The team

Research team

Jan Blanc

Project leader

is full professor in Art History of the early modern period and dean of the Faculty of Humanities of the Université de Genève. He is a specialist on the connection between artistic theory and practice in the Dutch Republic and has worked on Samuel van Hoogstraten, Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer in particular. A central theme in his research is the way in which seventeenth-century art works do not so much reproduce or reflect ‘reality’ but rather produce credible and necessary fictions.

Léonie Marquaille

Postdoctoral researcher

specialized, ever since her master at the École du Louvre, on the arts of the Dutch Republic. She defended her dissertation Peindre pour les milieux catholiques dans les Pays-Bas du Nord au XVIIe siècle, supervised by Jan Blanc (Université de Genève) and Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre), in November 2015 (summa cum laude). Since September 2016, she works as associate professor at the Université de Lausanne. Her current research focuses on the decoration of the Oranjezaal in Huis ten Bosch, painted on command of Amalia van Solms after the death of her husband Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange.

Marije Osnabrugge

Postdoctoral researcher

Her main research focus is the mobility and migration of artists in the early modern period. She obtained her BA and MPhil degree in Art History at Utrecht University (both cum laude). Her PhD research at the University of Amsterdam (2010-2015) was on the social and artistic integration of Netherlandish painters in early modern Naples. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a postdoc at the University of Montpellier III in the ERC-funded project "LexArt" on the dissemination of art terminology.

Susanne Bartels

PhD candidate

specializes in artistic exchange, migration and mobility of artists, and the social and economic circumstances in which art was created and collected in the early modern period. After receiving her BA and Research MA in Art History at Leiden University, Susanne worked as a documentalist at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), and as a graduate trainee at the Fondation Custodia (Collection Frits Lugt).