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
Book Reviews
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