Book Reviews

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

By Stephanie Porras

University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 200 pp, 80 illus., ISBN 978-0-271-07089-6

Review published April 2017

The works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder transfix viewers and vex interpreters. When Karel van Mander wrote that one could not look at Bruegel’s works without laughing, he spoke to the immersive [...] Read More

The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch: Imagining Antichrist and Others from the Middle Ages to the Reformation

By Debra Higgs Strickland

London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2016. vi, 301 pp, 104 illus. ISBN 9-781909-400-55-9

Review published April 2017

The “Epiphany” in this book’s title may be read effectively in at least three ways. It refers most directly to Hieronymus Bosch’s great Adoration of the Magi triptych (c.1495) in Madrid, widely known [...] Read More

The Neptune Fountain in Bologna: Bronze, Marble, & Water in the Making of a Papal City

By Richard J. Tuttle

Edited by Nadja Aksamija and Francesco Ceccarelli (VISTAS, Virtual Images of Sculpture in Time and Space, 2). London: Harvey Miller Publishers, an imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2015. 248 pp, 150 color illus. ISBN 978-1-909400-24-5

Review published November 2016

Published posthumously, Richard Tuttle’s excellent analysis of Giambologna’s Neptune Fountain in Bologna is insightful, well written, and beautifully illustrated. Its focus on a single monument, [...] Read More

The Seventh Window: The King’s Window Donated by Philip II and Mary Tudor to Sint Janskerk in Gouda (1557)

By Wim de Groot, ed.

Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 2005. 304 pp, numerous color illus. ISBN 978-90-6550-822-8

Review published November 2016

The Seventh Window is an anthology conceptualized and edited by Wim de Groot, which brings together twenty-one scholars from various fields and countries to ruminate over one of King Philip II of [...] Read More

Cornelis van Poelenburch, 1594/5-1667: The Paintings

By Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert

Trans. Jennifer M. Kilian and Katy Kist (OCULI. Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, 15). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2016. xi, 408 pp, 176 b&w illus, 195 color illus. ISBN 978-90-2724-976-8

Review published November 2016

Cornelis van Poelenburch frequently signed his works Poelenburch or van Poelenburch but more often with the monogram C.P. Born in Utrecht between January 21, 1594 and January 21, 1595, he was the [...] Read More

Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age

By Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, with Janet C. Blyberg, eds.

[Cat. exh. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, October 17, 2015 – January 17, 2016; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, February 27 – June 5, 2016.] Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2015, distributed by Yale University Press. 356 pp, 112 illus. ISBN 978-0-875-77229-5

Review published November 2016

In 1665, Jacob Jansz. Coeman, a Dutch painter working in Batavia (present day Jakarta), painted a portrait of a family group (Rijksmusem, Amsterdam). He shows the merchant Pieter Cnoll, his wife, [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews