Book Reviews

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

The Renaissance Nude

By Thomas Kren with Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell, eds.

Cat. exh. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 30, 2018 – January 27, 2019; Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 2 – June 2, 2019. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. xiii, 417 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-1-6060-6584-6.

Review published September 2019

This handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated catalogue considers the development of the naturalistic nude in various media produced in northern and southern Europe, c. 1400-1530. It [...] Read More

A Knight for the Ages: Jacques de Lalaing and the Art of Chivalry

By Elizabeth Morrison, ed.

Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2018. xi, 180 pp, 18 pls, 60 figs. ISBN 978-1-606-06575-4.

Review published September 2019

Jacques de Lalaing, the bon chevalier, a renowned jouster and military commander in the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, died in 1453, aged only thirty-two, at the siege of Poeke during [...] Read More

Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety, and a Reunited Altarpiece

By John Marciari, ed.

Exh. Cat. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, September 2, 2016 – January 8, 2017. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016. 112 pp, 55 illus. in color. ISBN 978-1-911300-08-3.

Review published September 2019

New York is a city fortunate enough to contain a significant group of paintings by Hans Memling. From portraiture (the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tommaso di Folco Portinari and Maria Portinari are [...] Read More

Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art

By Andrea Pearson

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 296; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 37. Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2019. xxii, 356 pp, 148 illus., mostly color. ISBN 978-90-04-39295-3 (hardback); 978-90-04-39310—3 (e-book).

Review published August 2019

Pearson sets out to expand and recalibrate the ways that art historians conceptualize early modern garden imagery. Specifically, she challenges an overemphasis on interiority that she sees in modern [...] Read More

Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer: Parallel Visions / Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer: Miradas afines

By Alejandro Vergara, ed.

Exh. cat. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, June 24 – September 29, 2019. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2019. 252 pp, illustrated in color. ISBN 978-96-8167-048-3.

Review published August 2019

The title of the exhibition might suggest a gathering of crowd-pleasing Old Masters to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Prado. Instead, the curator Alejandro Vergara tackles an intellectually [...] Read More

Women. The Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg

By Sabine Haag, Dagmar Eichberger and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, eds.

Exh. Cat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, June 14 – October 7, 2018. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2018. 190 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-3-99020-178-7.

Review published August 2019

Women, the Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg translates into English the German catalogue to an exhibition at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck in 2018. The catalogue explores the [...] Read More

Perfection’s Therapy. An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I

By Mitchell B. Merback

New York: Zone Books, 2017. 357 pp, 91 b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-942130-00-0.

Review published August 2019

Mitchell B. Merback’s most recent book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, argues that this celebrated and much-discussed engraving incites a therapeutic or healing [...] Read More

Niederländische Maler in Italien: Künstlerreisen und Kunstrezeption im 16. Jahrhundert

By Maria Harnack

Reflexe der immateriellen und materiellen Kultur, 6. Berlin – Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 332 pp, fully illustrated, ISBN 978-3-11-0557428-8.

Review published July 2019

Maria Harnack offers a broad-view examination of sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists in Italy. She begins Chapter One’s first section, travel to the Eternal City, by citing a few key contributors [...] Read More