16th Century

Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print

By Joris van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock, eds.

[Cat. exh. Museum M, Leuven, March 14 – June 9, 2013; Institut Néerlandais, Paris, September 18 – December 15, 2013.] Brussels: Mercatorfonds; New Haven: Yale University Press 2013. 416 pp, 320 illus. ISBN Mercatorfonds: 978-90-6153-953-7; Yale: 978-0-300-19184-4

Review published April 2014

During the third quarter of the sixteenth century, Antwerp’s Hieronymus Cock (1518 - 1570) was the most important publisher of printed imagery north of the Alps, if not in all Europe. Fittingly, he [...] Read More

The Flemish Primitives VI: The Bernard van Orley Group. Catalogue of Early Netherlandish Painting in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

By Alexandre Galand

Brussels: Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium; Turnhout: Brepols Publishers 2013. 446 pp, 370 illus., most in color. ISBN 978-2-503-54575-2

Review published April 2014

At long last, the Flemish painters whose gaze turned towards Renaissance Italy are receiving their scholarly (and public) due. Sparking this “Northern Ren” turn, Maryan Ainsworth’s seminal Jan Gossart [...] Read More

Pieter Bruegel and the Culture of the Early Modern Dinner Party (Visual Culture in Early Modernity)

By Claudia Goldstein

Burlington, Vermont and Farnham: Ashgate 2013. 188 pp, 69 b&w illus. ISBN 978-0-7546-6732-2

Review published April 2014

Goldstein’s book is the third volume on Bruegel published by Ashgate in as many years (Margaret Sullivan’s 2010 Bruegel and the Creative Process, 1559-1563, reviewed [...] Read More

Parody and Festivity in Early Modern Art. Essays on Comedy as Social Vision

By David R. Smith, ed.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2012. 220 pp, 50 b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-4094-3030-8

Review published April 2014

Comedy and laughter in the Early Modern period have been little addressed by scholarship, though Stephen Greenblatt and others have attended to laughter and Shakespeare (2004). Walter Gibson’s Pieter [...] Read More

Understanding Art in Antwerp. Classicising the Popular, Popularising the Classic (1540-1580). (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 45)

By Bart Ramakers, ed.

Leuven: Peeters 2011, 342 pp, 67 b&w pls. ISBN 978-90-429-2613-4

Review published April 2014

This volume addresses the interchange between what is often described as the native or vernacular tradition in Antwerp and the foreign or classical one as it was imported into that city. This [...] Read More

Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power: The Triumphal Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp (Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 11)

By Stijn Bussels

Amsterdam: Rodopi 2012. 258 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-3471-6

Review published April 2014

Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power by Stijn Bussels is certainly a valuable, praiseworthy contribution to the growing literature on Netherlandish festivals. It offers a thorough monographic study of the [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

16th Century