“Cut and paste”-techniques and Repetitions in Visual Culture in Seventeenth-Century Sweden

We live in an image-saturated society. This means that every day we are confronted with a multitude of images that are repeated or recreated by merging elements from other images. By repeatedly seeing an image, we learn to recognise it and, using our trained visual memory, to identify similarities from previous images that help us to read new images. A prerequisite for the dissemination of images is mass media. A starting point for this project is that the mass production and repetition of images is a key principle of visual culture that can be traced in different visual media. The focus is on the relationship between printed images and painted pictures as a dominant principle of early modern visual culture. The aim is to analyse repetitions and "cut-and-paste"-techniques as an image-theoretical phenomenon within the visual culture of seventeenth-century Sweden. The material that will be investigated will be locally made church paintings based on popular, globally distributed prints that reproduced designs by Dutch and Flemish engravers and printmakers; portraits with pictorial elements that were repeated and merged from pre-existing images; and imported and copied woodcuts distributed nationwide as illustrations in devotional literature. The project is motivated by the need to take a non-hierarchical approach to the large number of pictures produced in the seventeenth century, and to analyse this phenomenon from the perspective of image theory rather than art history.