Koenraad Jonckheere is an art historian who moves effortlessly between the worlds of the Northern Renaissance and today’s visual culture. At Ghent University he teaches art history, but just as often he builds bridges—between centuries, styles, and ways of looking.
His research traces the pulse of the 17th- and 18th-century art trade, the turbulent history of sixteenth-century Antwerp art, and the force of portraiture. These interests have given rise to a series of books, including The Auction of King William’s Paintings, Adriaen Thomasz. Key and Willem Key, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, and Another History of Art—each opening unexpected windows onto a familiar past. But his gaze extends far beyond early modernity. In Instagrammable ( Fall 2024), he explored what art history can reveal about the visual habits of social media. At the same time, he is completing Rubens’ Questies: Religion, paragone and the ontology of painting, a new study to be published in Spring 2026 that once again probes the deeper questions behind seeing—and making—art.
In 2013, he brought new life to the sixteenth-century Romanist Michiel Coxcie with a major exhibition at Museum M in Leuven. His work has been recognized with the Jan van Gelder Prize, membership in the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, and previously the Young Academy.
From 2014 to 2019, Jonckheere served as Director of Publications at the Centrum Rubenianum, where he guided the Corpus Rubenianum, the long-term research project dedicated to Rubens’s oeuvre.
