Adam van Vianen and Ghosts of Silver in the Late Renaissance World

Abstract This chapter attends to a work of art created in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century. A small ewer made by the Utrecht silversmith Adam van Vianen, the object was fêted for its singular display of skill, in liquescent animal forms merging into vague allusions to the human body, all intricately fashioned from a single sheet of silver. It had been commissioned by the Amsterdam silversmith’s guild to commemorate the death of another silversmith, the artist’s own brother. Made to address the discernment of men knowledgeable in silver and its properties, the work was the expression of enfolded intimacies – of the bonds of a profession, of fraternal love and mourning, of the delicate manipulation of metal. At the same time, it opened out more extensive questions. Something quite distinct from a memorial in any conventional sense, Adam van Vianen’s ewer was a return of the dead in unsettled forms, a reflection on the complex relations between matter and what constitutes the human, and a blurring of the status of silver as a bearer of value and social relations.