Book Reviews

‘Truly Bright and Memorable’: Jan de Beer’s Renaissance Altarpieces

By Dan Ewing, Peter van den Brink, and Robert Wenley

Exh. cat. Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham University, October 25, 2019 – January 19, 2020. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019. 95 pp, 62 color illus. ISBN 978-1-911300-72-4.

Review published April 2020

This slim volume is a catalogue of an “in focus” exhibition, centered around Jan de Beer’s double-sided panel of Joseph and the Suitors and The Nativity in The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, [...] Read More

Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting

By Ingrid Falque

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 38. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xxiv, 336 pp, 111 color illus. ISBN: 978-90-04-36975-7 (hardback); 978-90-04-39760-6 (e-book).

Review published April 2020

Lucidly written and clearly organized, Ingrid Falque’s study focuses on the portraits integrated into religious pictures from the Low Countries between circa 1400 and 1550. The corpus of works [...] Read More

Renaissance Illuminators in Paris: Artists & Artisans 1500-1715

By Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse

London: Harvey Miller Publishers. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2019. 280 pp, 65 color illus. ISBN: 978-1-912554-28-7.

Review published April 2020

As Richard and Mary Rouse explain in their acknowledgments, “the impetus for this book came from Myra Orth,” whose lifework was the study of illuminated manuscripts of the Renaissance period in [...] Read More

Connoisseurship and the Knowledge of Art, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 69, 2019

By H. Perry Chapman and Thijs Weststijn, eds.

Leiden: Brill, 2019. 372 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-40916-3.

Review published March 2020

Half a century ago, when I was a graduate student, art scholarship largely boiled down to connoisseurship; even iconography was considered over-interpretive (and the case can still be made that within [...] Read More

The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510-1610

By Karl A.E. Enenkel

Brill’s Studies in Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 295-36. Boston – Leiden: Brill, 2018. 460 pp, xxxv, 156 illus. ISBN 978-90-04-38725-6.

Review published March 2020

With its focus on emblems, the present study directly addresses topics of interest to historians of Netherlandish art. This contribution is due to the significant production of emblem books by Dutch [...] Read More

The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (1400-1550)

By Jelle De Rock

Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800), 44. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2019. 356 pp, 95 b&w illus., 17 col. pls., 14 tables. ISBN 978-2-503-57982-5.

Review published March 2020

As a religious artifact, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432) radiates the intangible power of Christ’s sacrifice and God’s forgiveness. As a material work of art, Jan van Eyck’s polyptych pulls the narrative [...] Read More

Moving with the Magdalen: Late Medieval Art and Devotion in the Alps

By Joanne W. Anderson

New York – London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. xvi, 248 pp, 44 b&w illus., 40 color illus. ISBN 978-1-5013-3468-9 (hardback); 978-1-5013-3470-2 (ePDF); 978-1-5013-3469-6 (eBook).

Review published February 2020

Joanne Anderson expands our knowledge of Mary Magdalen imagery by analyzing little known Alpine fresco cycles and altarpieces of the saint produced between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth [...] Read More

Pieter de Hooch in Delft. From the Shadow of Vermeer

By Anita Jansen

Exh. cat. Museum Prinsenhof, Delft, October 11, 2019 – February 16, 2020. Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2020. 224 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-94-6258327-6.

Review published January 2020

Somewhat surprisingly, the present exhibition is the first ever devoted to Pieter de Hooch in The Netherlands. There have been exhibitions that featured his work in numbers among other Delft Masters, [...] Read More

The Value of Taste: Auction Prices and the Evolution of Taste in Dutch and Flemish Golden Age Painting 1642-2011

By Peter Carpreau

London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017. 295 pp, 83 b&w tables. ISBN 978-1-909400-48-1.

Review published December 2019

While a unique artwork cannot be easily reduced to objective data, Peter Carpreau effectively argues that the price paid for a work at auction is a data point that “reflect(s) taste at a certain time [...] Read More

Jacob Jordaens y España

By Matías Díaz Padrón

Madrid: Instituto Moll. Center for Research in Flemish Painting, 2018. 2 vols. ISBN 978-84-948585-0-5. (Now available in English translation, Brepols Publishers, ISBN 978-84-948585-3-6).

Review published December 2019

This is a welcome addition to the body of literature on Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), an artist still insufficiently scrutinized, notwithstanding a flurry of publications during the present decade. [...] Read More

Father and Son Weenix: Jan Baptist Weenix. The Paintings: A Story of Success and Bankruptcy in Seventeenth-Century Holland & Jan Weenix. The Paintings: Master of the Dutch Hunting Still Life

By Anke A. Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven

Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2018. 356 pp and 492 pp, fully illustrated in color. [The two volumes are packaged and sold together under the title Father and Son Weenix.] ISBN: 978-9462621596.

Review published November 2019

An essential reference source, the catalogue raisonné is foundational for scholarship and thinking in art history. Thus Anke Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven’s publication of large volumes on two important [...] Read More

Van Dyck’s Hosts in Genoa: Lucas and Cornelis de Wael’s Lives, Business Activities and Works

By Alison Stoesser

Pictura Nova, Studies in 16th- and 17th-century Flemish Painting and Drawing XIX. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018. 2 vols., 1028 pp, 683 b&w illus., 45 colour illus. ISBN: 978-2-503-53175-5 (set), ISBN 978-2-503-56906-2 (Volume 1), ISBN 978-2-503-56907-9 (Volume 2).

Review published November 2019

In a recent discussion of Flemish art dealers and agents who were active in seventeenth-century Italy, Isabella Cecchini claimed that scholars have paid far more attention to the presence of these [...] Read More

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Religious Art for the Urban Community

By Barbara A. Kaminska

Leiden: Brill, 2019. 241 pp. 37 illus. ISBN 978-90-04-40039-9.

Review published November 2019

Peasant subjects have always received the focus in Pieter Bruegel studies, at the expense of all but a few of his religious subjects. Despite the recent appearance of another volume from Brill, Pieter [...] Read More

Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins

By Arthur J. DiFuria

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 287; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, volume 31. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2019. 523 pp. 89 color ills. ISBN 978-90-04-38046-2

Review published November 2019

A view of the Septizonium by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) captures why the artist’s drawings of Roman ruins count among the most evocative and enigmatic images ever made of the oft-depicted [...] Read More

Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts

By Kathryn M. Rudy

Library of the Written Word, The Manuscript World, Volume 55. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xxii, 308 pp, 152 color illus. ISBN 978-90-04-32695-8 (hardback); 978-90-04-32696-5 (e-book).

Review published October 2019

Kathryn Rudy has added a new and beautifully illustrated study to her already extensive bibliography on readers’ interactions with early Netherlandish manuscripts. It is a monumental undertaking. She [...] Read More