16th Century

Cut in Alabaster. A Material of Sculpture and its European Traditions 1330-1530

By Kim W. Woods

Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. 418 pp, 170 color illus., 2 b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-909400-26-9.

Review published May 2019

Kim Woods’s book on alabaster sculpture of the Late Medieval and early modern periods is an important, welcome addition to recent writings on sculpture. Remarkably comprehensive, this is a [...] Read More

Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance

By Suzanne Kathleen Karr Schmidt

(Brill's Studies in Intellectual History). Leiden: Brill, 2017, xxvii, 439 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35413-5.

Review published March 2019

When I first received this book, it fell open at pages 18 and 19, where identical illustrations had been reproduced on each page. I must confess that my first reaction (typical of an academic author [...] Read More

Pieter Bruegel. The Complete Works.

By Jürgen Müller and Thomas Schauerte

Cologne: Taschen, 2018. 492 pp. ISBN 978-3-8365-5689-7

Review published January 2019

The year 2019 has already become the Year of Bruegel, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the artist's death (ca. 1525-1569). The once-in-a lifetime show in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum [...] Read More

Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) (Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History, 14)

By Tine Luk Meganck

Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2017. Xxii, 324 pp, 156 col. illus. ISBN: 978-90-04-34248-4.

Review published October 2018

Erudite Eyes considers a range of objects – prints, maps, drawings, poems and paintings – produced by a network of artists, merchants, and humanists around geographer Abraham Ortelius. Foregrounding [...] Read More

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century (Studies in European Urban History, 41)

By Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, eds.

Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 388 pp, 110 b&w illus., 3 tables. ISBN 978-2-503-57582-7.

Review published September 2018

Part of a series about urban history and culture (Bruaene of Ghent University is one of the series’ editors), this new anthology (based on a 2012 conference) offers nineteen impressive articles on a [...] Read More

Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel: Art and Science around 1600

By Thea Vignau-Wilberg

Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017. 544 pp, 515 illus. ISBN 978-3-7757-4173-6

Review published July 2018

No scholar has devoted more of her career to the works of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) than Thea Vignau-Wilberg. Nearly a half a century ago, she published her dissertation on the manuscripts that [...] Read More

Michel Sittow. Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe. [Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, January 28 – May 13, 2018.]

By John Oliver Hand and Greta Koppel, eds.

Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press. 128 pp, 90 illus. ISBN 978-0-300-23286-8.

Review published July 2018

This recent Washington exhibition, jointly organized with the Art Museum of Estonia and its curator Greta Koppel, offers a fitting moment to pay tribute to John Hand, its long-time curator (since [...] Read More

Forgotten Masters. Pieter Pourbus and Bruges Painting from 1525 to 1625. [Exh. cat. Groeningemuseum, Bruges, October 13, 2017 – January 21, 2018.]

By Anne van Oosterwijk, ed.

Ghent: Snoeck, 2017. 352 pp. ISBN 978-94-6161-415-5.

Review published July 2018

Twenty years ago, in 1998, Maximiliaan Martens, Paul Huvenne and Valentin Vermeersch organized a seminal exhibition at the Memlingmuseum in Bruges, “From Hans Memling to Pieter Pourbus” (the catalogue [...] Read More

Frans Floris (1519/20-1570): Imagining a Northern Renaissance (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 267/19)

By Edward Wouk

Leiden: Brill, 2018. 808 pp, 391 illus. ISBN 978-90-04-30725-4.

Review published July 2018

Apparently they do make artist monographs the way they used to do. This massive tome, dedicated to one of the great yet neglected Netherlandish artists of the sixteenth century, fills a massive [...] Read More

Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Bollingen Series XXXV: 57)

By Joseph Leo Koerner

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. 414 pp. 324 illus. ISBN 978-0-69117-228-6.

Review published June 2018

Deftly argued and fluently written, Koerner’s enthralling book is a revised and amplified version of the A. W. Mellon Lectures he delivered at The National Gallery of Art in 2007. He juxtaposes Bosch [...] Read More

Netherlandish Sculpture of the 16th Century (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 67)

By Ethan Matt Kavaler, Frits Scholten, and Joanna Woodall, eds.

Leiden: Brill, 2017. 404 pp, 236 colored illus. ISBN 978-90-04-36073-0.

Review published June 2018

Volume 67 of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, is titled Netherlandish Sculpture of the 16th Century and edited by Ethan Matt Kavaler, Frits Scholten, and Joanna Woodall. As Kavaler articulates [...] Read More

Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: Case Studies from Van Eyck through Gossart (Me Fecit)

By Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed.

Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 136 pp, 112 color illus. ISBN 978-2-503-56668-9.

Review published March 2018

Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: Case Studies from Van Eyck through Gossart, showcases cutting-edge developments in the longstanding and fruitful nexus between technical art history [...] Read More

Studies in Western Tapestry

By Iain Buchanan and Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer

Iain Buchanan, Habsburg Tapestries (Studies in Western Tapestry, vol. 4). Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 373 pp, color and b&w illus. ISBN 978-2-503-51670-7.

Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer, The Brussels Tristan Tapestries: Myth Regenerated in Wool, Silk & Precious Threads (Studies in Western Tapestry, vol. 6). Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 147 pp, color and b&w illus. ISBN 978-2-503-45982-8.

Review published January 2018

These entries in the Studies in Western Tapestry series testify to the variety of approaches to their subject. Iain Buchanan is an art historian with numerous tapestry publications, while Jacqueline [...] Read More

Niklaus Manuel. Catalogue raisonné

By Michael Egli and Hans Christoph von Tavel, with essays by Petra Barton Sigrist

Zurich, Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft and Bern, Burgerbibliothek. Basel: Verlag Schwabe, 2017. 2 vols., 916 pp. ISBN 978-3796536304.

Review published December 2017

While this year marks a half-millennium of the Reformation, that story is limited by its German bias, to the neglect of the movement in Switzerland, which climaxed in Bern and Basel in 1529. One of [...] Read More

Jan de Beer. Gothic Renewal in Renaissance Antwerp (Me fecit)

By Dan Ewing

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016. vi, 385 pp, 62 b&w, 203 color illus. ISBN 978-2-503-55531-7.

Review published October 2017

Dan Ewing has written an impressive and essential book about one of the most important but least understood painters of Antwerp. In his famous description of the city, the Italian merchant and [...] Read More