Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nation, and mediated in various forms via academies, literature, collections, markets and galleries. Moreover, it contributed to competitive debate around the hierarchy of art and artists in Europe. The ensuing fundamental instability of the notion of a school of art helped to create a pluriform panorama of both distinct and interconnected artistic traditions within the European art world. This edited collection brings together 20 articles devoted to selected case studies from the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, France, Spain, England, the German Empire, and Russia.

INGRID R. VERMEULEN is Associate Professor of Early-Modern Art History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the early-modern history of art history grounded in art literature, collections, and museums. It generated the book Picturing Art History (2010) and the project The Artistic Taste of Nations (2015) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

INTRODUCTION
Art and Its Geographies, 1550–1815. Configuring Schools of Art in Europe - Ingrid R. Vermeulen
ACADEMIES OF ART, CHURCHES, AND COLLECTIVE ARTISTIC IDENTITIES
Notions of Nationhood and Artistic Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Rome - Susanne Kubersky-Piredda
A Failed Attempt to Establish a Spanish Art Academy in Rome (1680). A New Reading of Archival Documents - Maria Onori
Mantua: A School of History and Heritage (1752–1797) - Ludovica Cappelletti
ART LITERATURE, ARTISTS, AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES
Conceptualizing Schools of Art. Giovanni Battista Agucchi’s (1570–1632) Theory and Its Afterlife. - Elisabeth Oy-Marra
Claimed by All or Too Elusive to Include: The Appreciation of Mobile Artists by Netherlandish Artists’ Biographers - Marije Osnabrugge
The Galeriewerk and the Self-Fashioning of Artists at the Dresden Court - Ewa Manikowska
DRAWINGS, CONNOISSEURSHIP, AND GEOGRAPHY
Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635–1714) and the Italian Schools of Design - Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò
Connoisseurship Beyond Geography: Some Puzzling Genoese Drawings from Filippo Baldinucci’s (1624–1696) Personal Collection - Federica Mancini
Arthur Pond’s (1705–1758) Prints in Imitations of Drawings (1734–1736): Old Masters, Copies, and the National School in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain - Sarah W. Mallory
TASTE AND GENIUS OF NATIONS
‘Taste of Nations’. Roger de Piles’ (1635–1709) Diplomatic Take on the European Schools of Art - Ingrid R. Vermeulen
How Do Great Geniuses Appear in a Nation? A Political Problem for the Enlightenment Period - Pascal Griener
PRINTS, COLLECTING, AND CLASSIFICATION
Dezallier d’Argenville’s (1680–1765) Concept of a Print Collection: by Topic or by School? - Gaëtane Maës
Michael Huber’s (1727–1804) Notices (1787) and Manuel (1797–1808). A Comparative Analysis of the French School of the Eighteenth Century - Véronique Meyer
Chronology and School. Questioning Two Competing Criteria for the Classification of Print Collections around 1800 - Stephan Brakensiek
ART MARKETS: SELLING AND COLLECTING
The Eighteenth-Century Art Market and the Northern- and Southern-Netherlandish Schools of Painting: Together or Apart? - Everhard Korthals Altes
The Print Collector Pieter Cornelis van Leyden (1717–1788): Literature of Art, Concepts of School, and the Genesis of a Connoisseur - Huigen Leeflang
The Problem of European Painting Schools in the Context of the Russian Enlightenment: Alexander Stroganoff (1733–1811) and his Catalogue (1793, 1800, 1807) - Irina Emelianova
ON PUBLIC DISPLAY IN PICTURE GALLERIES
Everyman’s Aesthetic Considerations on a Visible History of Art: Joseph Sebastian von Rittershausen’s (1748–1820) Betrachtungen (1785) on Christian von Mechel’s (1737–1817) Work at the Imperial Picture Gallery in Vienna - Cecilia Hurley
An Organisation by Schools Considered Too Commercial for the Newly Founded Louvre Museum - Christine Godfroy-Gallardo
Scuole Italiane or Scuola Italiana? Art Display, Historiography, and Cultural Nationalism in the Pinacoteca Vaticana after 1815 - Pier Paolo Racioppi
CONTRIBUTORS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX