Book Reviews

Willem Key and Adriaen Thomasz. Key: Fresh Perspectives on Their Oeuvres (Pictura Nova: Studies in 16th- and 17th-Century Flemish Painting and Drawing, XXVIII)

By Lien Vandenberghe, in collaboration with Gijs Key. Edited by Koenraad Jonckheere.

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2025. 256 pp, 102 color, 1 b&w illus. ISBN 978-2-503-61926-2.

Review published June 2026

In 2007, Koenraad Jonckheere published a monograph on the relatively little-known, under-studied Antwerp painter, Adriaen Thomasz. Key: Adriaen Thomasz. Key (c. 1545 - c. 1589): Portrait of a [...] Read More

Early Netherlandish Drawings 1400-1600

By Olenka Horbatsch and Charlotte Wytema (curators)

London, The British Museum, April 16 – September 20, 2026.
Exh. cat. ed. by Olenka Horbatsch and Charlotte Wytema, London: The British Museum Press, 2026, 368 pp, 320 illus. ISBN 978-0-7141-3651-6.

Review published June 2026

Accompanying an exhibition of its spectacular holdings of Netherlandish drawings, the British Museum has issued its richly illustrated definitive catalogue of collection highlights, the first in [...] Read More

Beached Whale Images in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp. Symbols of Humanity’s Dominion over the Earth

By Ryan E. Gregg

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2026. 185 pp, 9 color, 54 b&w illus. ISBN 978-90-485-6624-2.

Review published June 2026

Today, when a whale of any kind (what Ryan Gregg often calls “cetaceous units”) gets stranded on a beach, support is mobilized to keep the animal hydrated and to prepare the creature for return to the [...] Read More

Les précurseurs flamands: Rogier Van der Weyden et les frères Van Eyck au prisme de la perspective

By Ludovic Balavoine and Gilles Simon

Turnhout: Brepols, 2025. 415 pp, 218 col., 41 b&w illus. ISBN 978-2-503-61506-6 (hardback).

Review published May 2026

While art history has long been anchored in the “Italian myth” – crediting Brunelleschi with the empirical invention of linear perspective around 1413 and Alberti with its formal theorization in 1435 [...] Read More

Rubens. Mythological Subjects: Paris to Venus (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XI, 3)

By Elizabeth McGrath, Gerlinde Gruber, Gregory Martin, Koenraad Jonckheere, Bert Schepers, Nils Büttner. Edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Bert Schepers.

2 vols. London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2025. Vol. I: 557 pp; Vol. II: 419 pp, 315 illus., mostly in color. ISBN: 978-1-915487-63-6.

Review published May 2026

The publication of this two-volume study of Rubens’s works inspired by classical mythology is the final installment in the three-part series on this subject within the catalogue raisonné of his work, [...] Read More

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages

By Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut (curators)

New York, The Cloisters, October 17, 2025 – March 29, 2026.

Exh. cat. ed. by Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025, 144 pp. ISBN 9781588398055.

Review published April 2026

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, edited by Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut, was designed to accompany an exhibition of the same title at The Cloisters in New York. [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews