When a venerated medievalist who has contributed great insights into the cultural practices of late medieval elites pens a book that distills a life’s work, it is best to pay attention. This is the [...] Read More
Book Reviews
Maarten van Heemskerck. Römische Studien zwischen Sachlichkeit und Imagination
Tatjana Bartsch’s book on Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574, in Rome 1532–c. 1537) delivers the most thorough analysis to date of the artist’s extant corpus of Roman drawings. As renowned as is [...] Read More
Anthony van Dyck & the Art of Portraiture
In general, Anthony van Dyck has been better served by catalogues than monographs. Any study of the artist will have as its point of departure the monumental 2004 catalogue raisonné by Susan Barnes, [...] Read More
Flesh, Gold and Wood: The Saint-Denis Altarpiece in Liège and the Question of Partial Paint Practices in the Sixteenth Century
This book contains twenty articles (about half in English and half in French, all with English abstracts) from a 2015 international symposium held at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage [...] Read More
Vie de Lambert Lombard (1565)
Dominicus Lampsonius has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the historiography of European art. He is perhaps best known for his role as the author of Latin inscriptions on the Effigies [...] Read More
Pieter Bruegel, Mayken Verhulst en Mechelen. Het begin van een wonderlijke Schildersdynastie
This useful yet curious volume is actually a reprint, updated with new archival findings of a 2005 volume (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus Museum) with a similar title, Mayken Verhulst. De turkse Manieren [...] Read More
Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community
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
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