14th and 15th Centuries

Borman. A Family of Northern Renaissance Sculptors

By Marjan Debaene, ed.

[Exh. Cat. M – Museum, Leuven, September 20, 2019 – January 26, 2020.] London / Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2019. 312 pp, 560 color illus. ISBN 978-1-912554-41-6.

Review published June 2020

This edited volume was produced to accompany the much anticipated exhibition Borman and Sons: The Best Sculptors, held at M-Museum Leuven from September 20th, 2019 to January 26th, 2020. Like the [...] Read More

Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550

By Anne L. Williams

(Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 244 pp, 10 col. plates, 54 b&w illus. ISBN 978-94-6298-374-8 (hardback), 978-90-4853-411-1 (e-book).

Review published June 2020

As Anne Williams astutely identifies, depictions of Saint Joseph in works of art of the fourteenth to sixteenth century are rife with paradox, a seemingly conflicting combination of ridicule and [...] Read More

Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting

By Ingrid Falque

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 38. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xxiv, 336 pp, 111 color illus. ISBN: 978-90-04-36975-7 (hardback); 978-90-04-39760-6 (e-book).

Review published April 2020

Lucidly written and clearly organized, Ingrid Falque’s study focuses on the portraits integrated into religious pictures from the Low Countries between circa 1400 and 1550. The corpus of works [...] Read More

The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (1400-1550)

By Jelle De Rock

Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800), 44. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2019. 356 pp, 95 b&w illus., 17 col. pls., 14 tables. ISBN 978-2-503-57982-5.

Review published March 2020

As a religious artifact, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432) radiates the intangible power of Christ’s sacrifice and God’s forgiveness. As a material work of art, Jan van Eyck’s polyptych pulls the narrative [...] Read More

Moving with the Magdalen: Late Medieval Art and Devotion in the Alps

By Joanne W. Anderson

New York – London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. xvi, 248 pp, 44 b&w illus., 40 color illus. ISBN 978-1-5013-3468-9 (hardback); 978-1-5013-3470-2 (ePDF); 978-1-5013-3469-6 (eBook).

Review published February 2020

Joanne Anderson expands our knowledge of Mary Magdalen imagery by analyzing little known Alpine fresco cycles and altarpieces of the saint produced between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth [...] Read More

Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts

By Kathryn M. Rudy

Library of the Written Word, The Manuscript World, Volume 55. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xxii, 308 pp, 152 color illus. ISBN 978-90-04-32695-8 (hardback); 978-90-04-32696-5 (e-book).

Review published October 2019

Kathryn Rudy has added a new and beautifully illustrated study to her already extensive bibliography on readers’ interactions with early Netherlandish manuscripts. It is a monumental undertaking. She [...] Read More

The Renaissance Nude

By Thomas Kren with Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell, eds.

Cat. exh. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 30, 2018 – January 27, 2019; Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 2 – June 2, 2019. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. xiii, 417 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-1-6060-6584-6.

Review published September 2019

This handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated catalogue considers the development of the naturalistic nude in various media produced in northern and southern Europe, c. 1400-1530. It [...] Read More

A Knight for the Ages: Jacques de Lalaing and the Art of Chivalry

By Elizabeth Morrison, ed.

Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2018. xi, 180 pp, 18 pls, 60 figs. ISBN 978-1-606-06575-4.

Review published September 2019

Jacques de Lalaing, the bon chevalier, a renowned jouster and military commander in the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, died in 1453, aged only thirty-two, at the siege of Poeke during [...] Read More

Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety, and a Reunited Altarpiece

By John Marciari, ed.

Exh. Cat. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, September 2, 2016 – January 8, 2017. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016. 112 pp, 55 illus. in color. ISBN 978-1-911300-08-3.

Review published September 2019

New York is a city fortunate enough to contain a significant group of paintings by Hans Memling. From portraiture (the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tommaso di Folco Portinari and Maria Portinari are [...] Read More

Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art

By Andrea Pearson

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 296; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 37. Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2019. xxii, 356 pp, 148 illus., mostly color. ISBN 978-90-04-39295-3 (hardback); 978-90-04-39310—3 (e-book).

Review published August 2019

Pearson sets out to expand and recalibrate the ways that art historians conceptualize early modern garden imagery. Specifically, she challenges an overemphasis on interiority that she sees in modern [...] Read More

Colard Mansion. Incunabula, Prints and Manuscripts in Medieval Bruges

By Evelien Hauwaerts, Evelien de Wilde and Ludo Vandamme, eds.

[Exh. cat. Groeningemuseum, Bruges, March 1 – June 3, 2018.] Ghent: Snoeck, 2018. 256 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-94-6161-439-1.

Review published February 2019

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition Haute Lecture by Colard Mansion: Innovating Text and Image in Medieval Bruges, co-organized by Musea Brugge and Openbare Bibliotheek Brugge. Devoting an [...] Read More

Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art

By Carlee A. Bradbury and Michelle Moseley-Christian, eds.

Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xvii, 244 pp, 26 b&w illus. ISBN 978-3-319-65049-4.

Review published August 2018

In a new blog on intersectionality posted by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, literature historian Christina Luckyj confronted tensions that she identified between a contemporary, [...] Read More

Thresholds and Boundaries. Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1530) (Visual Culture in Early Modernity)

By Lynn F. Jacobs

London – New York: Routledge, 2018. xiii, 231 pp. 12 col. plates, b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-315-10799-8.

Review published July 2018

As points of transition, thresholds offer new possibilities, but they also mark boundaries, divisions of time and space. Employing the anthropological theories of Arnold Gennep and Victor Turner, who [...] Read More

Utopia’s Doom: The Graal as Paradise of Lust, the Sect of the Free Spirit and Jheronimus Bosch’s So-Called Garden of Delights (Art & Religion, 8)

By Paul Vandenbroeck

Leuven: Peeters, 2017. 343 pp, 6 b&w illus, 94 color illus. ISBN 978-90-429-3468-9.

Review published July 2018

Paul Vandenbroeck has been publishing on Bosch since 1981, with his key publication on the Garden of Earthly Delights appearing in a magisterial, two-part article published in Dutch in the 1989 and [...] Read More

In neuem Glanz. Das Schächer-Fragment des Meisters von Flémalle im Kontext / With New Splendour. The Crucified Thief by the Master of Flémalle in Context

By Jochen Sander, editor

[Cat. exh. Liebieghaus, Frankfurt/M, Nov. 15, 2017 – February 18, 2018.] Regensburg: Schnell + Steiner, 2017. 176 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-3-7954-3251-5.

Review published January 2018

This book is the catalogue for a 2017-2018 exhibition at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt. The exhibition (which, sadly, I have not seen) is a small one, highlighting a single painting, [...] Read More