• Concert info

Co-curators:
Richard Musselwhite, Department of Religious Studies, UNC-CH
Quincy Newell, Department of Religious Studies, UNC-CH
Carolyn H. Wood, Ackland Art Museum

Cornelis Visscher II, The Pancake Baker, engraving, Burton Emmett Collection, 58.1.273

Works of art exhibited in museums have been separated from the places where they were originally used and the communities of people that originally used them. Invested with cultural-and often spiritual-significance in their original settings, these works of art become isolated objects of visual interest when they enter the museum. Domesticating Virtue suggests the original context for which several Dutch paintings and prints from the Ackland's collection were created and the meanings that Dutch viewers attached to them.

This seven-month exhibition explores the use of images for moral education in seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant homes. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Church patronage of the visual arts in the Northern Netherlands declined considerably, compelling artists to look elsewhere for customers. They turned to private citizens, who because of the strong economy in the Northern Netherlands, were able to decorate their homes with many images. Indeed, the average middle-class Dutch home contained around forty works of art in the seventeenth century, most of which were paintings or prints like those displayed in Domesticating Virtue.

Domesticating Virtue is the second exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum funded by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation's Old Masters in Context Program, which supports projects that make the historical context of European art accessible to museum visitors. Last year, the Ackland received a grant from the Kress Foundation to support Mass and Masterpiece: Celebrating the Eucharist in the Renaissance and Baroque, which explored the important role altarpieces played in the celebration of the Eucharist in Catholic Europe of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

With the assistance of the Kress Foundation grant, the Ackland engaged two graduate students from the department of religious studies at UNC-CH, Richard Musselwhite and Quincy Newell, to assist in curating Domesticating Virtue and writing the accompanying catalogue. The theme of the exhibition was developed by Professor Peter Iver Kaufman, whose courses on the history of the Christian traditions (Religious Studies 27 and 99) this year consider the use of images in the Catholic and Protestant traditions.