In the course of his long and distinguished career, Larry Silver has published twelve books on Northern Renaissance art. His extraordinary productivity in this field is complemented by additional volumes on seventeenth-century European art, Jewish art, and Europe’s encounters with non-Western worlds. The present book, his latest, is one of his most wide-ranging and comprehensive. In it, he presents a personal view of the trends and developments that most essentially defined the art of the long sixteenth century in northern Europe (mainly the Low Countries and Germany). This century, however, is not strictly delimited by the 1500s. Interwoven throughout Silver’s account are discussions of certain late fifteenth-century artists (like early Dürer) whose work already reveals the attitudes of the following century, and certain seventeenth-century artists (like Jacques Callot) whose work perpetuates those views.

The book’s multiple chapters include four case studies of individual artists whose work epitomizes the period – Holbein, Dürer, Bosch, and Bruegel – , but the heart of the book is its six chapters of iconographic studies of newly emerged art themes that dominated the century. Each of these core chapters identifies and defines an essential trend or trends in the artistic and ideological DNA of the century, a kind of genomic mapping of the new species. The themes addressed in these chapters are, respectively: the conflicting religious creeds unleashed by the Reformation (Chap. 3); the world of demons, witchcraft, and death (4); wars and warfare, both political and religious (5); anxious responses to the threat of the Ottoman Turk (6); European enlargement through contacts with the Americas and India (7); and fools and human folly (8). Most of these developments implicate the “darker vision” of the Renaissance, which Silver adduces in his Prologue, citing Robert Kinsman’s 1974 book, The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason (p. 3, n. 6). As a whole, the sixteenth century was a period largely defined by conflict, strife, fragmentation, existential fear, and anxiety. Here,   Silver aptly invokes John Donne’s “all coherence gone” (1611) – twice. He introduces it in his Acknowledgments as part of  “A Personal Note,” and again in the epigraph to Chapter One, “The Waning of the Renaissance,” in which he puts forward Holbein’s French Ambassadors (fig. 1.4) as his first case study.

In Holbein’s familiar yet extraordinary double portrait, the painted splendor of so many instruments and allusions to scientific and other forms of knowledge appears, at first glance, to reflect the Renaissance world of order and rationality. But this is contravened, as has been well established, by details which reveal how broken this knowledge has become (literally so in the case of one of the lute’s strings). To this established narrative Silver brings fresh perspectives, particularly in his analysis of the picture’s famous anamorphic skull. He guides our attention from what the skull signifies to what is required to perceive it in its distorted state. This entails a shift from objective to subjective vision – replacing the old world of order with the modern conditions of ambiguity, contradiction, and contingency. Silver writes: “What this distorted skull image … embodies is nothing less than a fully contingent subjectivity…[O]ne can only resolve…[this] mysterious shape by introducing doubt concerning the otherwise seemingly straightforward verisimilitude … of all other details in the painting. That cryptic shape … casts doubt onto the reliability of perception itself…” (p. 14).

The chapters that follow employ a similar methodology, reinvigorating familiar artworks through the lens of Silver’s insights and perceptive analyses. Thus, he introduces the chapter on European existential fears about the rise of the Ottoman Turk (Chap. 6) by reminding American readers – at least those of us of a certain age – what the twentieth-century Cold War with the Soviet Union felt like in its comparable levels of anxiety and uncertainty. In the preceding chapter on sixteenth-century wars, Silver reminds us that artists like Bruegel, Gillis Mostaert, Frans Hogenberg, and David Vinckboons had depicted soldiers attacking civilians as part of the grim reality of the period’s religious wars during the Dutch Revolt. An early example, couched in the biblical narrative, is Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents of c. 1566-67 (fig. 5.12). The story is enacted by soldiers in contemporary red coats ravaging a snowy, peasant village, armed with swords, halberds, and pikes, weapons of the time. So grim are its violent details, Silver notes, that a later owner had the dead children painted out and replaced by slaughtered barnyard animals and wrapped bundles. Historians call these sixteenth-century military attacks upon peasants Boerenverdriet, or peasants’ distress. Recent scholars have claimed these works as the earliest instances of European anti-war art (n. 44, p. 331). In drawing renewed attention to this iconography and its significance, Silver reminds those of us who have spent a career teaching undergraduate art history that these images preceded by centuries Goya’s famous May 3, 1808 (Madrid, Prado), which almost inevitably is presented as an inauguration of the instruments of war turned against innocent civilians – an ongoing nightmare that today has become a global plague.

Throughout the book, Silver’s skill in summarizing the most salient findings of scholarship and synthesizing them into clear prose is evident. His penetrating insights and gestalt-like ability to bring-into-relation a broad range of contemporary attitudes and historical developments will undoubtedly reward scholars already familiar with some or many of his topics. Beyond that, the clarity of his writing, his ability to essentialize, and his vivid choices of artistic examples are certain to make his discussions accessible to the interested public and students alike.

Let me close with a few thoughts about the (intentionally) unexplained “Dis-illusion” of the book’s title. Inserting a hyphen turns “disillusion” – something that is not as good as thought, a theme of the book – into the absence or reversal of visual illusion. Even when the latter seems contradicted by the work’s stylistics, as in Holbein’s Ambassadors, where the illusionism is thrillingly high, this very illusion is inverted by the iconographic subtext and the meanings of the anamorphosis. I suspect, too, that Silver also wants us to think of “Dis-illusion” as a homophone for dissolution, as in Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries – a massive instance of the century’s proclivity to tear assunder.

This is a thoughtful and important book, the distillation of a lifetime of study and reflection. It forms something of a diptych with Silver’s earlier Peasant Scenes and Landscapes (2006, University of Pennsylvania Press), which had carefully catalogued the emergence of equally novel but different, and mostly more positive artistic genres in sixteenth-century Antwerp art, generated by local market forces. In the end, however, these two essential studies by the author do not actually make a diptych of equal parts, since the reach of Art and Dis-illusion is broader than its predecessor, and its rewards deeper.

Dan Ewing
Barry University