Book Reviews

Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World

By Ulinka Rublack

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 448 pp. + 70 illustrations, HB, ISBN 9780198873105, $36.00.

Review published August 2023

Fire swept through the Residenz palace in Munich in 1729. One casualty was the central panel of Albrecht Dürer’s Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary Altarpiece, created between 1507 and 1509 [...] Read More

Rubens. Architecture and Sculpture: Rubens’s House (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XXII, 2)

By Nora De Poorter and Frans Baudouin Edited by Arnout Balis (†), Brecht Vanoppen, Isabelle Van Tichelen, Joannes van den Maagdenberg and Valerie Herremans. Transl. from the Dutch by Jantien Black and Lee Preedy

2 vols. London – Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2022. Vol. 1: 433 pp; Vol. 2: 236 illus., including in color. ISBN 978-1-912554-64-5

Review published August 2023

Like most volumes in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (CRLB), Rubens’s House by Nora De Poorter and the late Frans Baudouin is a double volume. Volume One contains an introduction, eleven [...] Read More

Rubens. Mythological Subjects: Hercules to Olympus (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XI, 2)

By Elizabeth McGrath, Bert Schepers, Nils Büttner, Gerlinde Gruber, Fiona Healy, Eveliina Juntunen, Gregory Martin, Jeremy Wood. Edited by Elizabeth McGrath, Bert Schepers, and Brecht Vanoppen

2 vols. London/ Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers. An Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2022. Vol. I: 552 pp; Vol. II: 393 pp., 416 illus., mostly in color. ISBN 978-1-912554-86-7.

Review published May 2023

The writing of the catalogue raisonné of Rubens’s work is arguably one of the most ambitious projects dedicated to a single artist over the last several decades. The early volumes in this series, [...] Read More

The Painted Triptychs of Fifteenth-Century Germany: Case Studies of Blurred Boundaries

By Lynn F. Jacobs

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 305 pp, HB and e-book. ISBN 978-94-6372-540-8.

Review published May 2023

Lynn Jacobs has long been fascinated by Netherlandish altarpieces. Her pioneering Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550 (1998) explored the diverse forms, manufacture, and sale of often [...] Read More

Jean Bellegambe (c. 1470‒1535/36): Making, Meaning and Patronage of His Works

By Anna Koopstra

Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 156 pp, 119 col. illus. ISBN 978-2-503-57437-0.

Review published May 2023

Anna Koopstra’s book, Jean Bellegambe (c. 1470‒1535/36): Making, Meaning and Patronage of His Works, is a helpful intervention, as the first published volume on this Douaisian painter since 1890. The [...] Read More

The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World

By Steven Nadler

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 360pp. 21 col., 61 b/w ills. ISBN: 978-0226698366.

Review published April 2023

Steven Nadler’s latest book is a biography of Frans Hals. This format is increasingly rare. As such, it is worth contemplating the role of biographies, and indeed biography, in early modern studies. [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews