Die Wissenschaften und die Künste

This is a picture about pictures. Around the middle of the 17th century, wealthy collectors in Antwerp liked to have their cabinets of curiosities painted: whole rooms crowded with canvases, sculptures, globes, coins, shells and scientific instruments, standing for the arts and sciences a cultivated man was meant to command. Here painted panels hang frame to frame up the walls, while small figures study a drawing and handle the objects on the floor. Works like this doubled as showpieces of the painter's own range, since he had to reproduce many different styles in miniature within the single frame. The painting later belonged to a Spanish queen, Isabella Farnese, before it passed into the royal collections that became the Prado.