The Flemish Merchant of Venice. Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection

Abstract

The portrait of a plainly dressed man offering for inspection what appears to be a vellum binding enclosing a few leaves – possibly drawings – occupies the front cover of this book. Ranged behind him are several plaster casts of identifiable sculptures. The reader may be forgiven for assuming that he is the ‘Flemish merchant of Venice’ of the title, but he is not. Traditionally identified as ‘a Collector’, he serves none the less well as a stand-in for the enigmatic Daniel Nijs (1572–1647), for whom there is no securely-identified portrait in oils. Merchants as well as artists and patricians were collectors of art in late-Renaissance Venice, and Nijs was praised as such by contemporaries: the poet Iulio Cesare Gigli and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi. Anderson’s book may, therefore, be placed with those publications devoted to Venetian collectors and collections that now include a number of important, recent studies. But as Anderson’s chapter headings announce, Nijs also participated in the art market as a dealer, an agent and a broker.