Book Reviews

Hercules Segers: Painter Etcher

By Huigen Leeflang and Pieter Roelofs, eds.

Cat. exh. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, October 7, 2016 – January 8, 2017; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 13 – May 21, 2017. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2016. 700 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-94-6208-342-4.

Review published September 2017

Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher does much to advance our understanding of an artist whose work is often described as enigmatic and – as the accompanying exhibition calls it – ‘mysterious.’ Since the [...] Read More

Condition: The Ageing of Art

By Paul Taylor

London: Paul Holberton, 2015. 264 pp, 140 color illus. ISBN 978-190-7372 79-7

Review published April 2017

Paul Taylor’s Condition: The Ageing of Art provides an invaluable introduction to a topic often overlooked by art historians: how the chemistry of materials collides with the caprices of time, and how [...] Read More

Michael Pacher: Zwischen Zeiten und Räumen

By Lukas Madersbacher

Berlin/ Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015. 348 pp, 280 color and 25 b&w illus. ISBN 978-3-422-07307-4

Review published April 2017

In German art, the question a "Northern Renaissance" and when (or if) it occurred usually centers around such turn-of-the-epoch figures as Albrecht Dürer and the magic year 1500. Moreover, dominant [...] Read More

Bella Figura: Europäische Kunst in Süddeutschland um 1600

By Renate Eikelmann, ed.

[Cat. exh. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, February 6 – May 25, 2015.] Munich: Hirmer, 2015. 420 pp, fully illustrated. ISBN 978-3-7774-2358-6

Review published April 2017

Bronze sculpture of the late sixteenth century tends to be associated with Italy, specifically with the work of Giambologna, so an exhibition of bronzes originating mostly from southern Germany [...] Read More

Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art. A History of Chiaroscuro in Art Theory and Artistic Practice in the Netherlands of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Théorie de l’art 1400–1800/Art Theory 1400–1800, 7)

By Ulrike Kern

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014. 224 pp, 55 b&w, 55 color illus. ISBN: 978-2-503-54944-6

Review published April 2017

Light and shade played such fundamental roles in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists’ representation of the natural world that we may take for granted the complexity and ambiguity associated [...] Read More

Dutch Art and Urban Cultures 1200-1700

By Elisabeth de Bièvre

New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015. 492 pp, 100 color, 180 b&w illus. ISBN 978-0-300-20562-6

Review published April 2017

After completing her 1986 doctoral dissertation on the decoration of town halls in the United Provinces, Elisabeth de Bièvre published a series of studies (notably “The Urban Subconscious: The Art of [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews