This book presents an ambitious and original reappraisal of the early work of Jan Lievens (1607–1674), the Dutch painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose formative period in Leiden was intimately [...] Read More
Book Reviews
Rubens and the Human Body (The Body in Art)
The book under review is the third in a series of Brepols monographs addressing the human body in early modern visual arts. Given the stated aim of this series – to explore new approaches and [...] Read More
Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art
In a new blog on intersectionality posted by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, literature historian Christina Luckyj confronted tensions that she identified between a contemporary, [...] Read More
Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel: Art and Science around 1600
No scholar has devoted more of her career to the works of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) than Thea Vignau-Wilberg. Nearly a half a century ago, she published her dissertation on the manuscripts that [...] Read More
Thresholds and Boundaries. Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1530) (Visual Culture in Early Modernity)
As points of transition, thresholds offer new possibilities, but they also mark boundaries, divisions of time and space. Employing the anthropological theories of Arnold Gennep and Victor Turner, who [...] Read More
Michel Sittow. Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe. [Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, January 28 – May 13, 2018.]
This recent Washington exhibition, jointly organized with the Art Museum of Estonia and its curator Greta Koppel, offers a fitting moment to pay tribute to John Hand, its long-time curator (since [...] Read More
Rubens. Painter of Sketches. [Exh. cat. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, April 9 – August 5, 2018; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, September 8, 2018 – January 13, 2019.]
Peter Paul Rubens dominates Baroque art to a degree rivaled only by his Italian counterpart in sculpture, Bernini. This exhibition catalogue of oil sketches, presented and authored by Friso Lammertse [...] Read More
Forgotten Masters. Pieter Pourbus and Bruges Painting from 1525 to 1625. [Exh. cat. Groeningemuseum, Bruges, October 13, 2017 – January 21, 2018.]
Twenty years ago, in 1998, Maximiliaan Martens, Paul Huvenne and Valentin Vermeersch organized a seminal exhibition at the Memlingmuseum in Bruges, “From Hans Memling to Pieter Pourbus” (the catalogue [...] Read More
Frans Floris (1519/20-1570): Imagining a Northern Renaissance (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 267/19)
Apparently they do make artist monographs the way they used to do. This massive tome, dedicated to one of the great yet neglected Netherlandish artists of the sixteenth century, fills a massive [...] Read More
Utopia’s Doom: The Graal as Paradise of Lust, the Sect of the Free Spirit and Jheronimus Bosch’s So-Called Garden of Delights (Art & Religion, 8)
Paul Vandenbroeck has been publishing on Bosch since 1981, with his key publication on the Garden of Earthly Delights appearing in a magisterial, two-part article published in Dutch in the 1989 and [...] Read More
Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Bollingen Series XXXV: 57)
Deftly argued and fluently written, Koerner’s enthralling book is a revised and amplified version of the A. W. Mellon Lectures he delivered at The National Gallery of Art in 2007. He juxtaposes Bosch [...] Read More
Perspectives on Wenceslaus Hollar
Only the most renowned printmakers ever seem to get closer analysis. But Wenceslaus Hollar, the multinational etcher (1607 Prague-1677 London), has chiefly received exhibition attention only, so this [...] Read More
Netherlandish Art in its Global Context (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 66, 2016)
In a 2006 state-of-the field essay, I wrote that "scholars have recently begun to examine the contact between Europe's art and other regions of the world after 1492."[i] In the dozen years since then, [...] Read More
Netherlandish Sculpture of the 16th Century (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 67)
Volume 67 of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, is titled Netherlandish Sculpture of the 16th Century and edited by Ethan Matt Kavaler, Frits Scholten, and Joanna Woodall. As Kavaler articulates [...] Read More
Dutch and Flemish Paintings: Dulwich Picture Gallery
The collection catalog is an unforgiving literary genre. Its purpose is to serve as a work of reference for scholars seeking information about individual works for their own purposes. At a minimum, it [...] Read More