Koenraad Jonckheere is full professor in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art at Ghent University. He studied History and Art History in Leuven and received his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2005. He published widely on seventeenth and eighteenth century art markets and on sixteenth century Antwerp history and portrait painting. His monographs include the Auction of King William’s paintings, Adriaen Thomasz. Key and Willem Key, all published between 2007 and 2011. Recently Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, a book on decorum experiments in Netherlandish art after the beeldenstorm of 1566 (Yale University Press/Mercatorfonds 2012) was also published. For the Museum M in Leuven he curated the exhibition on the prolific sixteenth century Romanist Michiel Coxcie (Fall 2013). Koenraad Jonckheere won the Jan van Gelder-prize for art history, was laureate of the The Royal Academie for Science and the Arts of Belgium and was a member of the Young Academy of arts and Sciences (http://jongeacademie.be/).
From 2014 to 2019 Jonckheere, served as Director of Publications (editor in chief) at the Centrum Rubenianum, one of Northern Europe’s most famous art-historical research centres and the editing institution of the renowned Corpus Rubenianum.
Since 1 October 2018, Jonckheere is Director of Societal Outreach of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.
Currently Jonckheere is finishing two book projects: one on a methodological issue, which is (provisionally) called the ‘Timanthes effect’. It questions existing art-historical interprative models in that it focuses the early modern concept of Quaestio as a guiding principle for interpretation. The other one is tentatively entitled 'Another Story of Art'. This book sketches the story of art from Antiquity until the present day as a kaleidoscope. In seven chapters, the history of the visual arts is re-written from seven different angles: craft, theory, economy, paragone, politics and religion, iconoclasm and eventually style and meaning. Hence, art is not presented as a self-fulfilling esthetic prophecy, but as the complex entanglement of human ingenuity and rapidly changing historical contexts.
