Half a century ago, when I was a graduate student, art scholarship largely boiled down to connoisseurship; even iconography was considered over-interpretive (and the case can still be made that within [...] Read More
Book Reviews
The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510-1610
With its focus on emblems, the present study directly addresses topics of interest to historians of Netherlandish art. This contribution is due to the significant production of emblem books by Dutch [...] Read More
The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (1400-1550)
As a religious artifact, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432) radiates the intangible power of Christ’s sacrifice and God’s forgiveness. As a material work of art, Jan van Eyck’s polyptych pulls the narrative [...] Read More
Moving with the Magdalen: Late Medieval Art and Devotion in the Alps
Joanne Anderson expands our knowledge of Mary Magdalen imagery by analyzing little known Alpine fresco cycles and altarpieces of the saint produced between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth [...] Read More
Pieter de Hooch in Delft. From the Shadow of Vermeer
Somewhat surprisingly, the present exhibition is the first ever devoted to Pieter de Hooch in The Netherlands. There have been exhibitions that featured his work in numbers among other Delft Masters, [...] Read More
The Value of Taste: Auction Prices and the Evolution of Taste in Dutch and Flemish Golden Age Painting 1642-2011
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