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Article History

Received: 22 May 2024

Accepted: 4 July 2025

First Online: 18 August 2025

Competing interests

: One of the authors, Sabrina Meloni, is conservator at the Mauritshuis, The Hague and therefore has professional ties to the museum. All other authors declare no competing interests.

: This study was carried out in accordance with the Vrije Universiteit Research Data Management (VU RDM) and Ethical guidelines as upheld by the Committee Research and Ethics (CWBE), Faculty of Religion and Theology (FRT), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, there is no legal obligation to obtain ethics approval for non-medical research and FRT has not made it mandatory. After the start of the study, we realised that journals increasingly demand ethics approval and we sought approval from the CWBE on a voluntary basis, which we obtained on 26 June 2024 (ref. nr. CWBE24.14). The approval was granted specifically for the component of the study involving human participants.

: Participants were thoroughly briefed by means of a preparatory meeting in which we discussed the study plan as described in the preregistration. Subsequently, all participants in this study (four experts and the chair) provided informed, written consent. This was obtained through signing a Rules of Engagement document, which we received from the participants via email between 4 May 2023 and 7 June 2023, prior to their participation in the A-ECM on 14 June 2023.