Early Modern Netherlandish Art

Title: Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes
Author: Catherine Levesque
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” The pattern of Ruisdael’s reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael’s paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature’s dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048558919/jacob-van-ruisdaels-ecological-landscapes

Intended as a backdrop to the individual cases discussed at the Defining Boundaries-conference, this paper compares two types of information. How does what we understand about the Bosch production from written sources and on the basis of the flow of new research that has been published in recent years correlate to what is known of contemporary workshop practices in other, nearby locations? In what way does the Bosch-production, with its what for this purpose can be dubbed as an additive style, fit in to what we know of painters’ family businesses? Supported by a few, not always unequivocally explained contemporary documents it is generally assumed that Bosch as a fourth generation member of a painters’ dynasty worked within the frame of a family workshop. As a rule, various forms of collaboration, or division of labour, in the early modern painter’s workshop served to enhance productivity and/or the quality of the product. A rationalised and standardised working method is a condition to make such an organisation work. Specifying and categorizing the Bosch-esque production thus, might provide a useful way in when questioning the boundaries of the oeuvre.

The female soul and its external and internal senses Jheronimus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as a satirical psychology The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch is not a hidden object painting, but a highly sophisticated composition with almost 'scientific' content. This essay will show that the triptych contains a playful, detailed 'theory of the senses'. The five senses are staged in the foreground and middle ground of the painting, around a sensus communis in the center of this wheel of the senses. The central panel is divided into three parts according to the three components of the soul. The depiction of human perception goes beyond the outer or external senses; the painter also invented a structure for the internal senses or cerebral powers of man, such as memory and imagination. This sounds surprising to say the least, considering the results of previous analyses of the painting 1 , and will now be explained in four steps. 2 The five senses. In the foreground and middle ground of the central panel, half on land and half in the water, five large hollow fruit shells are distributed (fig. 1). They form a circle. This circle is held together by its center, the carrier of the mussel. It completes the circle to form the wheel of the senses. The catalog is diverse and yet unites a variation of the same: somnambulistic beings with friendly expressions taste fruit, touch and enjoy themselves while watching each other. Fig. 1 shows the structure of the five containers as a circle and their center. There are no other huge spherical fruits in the picture, only these five (the one on the left is doubled, which is explained immediately). A structure of this conciseness invites us to search for a meaning.

Detail van het kleed van Joos Vijd: er werden twee kijkvensters gemaakt in de algemene overschildering van het gewaad Détail de l'habit de Joos Vijd: ouverture de deux fenêtres dans le surpeint généralisé de l'habit (Sint-Baafskathedraal Gent © Lukasweb.be-Art in Flanders vzw, photo KIK-IRPA, Bruxelles) Detail van het kleed van Elisabeth Borluut: er werd een kijkvenster gemaakt in de algemene overschildering van het gewaad Détail de la robe d'Elisabeth Borluut : ouverture d'une fenêtre dans le surpeint généralisé de l'habit (Sint-Baafskathedraal Gent © Lukasweb.be-Art in Flanders vzw, photo KIK-IRPA, Bruxelles) Fig. 8 Detail van het gezicht van Elisabeth Borluut: pasteuze lichtaccenten die men niet terugvindt in de kunst van Van Eyck Détail du visage d'Elisabeth Borluut: touches de lumière empâtées érangères à l'art de Van Eyck (Sint-Baafskathedraal Gent © Lukasweb.be-Art in Flanders vzw, photo KIK-IRPA, Bruxelles)

Automatic paint loss detection is desired for supporting conservation/restoration treatments of paintings. Firstly, producing condition reports with appropriate damage surveys requires now a lot of manual work from the restorers. Secondly, paint losses have to be accurately detected prior to running virtual restoration. Large variation of paint loss in size, shape, intensity as well as varying and complex background make this problem a challenging task. We develop a multimodal paint loss detection method based on sparse representation, which incorporates the information from multiple imaging modalities in a high-dimensional kernel feature space and makes use of the spatial context. To cope with unreliable labelled data, we introduce a majority voting approach. Experimental results with the data set of the Ghent Altarpiece demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In the restoration process of classical paintings, one of the tasks is to map paint loss for documentation and analysing purposes. Because this is such a sizable and tedious job automatic techniques are highly on demand. The currently available tools allow only rough mapping of the paint loss areas while still requiring considerable manual work. We develop here a learning method for paint loss detection that makes use of multimodal image acquisitions and we apply it within the current restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. Our neural network architecture is inspired by a multiscale convolutional neural network known as U-Net. In our proposed model, the downsampling of the pooling layers is omitted to enforce translation invariance and the convolutional layers are replaced with dilated convolutions. The dilated convolutions lead to denser computations and improved classification accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method is designed such to make use of multimodal data, which are nowadays ...

The struggle against water and the changing coast lines of the Low Countries has strongly defined the art and character of its inhabitants. The silting of the Zwin estuary near Bruges at the end of the fifteenth century would ultimately lead to the city’s demise as a commercial and artistic hub, while in the north decisive efforts were being made to make changing shore lines and polders inhabitable and sea routes more accessible. As a result of this unceasing struggle against the North Sea, many of the cartographical commissions during the late 15th and 16th century were related to large-scale and ambitious hydraulic campaigns. While projects were traditionally dealt with by local building masters or land-surveyors, the visualisation of the area in the form of ground plans and maps, was often relayed to a local painter.
Although the well-documented cartographic involvement of painters such as Lanceloot Blondeel (1496-1561), Pieter Pourbus (1523-1584), Jan Van Scorel (1495-1562) and Cornelis Anthonisz. (1505-1553) received some partial academic interest, this paper will make a contextual and comparative analyses of the phenomenon of the painter-cartographer in the Low Countries between 1480 and 1550. Contrary to a previous generation of painters, these artists’ involvement in cartographic mapping projects exceeded a mere chorographic visual input. As their familiarity with geometrical principles and trigonometry increased, so did their involvement shift from a purely aesthetic role towards an active input on the technical and scientific design process. The focus of this interdisciplinary research will be threefold: on the trajectories which allowed geometrical knowledge to disseminate through established social networks, on collaborations between workshop practices and finally on the early development of trigonometry in the intellectual environment around Gemma Frisius (1508-1555) and the university of Leuven. Erudite networks in which artists, scientists, humanists and land-surveyors were key-players, set the stage for professional mapmaking embodied by figures such Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) and Gerard Mercator (1512-1594).

This approach needs a preliminary explanation as it is different from the usual ones. Making a distinction between the different composition phases of this masterpiece would simplify the insights. All research accepts a timespan beginning before 1426 and ending after 1432. The acceptance of the quatrain postulates two authors, Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Albeit, two restrictions make this postulate doubtful. Hubert died on September 18 th , 1426. Jan van Eyck was engaged by contract in May 1425 to work in the exclusive service of the Burgund Duke Philip the Good except for occasional personal artwork if the circumstances would permit it. No individual artistic mandate notification to Jan van Eyck is registered. Moreover, his patron is utterly absent from the Ghent Altarpiece. Jan van Eyck was by all means in ducal charge of non-artistic missions.

Since technical research revealed that the center panel of the Mérode Altarpiece is based on an Annunciation in Brussels and that the wings were added at a later stage, the painting has lost its status as a key work in both the oeuvre of the Master of Flémalle and the history of painting. Analysis of artistic and iconographic elements of the Mérode Annunciation in comparison to the Brussels Annunciation, however, shows that the image should not be considered a less important work than its model but a product of choices and intentions aiming to optimize its function as a visual accompaniment of a personal prayer practice. Compositional and iconographic discrepancies between the wings and the center panel suggest that the work was transformed into an altarpiece with a specific devotional intention.

Golden Star System is an experimental structural system which uses biomimicary to bring together the geometric configuration of the Koch Star, the Golden Mean and the rotation of DNA around its centerline. Creating physical models of Golden Star System (figure 1) appeared to be a challenge. This paper introduces a parametric application to generate Golden Star System around a desired curve in Rhino-Grasshopper and presents a detailed process to make the model ready for 3d printing. Figure 1: Plotted Models of Golden Star System This project focused on an experimental system called the Golden Star System. It involves the nexus of the Golden Mean, the Koch Star (Snowflake) and the rotation of DNA around the center of its axis. The hypothesis associated with this design is that the nexus of these components will improve structural load carrying capacity in dynamic loading situations. Tests are currently being planned. The Golden Mean ratio has been studied for millennia and it has been...

X-ray images of polyptych wings, or other artworks painted on both sides of their support, contain in one image content from both paintings, making them difficult for experts to “read.” To improve the utility of these x-ray images in studying these artworks, it is desirable to separate the content into two images, each pertaining to only one side. This is a difficult task for which previous approaches have been only partially successful. Deep neural network algorithms have recently achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of image analysis and other challenging tasks. We, therefore, propose a new self-supervised approach to this x-ray separation, leveraging an available convolutional neural network architecture; results obtained for details from the Adam and Eve panels of the Ghent Altarpiece spectacularly improve on previous attempts.

This essay reveals humor's centrality and function in depictions of Saint Joseph from the fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries, and it reconciles two strands of interpretation that have polarized the saint's image into distinct early and late manifestations-one comical and derogatory and the other idealized. This faulty division is rooted in our misunderstandings of the reasoning behind-and the functions of-late medieval religious humor. Arguing for the influence of contemporary and earlier medieval satirical treatments of the fool, peasant, and unequal couple, as well as the role of laughter in veneration, the following offers an alternative to the theory of education as the sole explanation for humor's presence in religious imagery. It encourages a more nuanced understanding of images used for private and public veneration, acknowledging not only the presence but also the purpose of visual jokes in such works.

We review Ketelsen et al.'s discovery of tiny pinprick holes in Jan van Eyck's silverpoint study portrait of Niccolò Albergati(?), which indicate mechanical copying such as by a Reductionszirkel or Proportionalzirkel, rather than by an optical epidiascope. We "re-enact" copying by Reductionszirkel and find (sub-millimeter) fidelity equal to that in van Eyck's work. We show that Renaissance artists would face significant challenges making and using an epidiascope, which finds no documentary support, including none from scientists, artists or patrons.

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why human beings change throughout their entire lifespan. Mindset, like Body Language, are of all times. Why not make a tryout on a historically famous person or realistic artwork. Generally, the heritage of medieval information remains very scarce or unexplored. Mindset is a vital part of one's personality. Sequential decision-making methodically reveals a mindset. Our actual knowledge can disclose unexpected developments-one's failure and effort clarify a life cycle's dynamics and consequential syntheses (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). By definition, mottos stand for frequent repetitions. The importance can not be overrated. They explain a lot about the user. President Obama wanted the American population to sustain his policy by Yes, we can. It may refer to teamwork. Jan van Eyck's world-famous Alc ixh xan would unveil quite a different mindset: Oh my God, I can not do that. A partnership seems excluded in this case. However, there is a distinction between I am not allowed to do that by somebody else, or I cannot do it. Jan worked mainly in partnership. Which hindrance determined his development process. Every person has interests that can blossom into abilities. When it comes to artistic ability, it looks more like a God-given gift. People seem to draw well or poorly naturally. Albeit, one learns a skill if the task gives him a chance to do that, as one develops his creativity or not. Success is about being your best self. Failure is an opportunity, not a condemnation; effort is the key to success. Dr. Carol S. Dweck explains that a fixed mindset expects to show up independently before learning occurs. A restricted way of thinking does not allow people the luxury of becoming. Challenge and interest go hand in hand. Albeit, people in a growth mindset do not just seek challenges. Becoming is better than being. They thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the

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

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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Walter Swennen’s encounter with painting has long been portrayed as a belated conversion. Everything seemed to support this interpretation: from authorised biographies and bibliographies to the apparently linear path of his pictorial development (progression from black and white to colour, recurrent motifs, etc.), as well as the artist’s own silences and infrequent remarks. Recently still the artist asserted that he had entered the art scene in 1981.  That year he was reaching his mid-thirties; he was known to have an inchoate or intermittent poetic activity; he held a degree in psychology from the Université catholique de Louvain; and he was teaching at the Brussels École de Recherche Graphique (ERG). The narrative would have it that he had only found his road by way of invitations, through a propensity for jokes rather than defiance. Supposedly ignorant of contemporary artistic tendencies, he had chosen the pictorial medium, so it was rumoured through an odd set of circumstances. Though the story of that accidental metamorphosis does contain a substantial element of truth, it deserves to be reconsidered in the light of a number of facts recorded in the artist’s career through the 1970’s, the 1960’s, and even before. By doing this we do not wish to question the claims of this founding moment. At bottom it belongs to the artist’s subjective development, hence to the objective constitution of his œuvre. On the other hand it seems necessary to establish the complexity and the density of this first entrance. In other words, we should be alert to the multiple and creative theatrical rehearsals which produced favourable conditions for the endorsed ‘première’. When the six events from 1980-1981 brought to view below are examined properly, one actually observes with jubilation not so much the wavering of the inexperienced actor wondering whether actually to come on stage, as his changes of costume, his stuttering, his voice exercises. We should therefore consider the date of 1981 not as that of an abrupt conversion or as that of a remote and suddenly revealed calling, but rather as a curtain-raiser —the moment when a scene was consciously opened to the public and to its judgment, whereas its purpose had until then been uncertain (long invested, often abandoned, sometimes reconverted).

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.

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.

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.

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.

A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.

On 28 August 1815, Goethe received as a birthday gift from Sulpiz Boisserée, the pioneering collector of medieval art, an engraving after a work by Jan van Eyck (Fig. 1). Boisserée, reverent, concealed a few of his own verses under the print, framing the sheets of paper with sprigs of oak, laurel, and clover. In his diary, Boisserée recorded the great man’s reaction to the poetry but not to the print, unfortunately. The engraving replicates with near-perfect fidelity every dash, dot, and stroke of Van Eyck’s work, the St. Barbara, now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp (Fig. 2). Although framed and signed, the picture is not in fact an oil painting but a kind of drawing on prepared panel. It measures 41 by 28 centimeters with its frame, the print very nearly the same. The engraved facsimile is so success- ful that on quick inspection one might easily mistake it for a pen drawing, as some contemporaries of Goethe apparently did. Wurzbach reported that the print was long exhibited in Bruges as a drawing.

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.

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.