SESSIONS: Early Modern Artists’ Signatures
Today, artistic identity is central to many of the most active avenues of inquiry. In many ways, signatures are the gateway to those inquiries. Some recently unearthed signatures have shifted attributions to women and under-studied minority artists. This has enabled rediscoveries of artists, oeuvres, and the roles of women in artistic practice and discourse. The increased practice of technical art history has helped rediscover obscured signatures. Despite the importance of signatures for grounding studies of makers’ identities, initial intentions and functions of signatures in early modernity remain incompletely understood.
Conversely, related disciplines have turned to related concepts. Studies of scribal culture and printing privileges have interrogated the interconnections between names, readers, and markets across the globe. These studies thoughtfully illuminate aspects of the place of creators’ names on objects and the means of visualizing those names within early modern European culture. Alternatively, in histories of art, many of the concepts associated with signatures, such as self-awareness or self-inscribed authorship, have not engaged signatures directly.
We ask speakers to bring an interdisciplinary approach to these inquiries and/ or critique the conceptual and terminological underpinnings of signature and its practice. We encourage papers that place signatures at the heart of interconnections between making and writing, viewing and reading, memory and record-making, fragility and permanence, stability and novelty. Papers can focus on a particular artist, medium, professional milieu, viewership, region or network.
Session Convenors:
Susan Jones, Northeastern University London
Christopher Atkins, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Centre for Netherlandish Art
Speakers:
David Bellingham, Programme Director, Sotheby’s Institute of Art
From Signature to Brand: Ancient Greek Artists and the Origins of Authorship
This paper explores the earliest known instances of artists’ signatures in the ancient Greek world, examining their materiality, placement, and conceptual function in relation to authorship, identity, and object branding. While the session focuses on the early modern period, this contribution offers a diachronic perspective, tracing how ancient practices of signing artworks laid the groundwork for later developments in artistic self-fashioning and professional identity. Drawing on case studies from Greek vase painting and sculpture, the paper investigates how signatures operated not merely as markers of authorship but as strategic tools for asserting status, authenticity, and market value. It considers the interplay between maker and patron, the role of inscriptions in shaping viewer reception, and the socio-political contexts that informed the emergence of the artist as a recognisable figure. By situating ancient signatures within broader discourses of visibility, reputation, and commodification, the paper aims to illuminate continuities and ruptures in the genealogy of the artist’s name. Ultimately, it argues that early modern artists’ signatures cannot be fully understood without acknowledging their classical antecedents, which provided both a model and a point of departure for the construction of artistic identity in the Renaissance and beyond.
Sue Jones, Northeastern University London
Authorship and Authority in the Signatures of Jan van Eyck
This paper investigates Van Eyck’s signatures in relation to his conception of authorship, and in particular his insistent claim to the possession of authority. It argues that Van Eyck used his signatures to put authority into play by imbuing them with timeless, transcendent and impersonal qualities which linked them both to antiquity and to God. By integrating the signatures into inscriptional programmes, moreover, he linked himself and his new kind of painting into a divine order. The core reason for the archaising, sacred and legalistic qualities of the signatures must have been to present his new mode of painting as authoritative, and himself as an authority, and thus as ‘worthy of faith’. Van Eyck’s personal motto AΛC IXH XAN (As I can) can be interpreted as a visualisation of his personal relationship to God as he understood it. It suggests that he perceived himself to have a direct and unmediated relationship to the divine, and that he saw God as the source of his skill, knowledge and powers of creation. Van Eyck’s goal was to integrate his novel mode of painting into prevailing, late medieval systems of value and of belief, and into recognised artistic and epistemological hierarchies. His personal claim to authority was of benefit to him in asserting status, and in pursuing the higher goal of being thought worthy of enduring remembrance. The signatures are examined in relation to humanism and other domains of thought (law, theology), and in relation to van Eyck’s approach to Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. The paper tests the idea that Van Eyck wanted to be recognised and remembered as someone who had fashioned new rules for language by creating a synthesis of different and/ or conflicting authorities.
Edward Payne, Aarhus University
Signature as Strategy: Ribera’s Self-Fashioning as Artist, Subject, and Spaniard
Ribera signed his works prominently and consistently throughout his career. Emphasizing his Spanish roots, he typically signed Jusepe de Ribera español, followed by the year of execution, and he earned himself the nickname lo Spagnoletto, ‘the little Spaniard’. Latin variants on his signature include a more elaborate ‘curriculum vitae’, detailing his province of origin (Valencia), place of formation (Rome), city of residence (Naples), and professional status (Roman Academician). Distinctively flamboyant, Ribera’s signatures not only convey authorship, but also operate as acts of self-inscription, indices that locate the artist temporally, geographically, and culturally within the Spanish colonial landscape.
What did it mean to sign ‘español’ in early modern Naples? Ribera once explained why he preferred to stay in Naples rather than return to his homeland: ‘Spain is a merciful mother to foreigners but a most cruel stepmother to her own. I find myself well admired and esteemed in this city and kingdom, and my works compensated to my complete satisfaction’. Indeed, Ribera’s principal patrons were the viceroys of Naples, who commissioned works for their private collections and for the Spanish Crown. Ribera deployed variations on his signature both strategically, to signpost his unique position as an artist between Naples and Spain, and indexically, to signify his multifaceted persona. This paper will explore the construction, location, and function of a range of signatures on Ribera’s paintings, prints, and drawings, examining the artist’s development of such ‘signature subjects’ as penitents and martyrs, and his ‘signature handwriting’, namely a rich impasto and tenebrist ground.
Surabhi Sharman, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
The Ragamala Manuscript of Madhodasa: The Colophon as Signature and the Making of a Regional School
In much of early modern India, paintings were beginning to be attributed to individual artists who worked on them. However, in Central India, artists often remained anonymous, with attribution to individual painters, scribes, or workshops frequently absent. In the case of illustrated manuscripts from Central India from the 17th century, the scarcity of court documents and colophons has complicated efforts to trace provenance. Yet, a rare colophon on a Ragamala manuscript from 1680 provides the name of the artist, Madhodasa, and the place where the manuscript was produced – Narsyng Shahar-, inviting us to reconsider what constitutes a signature in early modern South Asia. Drawing on Tyler Williams’ (2019) argument that colophons were not a static or neutral convention but a performative marker of social and economic value, this paper proposes that the act of naming the artist itself was a conscious intervention within a field otherwise defined by anonymity.
Fieldwork conducted in present-day Narsinghgarh, Malwa in Central India – identified by early scholars as the possible site of erstwhile Narsyng Shahar mentioned in the colophon, revealed how the name Madhodasa continues to circulate in local memory, inscribed on a temple signboard and linked to murals associated with the artist centuries later. Although the chronological and stylistic connections remain uncertain, this persistence gestures towards how historical imagination and acts of remembering sustain regional artistic legacies. Building on Christopher Bahl and Stephen Hanß’s reading of colophons as dynamic, negotiated interventions, the paper asks whether regional ‘style’ itself might operate as a kind of signature. The paper treats the colophon as a form of early modern signature, examining how the inscription functions not only as a marker of individual authorship but also as a factor for the formation of regional artistic identity. The colophon thus emerges not only as an individual mark but also as a collective sign mediating between artists, artworks, region and collective memory in early modern South Asia.