Book Reviews

Tree of Jesse Iconography in Northern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

By Susan L. Green

Routledge Research in Art and Religion. London – New York: Routledge, 2019. 244 pp, 76 illus. ISBN: 978-0-367-66473-2.

Review published March 2021

In this book, Susan Green addresses the polyvalent and dynamic character of iconography, by focusing on how the depictions of the Tree of Jesse variously functioned in the late Middle Ages. According [...] Read More

Willem van den Blocke: A Sculptor from the Low Countries in the Baltic Region

By Franciszek Skibiński

Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2020. 394pp, 197 illus. IBSN 978-2-503-58489-8.

Review published March 2021

This first volume in the new Brepols Early Modern Cultural Studies series centers on the extraterritorial career of an individual Netherlandish artist, Willem van den Blocke, in order to offer larger [...] Read More

Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700

By Elizabeth Sutton, ed.

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 190 pp, 39 illus, 8 col. pls. ISBN 978-94-6372-140-0.

Review published March 2021

The early modern Netherlands were, statistically speaking, a land of women: estimates suggest that during the seventeenth century women outnumbered men four to three. These women were not only [...] Read More

Peter Paul Rubens und der Barock im Norden

By Christoph Stiegemann, ed.

Cat. exh. Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Paderborn, July 24, 2020 – October 25, 2020. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2020. 576 pp, numerous illus., mostly in color. ISBN 978-3-7319-0956-9.

Review published March 2021

The occasion for this exhibition, organized under the direction of Christoph Stiegemann, the actual director of the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum in the Westphalian city of Paderborn, was the fact [...] Read More

Renaissance Metapainting

By Péter Bokody and Alexander Nagel, eds.

London: Harvey Miller, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2020. 348 pp, 6 b&w and 147 color illus. ISBN 978-1-912554-26-3.

Review published February 2021

The very cover of this impressive new anthology sends out a contradiction: its images feature details of the Washington Jan van Eyck Annunciation shutter, yet its editors are noted specialists in [...] Read More

The Golden Age of Dutch Marine Painting: The Inder Rieden Collection

By Gerlinde de Beer, with Franz Ossing and Jaap van der Veen, edited by Charles Dumas

Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2019. 4 Volumes. 348 + 348 + 368 + 320 pp; 900+ illustrations. ISBN 978-90-5997-268-1.

Review published January 2021

This lavishly produced four-volume boxed set accompanied an exhibition in 2019 at the Bredius Museum in The Hague devoted to the collection of Dutch marine paintings assembled by the London collector [...] Read More

Rubens. Genre Scenes (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XVII)

By Nils Büttner

London: Harvey Miller. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2019. 462 pp, 196 b&w and col. illustrations, 20 text ill. ISBN 978-0-905203-73-7.

Review published January 2021

This latest volume in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard is dedicated to Rubens’s genre pictures. It was only in the late eighteenth century that today’s generic term genre gradually was becoming [...] Read More

The Library of the Dukes of Burgundy

By Bernard Bousmanne and Elena Savini, eds.

Brussels: Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) / London: Harvey Miller. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2020. 205 pp, 134 color illus. ISBN 978-1-912554-24-9.

Review published January 2021

In September of 2020, the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels opened a state-of-the-art museum to great fanfare. Its purpose is to offer the public the opportunity to enjoy a rotating exhibit of [...] Read More

Theodoor van Loon

By Sabine van Sprang et al.

Exh. Cat. Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (BOZAR), October 10, 2018 – January 13, 2019; Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art, Luxembourg (MNHA), February 15 – May 26, 2019. Brussels: BOZAR Books, Mercatorfonds, 2018. 236 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-94-6230-237-2. In Dutch and French.

Review published January 2021

Despite the high esteem in which he was held by contemporaries in Italy and the Netherlands, the Brussels painter Theodoor van Loon (1581/82–1649) had until recently been largely ignored by modern [...] Read More

Van Eyck

By Maximiliaan Martens, Till-Holger Borchert, Jan Dumolyn, Johan De Smet, and Frederica Van Dam, eds.

Exh. Cat. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, February 1 – March 12, 2020. London – New York: Thames & Hudson, 2020. 490 pp, 350 color illus. ISBN 978-0-500-02345-7.

Review published December 2020

Many readers will have shared my disappointment at having missed the exhibition Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, which opened at Ghent’s Museum voor Schone Kunsten on February 1st, 2020, and was [...] Read More

Antwerp in the Renaissance

By Bruno Blondé and Jeroen Puttevils, eds.

Studies in European Urban History, 49. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2020. 315 pp, 61 illus. ISBN 978-2-503-58833-9.

Review published November 2020

Students of visual culture in the cities of the Netherlands have learned to attend to a variety of imagery that formerly were omitted from consideration as "art," especially printed images that also [...] Read More

Hans Holbein. The Artist in a Changing World

By Jeanne Nuechterlein

London: Reaktion Books, 2020, 280 pp., 70 illus., some in color. ISBN 978-1-78914-211-2.

Review published November 2020

Hans Holbein (c. 1497/98–1543) has generated plenty of scholarship in the form of catalogues of paintings, drawings and prints as well as serious exhibition catalogues and scholarly monographs. But he [...] Read More

The Ghent Altarpiece: Research and Conservation of the Exterior

By Bart Fransen and Cyriel Stroo, eds.

Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives, 14. Brussels: Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), Brussels, 2020. 430 pp, 300 color illus. ISBN 978-2-930054-38-4.

Review published October 2020

As the first in a series about Jan (and Hubert?) van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), this volume documents the research and conservation treatment of the exterior panels. It is undoubtedly an [...] Read More

Leiden circa 1630. Rembrandt Emerges

By Jacquelyn N. Coutré, ed., with contributions by Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Stephanie S. Dickey, Piet Bakker, and Janet M. Brooke

Exh. Cat. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON, August 24 – December 1, 2019; The Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, March 7 – September 27, 2020; The McKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, December 5, 2020 – February 21, 2021; The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, ON, March 13 – May 30, 2021. Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2019. 359 pp, 205 illus., mostly in color. ISBN 978-1-55339-419-8. In English and French.

Review published September 2020

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre joined the celebrations of the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death (or immortality, if you will) with a traveling exhibition combining collection works and loans [...] Read More

Black in Rembrandt’s Time

By Elmer Kolfin and Epco Runia, eds., with contributions by Stefanie Archangel, Mark Ponte, Marieke de Winkel, and David de Witt

Exh. Cat., The Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam, March 5 – May 31, 2020, extended to September 10, 2020. Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2020. 135 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-94-625-8372-6 (English), 978-94-625-8371-9 (Dutch).

Review published August 2020

In recent decades, art museums in Europe and North America have increasingly staged exhibitions contextualizing the multi-dimensional nature of our shared cultural heritage. The decision to mount [...] Read More