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
Book Reviews
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 Boschs’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
Power and Grace. Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens
Exhibited in the inner sanctum, the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery at The Morgan Library & Museum, Ilona van Tuinen assembled a beautiful, small collection of eighteen works by Rubens, Van Dyck and [...] Read More
The Life of Christ before the Passion. The Ministry of Christ, with an introduction by Paul Huvenne. Translated from the Dutch by Abigail Newman (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, V, 2)
This recent volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard offers Rubens scholars another important, well-documented, and occasionally surprising contribution to the invaluable series. With catalogue [...] Read More
Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: Case Studies from Van Eyck through Gossart (Me Fecit)
Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: Case Studies from Van Eyck through Gossart, showcases cutting-edge developments in the longstanding and fruitful nexus between technical art history [...] Read More
Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679): Crafting a Natural History of Art in Early Modern Antwerp (Studies in Baroque Art, 5)
The book consists of four chapters referring to the main areas of the work of the Antwerp artist Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679). Clearly structured, Van Kessel’s essential paintings are analyzed on the [...] Read More
Jacob Duck c.1600-1667: Catalogue Raisonné (OCULI. Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, 16)
The seventeenth-century Utrecht genre painter Jacob Cornelisz Duck (c 1600-1667) is best known for his depictions of soldiers and prostitutes, but his oeuvre also includes scenes of tranquil [...] Read More
Stories in Gilded Frames: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Paintings with Biblical and Mythological Subjects
Not surprisingly, the most respected genre of art, which appealed to the wealthiest and most educated buyers and fetched the highest prices for Dutch painters in the seventeenth century, was history [...] Read More
St Jacob’s: Antwerp Art and Counter Reformation in Rubens’s Parish Church (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 253; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 13)
This book is as monumental and rich as the church that is its subject. In fact, rather than a study of a building, it is a wide-ranging narrative of the community that built it over a period of two [...] Read More