The tag “Dutch Golden Age” evokes a luminous glow, as a sunset over vistas with ruins or harbors; it calls to mind lavish spreads of food in costly vessels, of well-dressed men gathered to celebrate [...] Read More
Book Reviews
Mythological Passions: Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velázquez
It must have been one of the most satisfying and challenging tasks with which a museum curator can be faced. To be presented with six of the finest pictures ever executed, namely Titian’s poesie [...] Read More
Living Pictures. Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century
In this ambitious book, Noa Turel argues for a new understanding of the original aims and perception of early Netherlandish painting. Rather than the phenomenal optical realism usually regarded as the [...] Read More
Mary of Hungary, Renaissance Patron and Collector. Gender, Art and Culture
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
Tree of Jesse Iconography in Northern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
In this book, Susan Green addresses the polyvalent and dynamic character of iconography, by focusing on how the depictions of the Tree of Jesse variously functioned in the late Middle Ages. According [...] Read More
Willem van den Blocke: A Sculptor from the Low Countries in the Baltic Region
This first volume in the new Brepols Early Modern Cultural Studies series centers on the extraterritorial career of an individual Netherlandish artist, Willem van den Blocke, in order to offer larger [...] Read More
Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700
The early modern Netherlands were, statistically speaking, a land of women: estimates suggest that during the seventeenth century women outnumbered men four to three. These women were not only [...] Read More
Peter Paul Rubens und der Barock im Norden
The occasion for this exhibition, organized under the direction of Christoph Stiegemann, the actual director of the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum in the Westphalian city of Paderborn, was the fact [...] Read More
Renaissance Metapainting
The very cover of this impressive new anthology sends out a contradiction: its images feature details of the Washington Jan van Eyck Annunciation shutter, yet its editors are noted specialists in [...] Read More
The Golden Age of Dutch Marine Painting: The Inder Rieden Collection
This lavishly produced four-volume boxed set accompanied an exhibition in 2019 at the Bredius Museum in The Hague devoted to the collection of Dutch marine paintings assembled by the London collector [...] Read More
Rubens. Genre Scenes (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XVII)
This latest volume in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard is dedicated to Rubens’s genre pictures. It was only in the late eighteenth century that today’s generic term genre gradually was becoming [...] Read More
The Library of the Dukes of Burgundy
In September of 2020, the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels opened a state-of-the-art museum to great fanfare. Its purpose is to offer the public the opportunity to enjoy a rotating exhibit of [...] Read More
Theodoor van Loon
Despite the high esteem in which he was held by contemporaries in Italy and the Netherlands, the Brussels painter Theodoor van Loon (1581/82–1649) had until recently been largely ignored by modern [...] Read More
Van Eyck
Many readers will have shared my disappointment at having missed the exhibition Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, which opened at Ghent’s Museum voor Schone Kunsten on February 1st, 2020, and was [...] Read More
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