Feminist art history has recovered early modern women patrons of great importance, most notably in the ground-breaking exhibition, Women of Distinction (Mechelen, 2005; organized by Dagmar [...] Read More
16th Century
Antwerp in the Renaissance
Students of visual culture in the cities of the Netherlands have learned to attend to a variety of imagery that formerly were omitted from consideration as "art," especially printed images that also [...] Read More
Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image
A frustrated attempt to describe an iceberg opens Into the White, Christopher P. Heuer’s fascinating book on the Arctic as seen and imagined during the European Renaissance. In a pamphlet produced [...] Read More
‘Truly Bright and Memorable’: Jan de Beer’s Renaissance Altarpieces
This slim volume is a catalogue of an “in focus” exhibition, centered around Jan de Beer’s double-sided panel of Joseph and the Suitors and The Nativity in The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, [...] Read More
Renaissance Illuminators in Paris: Artists & Artisans 1500-1715
As Richard and Mary Rouse explain in their acknowledgments, “the impetus for this book came from Myra Orth,” whose lifework was the study of illuminated manuscripts of the Renaissance period in [...] Read More
The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510-1610
With its focus on emblems, the present study directly addresses topics of interest to historians of Netherlandish art. This contribution is due to the significant production of emblem books by Dutch [...] Read More
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Religious Art for the Urban Community
Peasant subjects have always received the focus in Pieter Bruegel studies, at the expense of all but a few of his religious subjects. Despite the recent appearance of another volume from Brill, Pieter [...] Read More
Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins
A view of the Septizonium by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) captures why the artist’s drawings of Roman ruins count among the most evocative and enigmatic images ever made of the oft-depicted [...] Read More
Women. The Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg
Women, the Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg translates into English the German catalogue to an exhibition at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck in 2018. The catalogue explores the [...] Read More
Niederländische Maler in Italien: Künstlerreisen und Kunstrezeption im 16. Jahrhundert
Maria Harnack offers a broad-view examination of sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists in Italy. She begins Chapter One’s first section, travel to the Eternal City, by citing a few key contributors [...] Read More
Prints in Translation, 1450-1750. Image, Materiality, Space
Prints in Translation, 1450-1750, is a wide-ranging volume that aims to mark a fundamental shift in print scholarship. Edited by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk, the volume grew out of a [...] Read More
A Suspect Paradise: Studies on the Left Panel and Detail Symbolism of Hieronymus Bosch’s So-Called “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
The 2017–2018 Annual of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp is completely devoted to Paul Vandenbroeck’s writings on Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The Annual is divided into two parts; the [...] Read More
Cut in Alabaster. A Material of Sculpture and its European Traditions 1330-1530
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
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.
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