Early Modern Netherlandish Art

Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, this essay describes how a particular kind of image--the devotional icon--could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin's body and the corporal reality of Christ. Treating Mary's unsullied essence as painting's self reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma--the anticipation of her Son's death--to an epistemology of endurance.

Hieronymus Bosch (um 1450/55–1516) war schon zu Lebzeiten für seine fantastischen Bilderfindungen berühmt. Heute ist sein Name zum Synonym für Spuk und Höllenbilder geworden. Nils Büttner zeichnet in diesem Buch die Karriere des Malers nach, der für die höchsten adeligen und höfischen Kreise arbeitete, und erläutert dessen Werke vor dem Hintergrund der damaligen Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit. Auf diese Weise gibt er den oft rätselhaft erscheinenden Bildern ihre ursprüngliche Bedeutung zurück.

When Philipp the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1396–1467), obliged his court to wear black as the new exquisite color of the court garments, it was no less than a revolution of inherited royal vesture conventions. This revolution established black, purple, and gold as the new aristocratic dress code. As this essay shows, Philipp’s color revolution only becomes comprehensible in the context of the Burgundian court’s elaborate textile production, which arrayed the protagonists with a semantics of color. The analysis will focus on the vesture practices of the royal congregation of the Golden Fleece and, especially, the paraments. Both as media of aristocratic representation and as artistically produced objects for a specific ritual context, the paraments tellingly reflect the concept of Philipp’s color strategy.

In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Ernst van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

This paper focuses on depictions of port cities and river harbours, integrated in the background landscapes of Early Netherlandish panel paintings. As compositional parts of larger landscape settings, these motifs were quite popular in the southern Low Countries and especially in Antwerp during the first decades of the sixteenth century. A thorough investigation into their precise nature and significance has hitherto been lacking. It is the aim of the present article to fill this gap and investigate to what extent the emergence and evolution of this specific kind of imagery can be linked to larger societal developments in the southern Low Countries and in the distinctive urban culture of Antwerp more specific.

A captivating historical look at the cultural and artistic significance of shells in early modern Europe

Among nature’s most artful creations, shells have long inspired the curiosity and passion of artisans, artists, collectors, and thinkers. Conchophilia delves into the intimate relationship between shells and people, offering an unprecedented account of the early modern era when the influx of exotic shells to Europe fueled their study and representation as never before. From elaborate nautilus cups and shell-encrusted grottoes to delicate miniatures, this richly illustrated book reveals how the love of shells intersected not only with the rise of natural history and global trade but also with philosophical inquiry, issues of race and gender, and the ascent of art-historical connoisseurship.

Shells circulated at the nexus of commerce and intellectual pursuit, suggesting new ways of thinking about relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. The authors focus on northern Europe, where the interest and trade in shells had its greatest impact on the visual arts. They consider how shells were perceived as exotic objects, the role of shells in courtly collections, their place in still-life tableaus, and the connections between their forms and those of the human body. They examine how artists gilded, carved, etched, and inked shells to evoke the permeable boundary between art and nature. These interactions with shells shaped the ways that early modern individuals perceived their relation to the natural world, and their endeavors of art and knowledge.

Spanning painting and print to architecture and the decorative arts, Conchophilia uncovers the fascinating ways that shells were circulated, depicted, collected, and valued, during a time of remarkable global change.

The Great Hercules engraving was published by Hendrick Goltzius in the city of Haarlem in 1589, a decisive moment in the revolt of the Netherlands against their Habsburg sovereign, Philip II of Spain. The huge engraving appeared on the eve of the renowned printmaker’s departure for Italy, where he would encounter and study the antique statues to which his print alludes. According to his friend, Karel van Mander, Goltzius took copies of the engraving with him on his journey and discussed it with a fellow artist. This chapter describes the kinds of knowledge available to the work’s initial viewers. They may, for example, have read Hercules Prodicius, an allegorical travelogue and mirror for princes published in Antwerp by the antiquarian Stephanus Vinandus Pighius in 1587. Noting how art historians have tried to contain and stabilize the wayward figure by recourse to traditional methodologies such as iconology and the construction of an Author, the chapter points out the mobile and expansive aspects of The Great Hercules. This ‘monstrous’ overdetermination is related to the phenomenon of aporia, in which internal contradictions generate a state of confusion comparable to that of Hercules at the Crossroads. Aporia, according to Aristotle, was the initial impulse to philosophical thought. The chapter suggests that the marvelousness, and monstrosity, of The Great Hercules lie in its aporetic capacity to mobilise its viewers to wonder and think about masculine virtue by offering multiple, contradictory paths, and challenging them to find a way among them. In doing so, the image can be seen to force or facilitate a re-charting of the masculine subject for the ‘new world’ that was incipient in 1589.

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This article considers the generic and temporal heterogeneity of a painting titled Holy Family, made by the Antwerp painter Joos van Cleve around 1515. Hans Belting has used Joos’s hybrid painting, in which a still life appears before the Virgin and Child, to illustrate where ‘the era before art’ ends and the era of art proper begins, placing the genre of religious icon and the genre of still life on opposing sides of the line separating the medieval from the modern world. It is to Belting’s compelling account of the painting that this article responds by asking what is lost in the drawing of such periodizing lines.

The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style — in opposition to the soft style common at 1400 — this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears.

Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, non mimetic — that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture — “thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.

At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important corrective to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners — opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.

Excerpt from the introduction: "Daan van Heesch’s contribution also addresses the genre of city views, drawing attention to an intriguing, little-studied drawing of the city of Jerusalem from the former collection of Maurice Delacre.  Made probably by an Antwerp artist in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the pen and ink drawing was inscribed by a later sixteenth-century hand with partial, faulty key to the sites and a claim to depict the site ‘naert Leven also het noch huyden ten Dage Leit’ (‘Jerusalem ‘ad vivum’ as it still stands today’). Having explored the drawing’s degree of topographical faithfulness in relation to both physical and sacred geography, Van Heesch shows that, while the novel view from the south is likely to have ultimately originated from a physical pilgrimage to the Holy City, the drawing and its later inscriptions relate in extremely complex ways to other prints and paintings of the period. The key, in particular, attempts to connect buildings depicted in the drawing with monuments in a more conventional view of Jerusalem, the Hierosolyma Urbs Sancta of Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, published in the second volume (1575) of Civitates Orbis Terrarum. In this respect, the Braun and Hogenberg print becomes the original, authoritative model for the Delacre drawing. Van Heesch also explores the possible functions of the drawing, showing that the main market for printed views was made up not of visitors to the sacred site but those at home who had to experience or remember it through secondary media such as maps and written accounts. Such views could also augment devotional imagery and reconstruct landscapes of the Holy Scriptures in the context of antiquarian scholarship. Van Heesch concludes that the ‘from the life as it still stands today’ inscription on the drawing might be related to its unconventional southern and low-point profile view of Jerusalem, which added to the chorographic qualities of the image and distinguish it from Braun and Hogenberg’s more hierotopical conception of the cosmic centrality of the city."

Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection, by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver, Yale University Press, 2008

impossible to ascertain whether or not Floris knowingly cast the fallen angels in that light. But given our present-day emphasis on diversity, alterity, syncretism, and inclusion, approaching the art of Frans Floris as an exemplary representative of a heterogeneous tradition can considerably revise our perspective on this artist. Extending that inquiry to the native/Italianate opposition circumvents the conventional duality and replaces it with a more promising figure: the hybrid.

Zoutleeuw's church of Saint Leonard exceptionally preserves three altarpieces painted by Frans Floris and his studio. This article presents the first overview of the rich archival evidence of this ensemble, and updates previous iconographic analysis.

Full title: Art, Honor and Success in The Dutch Republic: The Life and Career of Jacob van Loo
Author: Judith Noorman
Series: Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Focusing on the interrelationship between Jacob van Loo's art, honor, and career, this book argues that Van Loo's lifelong success and unblemished reputation were by no means incompatible, as art historians have long assumed, with his specialization in painting nudes and his conviction for manslaughter. Van Loo's iconographic specialty - the nude - allowed his clientele to present themselves as judges of beauty and display their mastery of decorum, while his portraiture perfectly expressed his clients' social and political ambitions. Van Loo's honor explains why his success lasted a lifetime, whereas that of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer did not. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book reinterprets the manslaughter case as a sign that Van Loo's elite patrons recognized him as a gentleman and highly-esteemed artist.

Showcasing new research by early and mid-career scholars, the articles included in this collection propose a more integrated approach to architecture in all its forms and across media, reassessing the polyvalent training of craftsmen, exploring the narrative potential of architectural settings and clarifying artists’ technical and creative engagement with architectural practice. The collection argues that a better understanding of the exchanges between artistic and architectural practice at this historical juncture is especially urgent, as the period saw the emergence of the architectural profession as an intellectual pursuit at the same time as painters and sculptors successfully performed as architects. Its articles will therefore shed light on the broader cultural resonance of architectural forms in early modern Europe, contributing to a better understanding of the phenomenon of the painter-architect, and advancing scholarship beyond the historiographical divide between art and architectural history.

https://journal.eahn.org/collections/855/

Personnalité aussi fascinante que méconnue, Jan Swart van Groningen (ca. 1495-ca. 1563) déploya, dans les anciens Pays-Bas, une formidable activité de concepteur d’images et de modèles figurés passibles d’usages multiples. Les modalités de leur élaboration méritent qu’on s’y attarde ; l’imitation et l’émulation y jouent un rôle central. L’artiste hollandais se signale en effet par l’habileté dont il fit preuve pour s’approprier des compositions et motifs éprouvés, puisant à des sources aussi diverses que les œuvres des Primitifs flamands, celles de graveurs italiens ou de Dürer, qu’il réinterpréta pour créer des formules iconographiques à la fois innovantes et visuellement marquantes. À leur tour, celles-ci inspirèrent d’autres artistes, actifs dans des disciplines diverses, qui les reformulèrent eux aussi, afin de les adapter à de nouvelles exigences esthétiques, fonctionnelles ou iconographiques. Il apparaît que nombre des modèles conçus par Jan Swart connurent une faveur particulière dans le milieu des peintres-verriers où ils furent notamment exploités pour la production de « rondels ». C’est dire qu’ils percolèrent largement dans la culture visuelle de leur temps.
Une suite remarquable de dessins illustrant l’histoire du patriarche Joseph (Londres, British Museum) servira de point de départ à mon propos, car elle se révèle être au centre d’un tel phénomène de recyclage créatif. À travers cet exemple, c’est la nature même d’une démarche créative basée sur un principe d’« imitation-émulation » qui sera contextualisée et interrogée.