The European fascination with the various manifestations of witches, demons and evil temptations seems endless; it generated a flourishing production of imagery that was supported by literary culture. [...] Read More
17th-Century Dutch Republic
Vermeer and the Art of Love (Northern Lights)
When one looks deeply at a Vermeer, one often borrows – however contingently – a lover’s rapt gaze. As Edward Snow observed, the painter’s “most profoundly dialectical”[1] tendencies hold the viewer’s [...] Read More
Godefridus Schalcken: A Late 17th-Century Dutch Painter in Pursuit of Fame and Fortune (Northern Lights)
Wayne Franits’s second monograph on Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706) reads as an ardent love letter to the late seventeenth-century Dutch artist. A meticulous analysis of a selection of paintings from [...] Read More
Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature
This multi-author volume edited by Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki is a welcome addition to the environmental humanities. As its title suggests, the book draws our attention to differences [...] Read More
Karel van Mander and his Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting. First English Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 62)
As an experienced and distinguished scholar who has spent a substantial part of his career studying Karel van Mander, Walter Melion[1] certainly knew what he was getting into when he took up the [...] Read More
Frans Hals. The Male Portrait
This book is the catalogue of a small exhibition held at the Wallace Collection in London, centered on the dashing portrait of a young man signed and dated by Hals in 1624 and nicknamed by [...] Read More