Book Reviews

Drawn to Life. Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum

By Robert Fucci

[Exh. Cat. Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, September 22 – December 31, 2022; The Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam, March 18 – June 11, 2023]. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022. 288 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-1-913645-32-8.

Review published February 2023

This excellent catalogue was designed to accompany the exhibition of 67 of 134 Dutch drawings donated recently by Leena and Sheldon Peck to the Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill. The book [...] Read More

The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths

By Angela Vanhaelen

University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. 211 pp, 13 col., 47 b&w illus. ISBN 978-0271091402.

Review published February 2023

Among the cultural developments in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the city’s doolhoven – planned environments containing moving sculptures, fountains, automata, waxworks, and clockworks – have [...] Read More

All the King’s Tapestries: Homecomings 2021-1961-1921

By Magdalena Ozga, Magdalena Piwocka, and Jerzy Holc

Exh. cat. Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków, March 18 – October 31, 1021. Kraków: Wawel Royal Castle – State Art Collection, 2021. 199 pp, 142 color, 48 b&w illus. ISBN 978-83-66648-22-7.

Review published February 2023

Around 1547, the Flemish master-weavers, Jan and Willem de Kempeneer, Jan van Tieghem, and Pieter van Aelst the Younger embarked upon a tapestry commission of remarkable scale. Pairing up with other [...] Read More

Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape

By Joanna Sheers Seidenstein and Susan Anderson, eds.

Exh. Cat. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, May 21 – August 14, 2022. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums; New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 2022. 246 pp, 138 col. & b&w illus. ISBN: 9780300263824.

Review published February 2023

Between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century, Dutch artists produced a staggering number of landscape drawings. This richly illustrated catalogue, published in the wake of an exhibition at [...] Read More

Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic

By Claudia Swan

Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2021. 336 pp, 140 color illus. ISBN 9780691207964.

Review published January 2023

In her methodologically capacious new book, Claudia Swan attempts to show how materials from around the globe amassed in the early modern Netherlands illuminate the formation and development of the [...] Read More

Giusto di Gand e la Comunione del Duca d’Urbino

By Francesca Bottacin, with contributions by Livia Depuyt-Elbaum, Andrea Bernardini, Gianluca Poldi, and Maria Letizia Amadori

Padua: CLEUP, 2021. 296 pp, 179 color illus. ISBN 978-88-5495-364-2.

Review published January 2023

This welcome book by an established scholar of artistic relations between Urbino and the Netherlands is the first monograph on Justus of Ghent since Jacques Lavalleye’s of 1936. Since then, many [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews