, Noldus, and their collaborators have given an important incentive to further research on what one contributor labelled as ‘the fundamental organizational principle’ (60) of early modern society.