Arts and Minds: Scholarship on Early
Modern Art History (Northern Europe)*
by L A R R Y S I L V E R
W
ith the exception of a few notable artists — chiefly van Eyck, Dürer,
Bosch, and Bruegel — early modern art outside Italy received little
attention as recently as a generation ago. To use a Dutch proverb, it “fell
between stools”: neither Italian Renaissance, the dominant paradigm and
intellectual center of the entire discipline of art history since Burckhardt,
nor the more celebrated Golden Age of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.
Moreover, scholarly focus lay exclusively on painting — not sculpture or
architecture, let alone other media, usually lumped together and dismissed
as “decorative arts” or, worse, “minor arts.”
These views conditioned canonical scholarship, led by Erwin Panofsky.
His major monographs — Early Netherlandish Painting and Albrecht
Dürer — defined the role of Northern art, chiefly in relation to Italy and
as the foundations of nascent artistic identity.1 For Panofsky, van Eyck in
the Netherlands and Dürer in Germany pioneered artistic naturalism and
also initiated progress from medieval icons toward modern, aesthetic
artwork. Panofsky built his account around Jan van Eyck, the first great,
named founder of Flemish Primitives, whose very rubric was taken as
establishing and defining the tradition of paintings that followed in
Flanders and Holland.
Yet in coining his influential interpretive framework of hidden symbolism, Panofsky also acutely saw van Eyck’s art through the culturally
sensitive prior reading by Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle
*
This essay should be seen as a complement and update to an earlier effort by the
author with a similar charge: Larry Silver, “The State of Research: Northern European Art
of the Renaissance Era,” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 518–35. The change in period designation
from Renaissance to early modern is just one index of the changes to be surveyed below.
Interested readers who want to see the material of the “Golden Age” of Dutch and Flemish
art can also now consult a recent essay on this “sequel” period by Mariët Westermann,
“After Iconography and Iconoclasm: Current Research in Netherlandish Art, 1566 –1700,”
Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 351–72. I am deeply grateful to Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Articles
Editor of Renaissance Quarterly, for his invitation to take on this challenging assignment.
1
See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, MA, 1953); The Life
and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943; Princeton, 2005, with introduction by Jeffrey Chipps
Smith).
Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 351–373
[ 351 ]
352
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
Ages.2 Besides defining the first early modern art with van Eyck, this
alternative vision simultaneously offered a late medieval harvest (Huizinga’s
metaphor), marked by symbolism in decline of religious thought
crystallizing into images. Even for Panofsky half a century ago, the transitional character of fifteenth-century art posed a conceptual tension for
art-historical periodization and interpretation.
Since then the history of Northern European art has been characterized
by methodological self-consciousness as well as rich interdisciplinary dialogue. As a result, current scholarship now works to dispel a host of
deep-seated modern biases: toward named artists, toward painting as the
featured medium, and toward uncritical embrace of the celebrated Flemish
naturalism as both progressive and foundational for the verisimilitude in art
of the following four centuries. Today, research focuses much more frequently on anonymous craftsmen and on works in a range of different
media, such as tapestries, which were clearly prized above panel painting in
princely inventories.3 Late medieval illuminated manuscripts have been
reexamined for Flanders and France, as well as for Bavaria.4 Many of these
deluxe items stem from the late medieval, Burgundian court world outlined
by Huizinga, which persisted within wider Europe well into the sixteenth
century. Scholars also now give greater attention to innovations besides
paintings — especially printed books and independent prints.
But the principal attention of art historians in recent decades has
focused on the status and purpose of artworks, inaugurated by Michael
Baxandall’s inimitable consideration of a neglected art form, The Limewood
2
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Payton and Ulrich
Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). Originally published 1919; first translated, incompletely,
into English by Fritz Hopman as The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, NY, 1954).
3
See Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe
(Cambridge, 2002); Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Good,
Duke of Burgundy” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979), and “The Practical Logistics
of Art: Thoughts on the Commissioning, Displaying, and Storage of Art at the Burgundian
Court” (in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson,
ed. Laurinda Dixon, 27– 47 [Turnhout, 1998]); Thomas Campbell, Tapestry in the
Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, New York, 2002); and Guy Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry
(New York, 2000).
4
For Flanders, see Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance:
The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles,
2003); Maurits Smeyers, Flemish Miniatures from the 8 th to the mid-16 th Century (Louvain,
1999); for France, see François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peintures en
France, 1440 –1520 (exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1993); and for Bavaria, see Ulrich Merkl,
Buchmalerei in Bayern in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1999).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
353
Sculptors of Renaissance Germany.5 Honed by experience as a curator at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, Baxandall devotes chapters to the material
itself, to the altarpieces’ functions (and their inverse, iconoclasm), to the
guild structure of production, and to the market. Unique in this analysis is
his anthropological exploration of the period eye, drawing analogies to
other rhetorical distinctions made in analogous local art forms such as
Gothic calligraphic script and Nuremberg Meistersinger flourishes. Yet
amidst all of his sensitivity to, even sympathy for, the German carved
wooden retable, Baxandall still features works by named artists, and because he celebrates their accomplishment as a climax of an artistic
development with a teleology, he regards their later fate (secular satisfactions) and subsequent influence by Italianate forms in works made for
private collectors as both a corruption and a decline. His book is at its best
when it offers holistic analysis of major carvings by major artists in the
known contexts of their original sites. However, an antidote to the negative
judgments about later German sculpture of the sixteenth century, with rich
consideration of functions and contexts, is provided by Jeffrey Chipps
Smith in German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance c. 1520–1580.6 For the
same period, Lynn Jacobs’s study of carved Flemish retables applies
Baxandall’s approach to a contemporary Northern region and considers
both medieval tastes and mass marketing.7 Such investigations have remained hallmarks of the best art history on Northern art during the past
quarter-century.
A model of the best contemporary examination of paintings resulted
from a collaboration, again not from a university but by custodians for a
single museum collection, the National Gallery, London. In Giotto to
Dürer, Susan Foister, curator of Netherlandish paintings, teamed with
colleagues, both curators and conservators, to analyze early Renaissance
painting, giving equal attention to Netherlandish masterpieces alongside
Italian pictures.8 Their discussion topics are revealing and useful to both
scholars and students alike. The authors begin with the uses of painting,
distinguishing broadly between Christian and secular purposes for civic,
5
Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven,
1980).
6
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance c. 1520 –1580
(Princeton, 1994).
7
Lynn Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380 –1550: Medieval Tastes and
Mass Marketing (Cambridge, 1998).
8
Jill Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National
Gallery (New Haven, 1991).
354
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
dynastic, and domestic art. Then they consider painting production, including the various terms of institutions (guilds and contracts, workshops),
procedures (drawings and tools), and materials, especially the techniques of
tempera and oil painting. Like Baxandall, they conclude the volume with
commentaries on individual works.
Most recently, Foister has produced her own exemplary monograph,
Holbein and England, in which she rings all the changes on a single artist,
place, and period.9 Utilizing her mastery of the archives as well as technical
studies of the paintings and procedures — notably using the collection of
careful portrait drawings studies (Windsor Castle) — she painstakingly
reconstitutes an individual career of art production. Nor does she ignore a
single medium. Besides the celebrated extant portraits and other paintings,
Foister also attends systematically to a wide range of creativity: drawing
designs by Holbein for lost goldsmithing work; his lost canvas and mural
decorations for royal festivals and vanished guild halls; and his woodcut
productions, including title pages for books. She reconstructs his circle of
patrons, royal and noble as well as foreign (ranging from German trade
representatives to French ambassadors), and fully reconsiders Holbein’s
complex relationship to the nascent Reformation in England, particularly
in the wake of his prior departure from Basel because of the loss of religious
commissions due to the Swiss Reformation. Even more to the point, she
goes beyond the individual limits of Holbein to wider English visual culture in a variety of settings, particularly in private collections, to assess the
presence of religious pictures as well as (largely imported) secular subjects.
Here Foister’s study complements a wide-ranging multimedia exhibition
by Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, Gothic: Art for England 1400–
1547.10 In the process, she not only has produced the authoritative study
of one of Europe’s greatest Renaissance portraitists but also has reconstituted his role within the neglected visual culture of an entire nation.
Foister’s careful reconstruction of English pictorial purposes raises
anew considerations of the status of the image in the Renaissance era. This
reexamination of assumptions held by Panofsky and earlier generations has
been one of the ongoing projects of recent interpretations. Two foundational books frame the period and provide basic terms of analysis,
particularly for the status of the painted image. The first, Likeness and
Presence by Hans Belting, is subtitled A History of the Image before the Era
9
Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, 2004).
Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, eds., Gothic: Art for England 1400 –1547
(exhibition catalogue, London, 2003).
10
A R T S A N D MIN D S
355
of Art.11 It chiefly considers the heritage of icons as objects of veneration in
the Christian tradition. In his final chapters, Belting examines “the crisis of
the image at the beginning of the Modern Age,” and he frames this transition within his basic, if traditional, distinction between medieval icons
and modern, aesthetic objects first outlined in his The End of the History of
Art? and explored further in his own focused exploration of Netherlandish
painting.12 A newer, self-conscious objectification of the image has been
most vividly analyzed as reflexive “meta-painting” by Victor Stoichita in his
The Self-Aware Image.13 Stoichita actually sees the institution (instauration
in the original French) of the easel picture as a foundational phenomenon
beginning at the end of the Renaissance. His examples include still-lifes and
gallery paintings — see also Zirka Zaremba Filipczak’s Picturing Art in
Antwerp 1550–170014 — of the seventeenth century, as well as complex
self-portraits of painters.15
Seeking the origins of the modern in Northern art of the sixteenth
century has formed the core argument of several important discussions of
“German Renaissance” painting, building upon the basic insights of
Baxandall concerning both “secular satisfactions” and artistic “identities.”
Chief among these is Joseph Koerner’s identification of a single work,
Dürer’s frontal Self-Portrait (Munich, 1500), as the very inauguration
of the entire era in a “moment of self-portraiture.”16 In similar fashion,
Christopher Wood argues for the origins of landscape in Dürer’s younger
11
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1990;
reprint, Chicago, 1994).
12
Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (1983; reprint, Chicago, 1987); Hans
Belting and Christiane Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemäldes. Das erste Jahrhundert der
niederländischen Malerei (Munich, 1994). See, most recently, Belting’s Art History after
Modernism (1995; reprint, Chicago, 2003); see also Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel.
Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich, 2002), which
discusses icons of Christ in relation to a new Renaissance concept of the image.
13
Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting
(1993; reprint, Cambridge, 1997).
14
Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550 –1700 (Princeton, 1987).
15
For Italian self-portraits, see Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture
(New Haven, 1998); the seventeenth-century Dutch phenomenon has been well analyzed
by Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den
Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1984). On Rembrandt’s self-portraits, see
H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits (Princeton, 1990); Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions
of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 2000); for Rembrandt’s
self-fashioning in “the studio and the market,” see Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise:
The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1988). Gallery pictures also form a major topic for
Filipczak (see n. 14 above).
16
See Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
(Chicago, 1993).
356
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contemporary, Albrecht Altdorfer, as a formative activity that established
self-conscious, independent, representational works of art for a new community of discerning collectors of both independent drawings and panel
paintings.17
Yet even as these scholars are locating the origins of modernity within
German painting and drawings, David Freedberg has challenged the primacy of celebrating such art objects in aesthetic terms even within Hans
Belting’s “era of art.” Freedberg still reaffirms the ongoing power of images
to evoke deep feelings, either religious or erotic images — in all media,
regardless of authorship (even anonymity).18 Moreover, Freedberg has
joined Baxandall in investigating the inversion of the power of images,
witnessed by their systematic or partial destruction by opponents: that is,
iconoclasm.19 Certainly the continuing iconic status of religious images in
Germanic regions led to iconoclastic destruction, which has become a
serious topic of investigation by various scholars, including historians
Carlos Eire, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Sergiusz Michalski.20
The importance of visual culture within the late medieval affective
spirituality of pre-Reformation Germany was sketched in a series of wonderful studies by the late Bob Scribner, culminating in his study of
“popular propaganda” in early Reformation prints, For the Sake of Simple
Folk.21 Earlier attempts to define Lutheran art have been evaluated by Peter
and Linda Parshall in their 1986 analytical bibliography, particularly the
many historical exhibitions of the 1983 Luther year that tackled the
17
See Christopher Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago,
1993).
18
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago, 1989).
19
See Freedberg’s “The Problem of Images in Northern Europe and its Repercussions
in the Netherlands,” Hafnia, Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art (1976): 229– 45;
Iconoclasts and their Motives (Maarsen, 1985); and “Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: The
Case of the Northern Netherlands,” in Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse Kunst
1525 –1580, ed. J. P. Filedt Kok, W. Halsema Kubes, and W. T. Kloek, 39–84 (exhibition
catalogue, Amsterdam, 1986).
20
Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986); Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious
Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel
(Cambridge, 1995); Sergiusz Michalski, “Das Phänomenon Bildersturm,” in Bilder und
Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Robert Scribner (exhibition
catalogue, Wiesbaden, 1990), and Reformation and the Visual Arts (London, 1993).
21
Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German
Reformation (Cambridge, 1981); see also Scribner’s Religion and Culture in Germany (1400 –
1800) (London, 2001).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
357
subject again;22 however, fine work on the subject of Marian images in
Reformation-era Germany has been recently carried out in a dissertation by
Bridget Heal, while the Reformation content of Augsburg has been examined by Andrew Morrall in his new monograph on artist Jörg Breu.23 As
noted above, wider, even crosscultural, examinations on iconoclasm have
shaped recent exhibition catalogues.24 The recovery of religious images by
both Lutherans and Catholics in Northern Europe now forms a major
subfield. For Lutheran images Koerner and Bonnie Noble have added to
the overview by Werner Hoffmann.25 An anthology on the Calvinist tradition and art edited by Paul Corby Finney breaks new ground on a
neglected relationship.26 Recently, Jesuit imagery has become a new frontier for analysis of the renewed role of visual art as part of the propaganda
fidei.27 Both architecture and, especially, prints (often published in
Antwerp) revived and reasserted linkages between art and religion for the
Counter Reformation of the Catholic Church.28 These studies ultimately
offer close study of text-image relationships, as well as the particular rhetoric of religious images and architectural settings.
22
Peter and Linda Parshall, Art and the Reformation: An Annotated Bibliography
(Boston, 1986).
23
Bridget Heal, “A Woman Like Any Other? Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian
Devotion in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne, c. 1500 –1600” (PhD diss., University of
London, 2001); Andrew Morrall, Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation
Augsburg (Aldershot, 2001).
24
Freedberg, 1976, 1985, and 1986 (see n. 19 above); also exhibitions: Norbert
Schnitzler, Ikonoklasmus-Bilderstum (Munich, 2002), ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel,
Iconclash (Karlsruhe, 2002).
25
Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2004); Bonnie Noble, “‘A
Work in Which the Angels are Wont to Rejoice’: Lucas Cranach’s Schneeberg Altarpiece,”
Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 1011–38; Werner Hoffmann, ed., Luther und die
Folgen für die Kunst (exhibition catalogue, Hamburg, 1983).
26
Paul Corby Finney, Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition
(Grand Rapids, 1999).
27
John O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy,
eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540 –1773 (Toronto, 1999); Thomas Da
Costa Kaufmann, “East and West: Jesuit Art and Artists in Central Europe and Central
European Art in the Americas” (in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits, 274–304) and Toward a
Geography of Art (Chicago, 2004); Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque
(Berkeley, 2004).
28
For architecture, see Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the
Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, 2002). For prints, see Walter Melion,
“Artifice, Memory, and Reformatio in Hieronymus Natalis’s Adnotationes et meditationes in
Evangelia,” Renaissance and Reformation 23 (1998): 5–34; Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof,
“Reputation and Wage: The Case of Engravers Who Worked for the Plantin-Moretus
Press,” Simiolus 30 (2003): 160–95.
358
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
A more focused study of how images actually work was provided
by Peter Parshall’s sensitive consideration of Passion images, utilizing
the insights of Mary Carruthers on medieval and Renaissance memory
systems — including both mimetic images and anthologies like the arma
Christi — as they served as visual cues to provoke religious affect as well as
more abstract spiritual understanding.29 Reindert Falkenburg’s analyses of
Netherlandish religious paintings of both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries evoke the powerful empathic experiences (sometimes evoking smell
and taste) of the works themselves, which reinforce the rhetoric of contemporary spiritual literature.30
One rhetorical aspect of visual art has finally begun to receive necessary
attention: the contribution of style to a picture’s effect and message. There
is still too little real analysis of the mimetic turn in the fifteenth century in
terms of either meaning or theories of seeing, what is coming to be called
visuality.31 However, scholars have drawn useful distinctions within late
medieval and early Netherlandish paintings between vision and having
visions, while stressing the empathic effects of devotional art.32
More resistant to interpretation has been the importance to meaning of
newly imported, Italianate forms of presentation — often known as
Romanism — in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art. One major catalogue
tackled the documentary and forensic sides of this issue.33 Ethan Matt
Kavaler has addressed case studies in stone sculpture;34 Larry Silver and
29
Peter Parshall, “Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,”
Art History 16 (1993): 554 –79.
30
Reindert Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life
(Amsterdam, 1988); The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish
Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450 –1550 (Amsterdam, 1994); “Marginal Motifs in
Early Flemish Landscape Painting,” in Herri met de Bles, ed. Norman Muller, Betsy Rosasco,
and James Marrow, 153–69 (Princeton, 1998); and “The Household of the Soul:
Conformity in the Merode Triptych,” in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads, ed.
Maryane Ainsworth, 2–17 (New York, 2001).
31
For the mimetic turn, see Linda Seidel, “The Value of Verisimilitude in the Art of
Jan van Eyck,” in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. Daniel
Poiron and Nancy Freeman Regalado, 23–43 (New Haven, 1991). For visuality, see Robert
Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000).
32
See Craig Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting,” Simiolus
15 (1985): 87–118; James Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the
Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance,” Simiolus 16 (1986): 150 – 69; and Jeffrey
Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary (Cambridge, MA, 1998). For Spain, see Victor
Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995).
33
Nicole Dacos, Fiamminghi a Roma 1508 –1608 (exhibition catalogue, Brussels,
1995).
34
Ethan Matt Kavaler, “The Jubé of Mons and the Renaissance in the Netherlands,”
A R T S A N D MIN D S
359
Ariane Mensger have considered the contrasting style choices made by Jan
Gossaert.35 Kaufmann in several essays has considered wider issues of the
tensions between such geographical diffusion and regional artistic identity.36 Beyond this phenomenon of traveling artists, Eric Jan Sluijter’s
interpretations investigate both Italianate ideal physical forms and classical
mythological subjects.37 In recent years much greater focus has centered on
the generation of Hendrick Goltzius, notably in a recent catalogue following a series of trenchant articles by Walter Melion.38 It is not difficult to
understand how nationalistic art historians of modern Belgium and the
Netherlands would have seen such imported forms and subjects as foreign
to a mimetic indigenous tradition of landscapes or genre images during the
sixteenth century, preferring, for example, Pieter Bruegel to Frans Floris or
Pieter Aertsen to Maerten van Heemskerck; nonetheless, it is gratifying to
see such topics finally addressed as part of the fuller art-historical record.
Recent exhibitions, such as Bruges and the Renaissance and Dutch Classicism
in Seventeenth-Century Painting, suggest a redress of an earlier, willful omission.39 In addition, German connections to Italian models, already the
center of Dürer appreciation, have been analyzed — as in the volume
Renaissance Venice and the North40 — in the wider context of fruitful
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 45 (1994): 348–81; “Renaissance Gothic in the
Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament,” Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 226–51.
35
Larry Silver, “The ‘Gothic’ Gossaert,” Pantheon 45 (1987): 58– 69; Ariane Mensger,
Jan Gossaert. Die niederländische Kunst zu Beginn der Neuzeit (Berlin, 2002).
36
See Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art in n. 27 above.
37
Eric Jan Sluijter, “De ‘heydensche fabulen’ in de Noordnederlandse schilderkunst,
circa 1590–1670” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1986); “Emulating Sensual Beauty:
Representations of Danaë from Gossaert to Rembrandt,” Simiolus 27 (1999): 4– 45; Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle, 2000).
38
The catalogue is Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten, eds., Hendrick Goltzius (1558 –
1617) (Amsterdam, 2003). Melion’s articles include “Karel van Mander’s Life of Goltzius:
Defining the Paradigm of Protean Virtuosity in Haarlem around 1600,” Studies in
the History of Art 27 (1989): 113–33; “Hendrick Goltzius’s Project of Reproductive
Engraving,” Art History 13 (1990): 458–87; “Love and Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius’s
Venus, Bacchus and Ceres of 1606,” Art History 16 (1993): 60–94; “Self-Imaging and the
Engraver’s virtù: Hendrick Goltzius’s Roman Heroes,” Modern Language Notes 110 (1995):
1090–1134; and “Vivae dixisses virginis ora: The Discourse of Color in Hendrick Goltzius’s
Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue,” Word and Image 17 (2001): 153–76.
39
See Maximiliaan Martens, ed., Bruges and the Renaissance (exhibition catalogue,
Bruges, 1998); Albert Blankert et al., eds., Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting
(exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, 2000).
40
Bernard Aikema and Beverly Brown, Renaissance Venice and the North (exhibition
catalogue, New York, 1999).
360
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
exchanges, particularly in the Augsburg of Burkgmair and for the Elder and
Younger Holbein and Breu.41
Beyond the purely visual rhetoric of the work of art, scholars now give
attention to the dialogue between Renaissance verbal rhetoric in its multiple forms and the purposes of visual art. Mark Meadow has investigated
Bruegel’s proverbs, which led him to Renaissance collections of verbal
commonplaces; he has also interpreted the artist’s references to earlier
Flemish art as a pictorial strategy that asserted traditional religious values
and naturalism against Italian fashion.42 Walter Melion has worked on
formative art-historical texts, beginning with Karel van Mander’s
crucial Schilderboeck of 1604 as well as the writings on art by Ortelius and
Lampsonius; similar studies on van Mander have been produced by Jürgen
Müller and Doris Krystof, building on the foundational work of Hessel
Miedema.43
Specific connections between Netherlandish urban Chambers of
Rhetoric and the visual arts were investigated in a conference. There
Meadow argued for Serlian architectural forms as a form of visual rhetoric
to signal serious public address in paintings as well as formal civic pageants.
Falkenburg found “paradoxical encomium,” the serious presentation of
humble subjects, in both paintings (Aertsen) and literature (such as
Erasmus’s Praise of Folly); Nina Serebrennikov investigated visual allegories
of Painting and Sculpture by Bruegel and Frans Floris as parallels to the
41
For Holbein the Elder, see Katharina Kruse, Hans Holbein der Ältere (Berlin, 2002);
for Breu, see Morrall, 2001 (n. 23 above).
42
Mark Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of
Rhetoric (Zwolle, 2002); and “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary, Æmulatio and the Space
of Vernacular Style,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1997): 181–205. See also
Catherine Scallen, “Rembrandt, Emulation, and the Northern Print Tradition,” in In
Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda
Dixon, 135– 49 (Turnhout, 1998); and Arthur Wheelock, Jr., “The Influence of Lucas van
Leyden on Rembrandt’s Narrative Etchings,” in Essays in Northern European Art Presented
to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Anne-Marie Logan, 291–96
(Doornspijk, 1983).
43
Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck
(Chicago, 1991); Jürgen Müller, Concordia Pragensis. Karel van Manders Kunsttheorie im
Schilder-Boeck (Munich, 1993); Doris Krystof, Werben für die Kunst. Bildliche Kunsttheorie
und das Rhetorische in den Kupferstichen von Hendrick Goltzius (Hildesheim, 1997).
Miedema’s works include the edited volume Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der Edel Vry
Schilder-Const, Uitgegeven en van Vertaling en Commentaar Vorzien door H. Miedema
(Utrecht, 1973); “Kunst, kunstenaar, kunstschilder: een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de
begrippen,” Oud Holland 102 (1988): 71–77; and Karel van Mander, The Lives of the
Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, Edited and with Commentary by Hessel
Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Doornspijk, 1994).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
361
performances of rederijker spelen van sinne in contemporary Antwerp.44
From the opposite side of the equation, the ongoing studies of early modern urban bourgeois Dutch literature by Herman Pleij have illuminated
visual motifs of Netherlandish art and its wider culture.45 A similar dialogue
between art and cultural practice has been recreated around Dürer and
Germany.46
Inverting Pleij’s consideration of shared, historically-situated complementarity between visual and verbal culture, Keith Moxey argues instead
in his recent work — notably his Practice of Theory and Practice of
Persuasion47 — in favor of radical indeterminacy or fully subjective construction of meaning in any visual interpretations and within art history in
general. He contends that authorship and argument — that is, rhetoric —
shape art-historical writing to fulfill the ideology and interested purpose of
the narrative. Thus, he argues — controversially — that the difference
between current academic analysis and Nazi propaganda only marks a
distinction of degree, not of kind, for custodians of cultural memory.
Nowhere does visual rhetoric play a greater role than in the wideranging variety of subjects used in printmaking, a major innovation of early
modern Europe, dating from even earlier in the fifteenth century than
Gutenberg’s Bible. Recent scholarship has contributed greatly to our understanding of this burgeoning medium and the international ramifications
of print culture, both woodcuts and intaglios. Here, too, the reigning
paradigms have shifted significantly since Panofsky, who still defined prints
primarily in terms of the signal masterworks of a single peintre-graveur
(painter-etcher), Dürer. Other printmakers, barely visible a generation ago,
now stock a growth industry of monographs. We also now have a synthetic
overview of both German and Netherlandish printmaking, The Renaissance
Print, 1470–1550.48 But the serious study of printmakers extends beyond
these limits, both to encompass the anonymous woodcuts of the earlier
44
Reindert Falkenburg, “Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer,” in Rhetoric-RhétoriqueursRederijkers, ed. Jelle Koopmans, Mark Meadow, Kees Meerhoff, and Marijke Spies
(Amsterdam, 1995), 197–217; Nina Serebrennikov, “‘Dwelck den Mensche, aldermeest tot
Consten verwect’: The Artist’s Perspective,” in ibid., 219–46.
45
See Herman Plej, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit (Amsterdam, 1983); De Sneeuwpoppen
van 1511 (Amsterdam, 1988); and Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb (1997;
reprint, New York, 2001).
46
Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika, Dürer and His Culture (Cambridge, 1998).
47
Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art
History (Ithaca, 1994); The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca,
2001).
48
David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470 –1550 (New Haven,
1994).
362
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
fifteenth century as well as to consider specialist masters in a later era of
professional printmakers.49 The phenomenon of the painter-etcher from
the origins of the medium of etching in the sixteenth century will receive
a fresh investigation in an upcoming exhibition in 2006, while Susan
Dackerman’s exhibition of Painted Prints revised our habitual notion of
viewing prints only in black-and-white.50 Jan van der Stock has challenged
the conventional fine-art definition of the print within the documented
urban context of printer-publisher producers and local consumers of cheap
images in sixteenth-century Antwerp.51
Other neglected, often expensive luxury media besides the tapestries
and illuminated manuscripts discussed above, have been reexamined of
late. For example, Stephen Scher and Jeffrey Chipps Smith have renewed
attention to these political and intellectual mementos in the form of bronze
medals in both Germany and the Netherlands.52 Long a neglected specialty
reserved for local antiquarians, Netherlandish architecture is now illuminated for palaces as well as churches and for stained glass.53 Flemish
metalwork, so often lost, has been addressed by Hugo van der Velden’s
thorough investigation of the goldsmith Gerard Loyet.54 Additionally, crucial French decorative arts in the sixteenth century are finally receiving
49
For the fifteenth century, see Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century
Woodcuts and their Public (exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC, 2005); for later
printmakers, see Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver, Graven Images: The Rise of Professional
Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540 –1640 (exhibition catalogue, Evanston, 1993).
50
The catalogue for the upcoming exhibition is Michael Cole and Madeleine Viljoen,
The Early Modern Painter-Etcher (Philadelphia, forthcoming); Susan Dackerman, Painted
Prints (exhibition catalogue, Baltimore, 2002).
51
Jan van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking to a
City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam, 1998).
52
Stephen Scher, The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (exhibition
catalogue, New York, 1994); for Smith, 1994, see n. 6 above.
53
For palaces, see Krista De Jonge, “Der herzogliche und kaiserliche Palast zu Brüssel
und die Entwicklung des höfische Zeremoniells im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch des
Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte 5–6 (1989–90): 253–82; “Het paleis op de Coudenberg
te Brussel in de vijftiende eeuw,” Revue Belge d’ Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art 59 (1990):
5–38; and “The Architectural Enterprises of the Emperor and his Court in the Low
Countries: The European Context,” in Belén Bartolomé Francia, ed., Carolus, 35–53 (exhibition catalogue, Toledo, 2000). For churches, see Jeremy Bangs, Church Art and
Architecture in the Low Countries before 1566 (Kirksville, 1997). For stained glass, see Ellen
Konowitz, Images in Light and Line: The Stained Glass Designs and Prints of Dirk Vellert
(Turnhout, 2005); and Timothy Husband, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in
the Lowlands, 1480 –1560 (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1995).
54
Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of
Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
363
attention, especially Limoges enamels and the experimental ceramics by
Palissy.55 Performance art and spectacle, with temporary, if grandiose,
structures — such as the entries and festivals of cities and courts — offer
a new, more historical mass medium.56
Even hidden artworks, the preparatory drawings by artists, have been
revealed through the ongoing intensive technological researches of
Molly Faries and Maryan Ainsworth — mostly notably in Ainsworth’s
book-length study of Gerard David — as well as the technical studies by
conservators at museums, such as the London National Gallery.57 These
technical discoveries not only shed (infrared) light on questions of attribution; they also provide invaluable insight into workshop procedures and
production, especially copying.
In addition to the recuperation of neglected media, more distant corners of Europe besides the Netherlands have received renewed attention. Notably, the earlier general neglect of German art, especially in
Anglophone scholarship, reinforced by the stigma attached to German
culture after World War Two, is being well redressed. Moreover, in
Germany other art centers besides Dürer’s Nuremberg are receiving
much-needed attention now: Augsburg, Cologne, and the Rhineland up to
Switzerland. 58 One exemplary collaboration between German and
American scholars reexamined stained glass from both Germany and
55
See Susan Caroselli, The Painted Enamels of Limoges (exhibition catalogue, Los
Angeles, 1993); Leonard Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (Paris, 1996).
56
See Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower, eds., “All the World’s a Stage. . . .”:
Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque (University Park, 1990); Reindert
Falkenburg et al., eds. Hof-, staats- en stadsceremonies. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49
(1998).
57
Maryane Ainsworth, Gerard David: Purity and Vision in an Age of Transition (New
York, 1998); Molly Faries, “Technical Studies of Early Netherlandish Painting: A Critical
Overview of Recent Developments,” in Recent Developments in the Technical Examination
of Early Netherlandish Painting: Methodology, Limitations & Perspectives, ed. Molly Faries
and Ron Spronk, 1–37 (Turnhout, 2003); David Bomford, ed., Art in the Making:
Underdrawing in Renaissance Paintings (London, 2002).
58
Smith, 1994 (see n. 6 above); Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Court, Cloister & City:
The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450 –1800 (Chicago, 1995); Pia Francesca Cuneo,
Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political
Identity ca. 1475 –1536 (Leiden, 1998); Brigitte Corley, Painting and Patronage in Cologne
1300–1500 (Turnhout, 2000); Rainer Budde and Roland Krischel, eds., Genie ohne Namen.
Der Meister des Bartholomäus-Altars (exhibition catalogue, Cologne, 2001); Dietmar Lüdke,
ed., Spätmittelalter am Oberrhein. Maler und Werkstätten 1450 –1525 (exhibition catalogue,
Karlsruhe, 2002); and Julien Chapuis, Stefan Lochner: Image Making in Fifteenth-Century
Cologne (Turnhout, 2004).
364
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Switzerland in the exhibition Painting on Light.59 Despite a major exhibition, crucial and innovative works by Wenzel Jamnitzer and other German
metalworkers in Munich and Prague remain understudied.60 Other than a
study on German Gothic churches, German architecture remains neglected, yet Smith’s new book on Jesuit churches of sixteenth-century
Germany (2002) ventures far beyond the usual emphasis on Reformation
patronage in the homeland of Martin Luther.61 Though not often singled
out as a cultural phenomenon, learned and courtly cultures in Germany
have also received some good recent attention.62
Moreover, French and Spanish art are no longer considered backwaters
relative to Flemish art. For France, Henri Zerner provides interpretive
readings of sixteenth-century works within a newly emerging national identity, complementing recent attention to French prints and ecclesiastical
tapestry cycles.63 A far-ranging new book by Rebecca Zorach studies the
culture of excess in Fontainebleau ornament to redefine both the purposes
and the effects of art that shaped the French Renaissance.64 For both
French and Iberian connections to the innovations of van Eyck and
Flemish painting, the wide-ranging catalogue by Borchert forms an essential reference.65 Spanish art is no longer dominated only by El Greco; and
its essential relationships to other regions in Europe, especially Spanish
59
Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the
Age of Dürer and Holbein (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2000).
60
The catalogue for the exhibition is Wenzel Jamnitzer und die Nürnberger
Goldschmiedekunst 1500 –1700 (Nuremberg, 1985). For the German metalworkers, see
Eliška Fučíková et al., eds., Rudolf II and Prague (exhibition catalogue, Prague, 1997).
61
See Norbert Nussbaum, German Gothic Church Architecture, trans. Scott Kleager
(1994; reprint, New Haven and London, 2000). For Smith, 2002, see n. 28 above
62
Martin Warnke, The Court Artist, trans. David McLintock (1985; reprint,
Cambridge, 1993); Edgar Bierende, Lucas Cranach d. Ä. und der deutsche Humanismus
(Munich, 2002); Susan Maxwell, “Friedrich Sustris and the Rise of the Court Artist:
Bavarian Court Patronage in the Age of the Counter-Reformation” (PhD diss., University
of Virginia, 2002); Thomas Schauerte, Albrecht Dürer. Das grosse Glück. Kunst im Zeichen
des geistigen Aufbruchs (exhibition catalogue, Osnabrück, 2003).
63
Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (1996; reprint,
Paris, 2002). For French prints, see The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 1994); for ecclesiastical tapestries,
see Laura Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of
Clerical Identity (Ithaca, 2004).
64
Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago,
2005).
65
Till-Holger Borchert, The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early
Netherlandish Painting 1430 –1530 (exhibition catalogue, Bruges, 2002).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
365
Flanders, though long neglected by specialists, can begin to emerge, particularly for the period before Rubens.66 While Spanish religious art has
always been regarded as traditional and conventional, its conventions have
now been well examined: retablos, visionary devotional images in painting
and sculpture, and liturgical manuscripts in Toledo, as well as general art
production.67 Royal luxury objects of armor and tapestry for the Habsburgs
now provide major links to Northern Europe, Germany, and Flanders,
respectively, and their other patronage investments have also received studies: Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the Escorial, and the wider royal patronage of
Philip II.68 Beginning with royal surveillance, Richard Kagan analyzes
Spanish city views as well as colonial urban images.69 Indeed, one great new
frontier of art history is Spanish (and Portuguese Brazilian) colonial material, increasingly revisited as a site of tensions from both the side of the
indigenous populations as well as the European settlers.70
For England, connections to royal interests and imagery have always
been central. The recent exhibition on Elizabeth I complements wider
studies of art and politics — as well as Karen Hearn’s volume on portraiture — building in turn upon foundational work by Roy Strong.71 Earlier
English art in all its diversity was encompassed by the important recent
66
Ibid.; Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Ignace Vandevivere, Luister van Spanje en de
Belgische Steden 1500 –1700 (exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1985). For the pre-Rubens era,
see Alexander Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons (Cambridge, 1999).
67
For retablos, see Judith Berg Sobré, Behind the Altar Table: The Development of the
Painted Retable in Spain, 1350 –1500 (Columbia, MO, 1989); Chiyo Ishikawa, The Retablo
de Isabel la Católica by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow (Turnhout, 2004). For painted
devotional images, see Stoichita, 1995 (n. 32 above); for sculpted ones, see Susan Verdi
Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain (Princeton, 1998). For the Toledo manuscripts, see Lynette Bosch, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo (University Park,
2000); general art production is examined in The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and
Architecture in Spain and Spanish America, 1500 –1600, Fenway Court 28 (1998).
68
For the Habsburgs, see Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Concha Herrero Carretero, and
José Godoy, Resplendence of the Spanish Monarchy: Renaissance Tapestries and Armor from the
Patrimonio Nacional (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991). For the Plaza Mayor, see Jesus
Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge, 2003); for Philip
II, see Rosemarie Mulchay, The Decoration of the Royal Basilica of El Escorial (Cambridge,
1994) and Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin, 2004).
69
Richard Kagan, Spanish Cities of the Golden Age (Berkeley, 1989); and Urban Images
of the Hispanic World 1493 –1793 (New Haven, 2000).
70
See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London, 2005).
71
See David Starkey, Elizabeth (exhibition catalogue, London, 2003); David Howarth,
Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Berkeley, 1997); John
King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, 1989); Karen Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in
Tudor and Jacobean England 1530 –1630 (exhibition catalogue, London, 1995).
366
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exhibition of English Gothic; religious visual culture in Britain received a
sympathetic reading in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars.72 Not to
be overlooked is an important interdisciplinary anthology by Erickson and
Hulse, whose studies also use literary sources and postcolonial theory to
address such encompassing cultural issues in early modern English visual
culture as national identity, racialism, and empire.73
Today the arts of Bohemia and Poland no longer lie beyond a Cold
War Iron Curtain, though they still carry a Slavic language barrier for most
scholars.74 Modern geographical boundaries have been expanded broadly
for scholars, especially Kaufmann, to encompass all of Central Europe,
following earlier, more regional apologetics of Jan Bialostocki of Poland.
Indeed, we are increasingly likely now to look at contacts between different
regions of Europe — Denmark, for example.75
Scholars have recently begun to examine the contact between Europe’s
art and other regions of the world after 1492, whether we look between
Spain and the New World, or else the Portuguese and then the Dutch in
Africa and Asia.76 Such a broader vision already underlay one important
anthology, appropriately entitled Reframing the Renaissance, and it can be
supplemented with groundbreaking exhibition catalogues on America, the
“Bride of the Sun,” and Australia.77 International collaborations by Jesuits
abroad have recently been examined.78 We begin now to study the reciprocal importance of foreign ventures on Dutch visual culture, particularly
in the form of maps and atlases, as in the volume on Dutch outlook on
America, Innocence Abroad by Benjamin Schmidt, and on Asia by Kees
72
Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, Gothic: Art for England 1400 –1547 (exhibition
catalogue, London, 2003); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England 1400 –1580 (New Haven and London, 1992).
73
Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race,
and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2000).
74
For Bohemia, see Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, The School of Prague (Chicago,
1988); Fučíková et al. (n. 60 above). For Poland, see Jan Ostrowski, Land of the Winged
Horsemen: Art in Poland 1572–1764 (exhibition catalogue, Alexandria, VA, 1999).
75
See Steffen Heiberg, ed., Christian IV and Europe (exhibition catalogue, Copenhagen,
1988); Kaufmann, 2004 (see n. 27 above).
76
See Bailey, 2005 (n. 70 above); Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch in Asia 1600 –1950
(Amsterdam, 2002).
77
Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin
America 1450 –1650 (New Haven and London, 1995); Paul Vandenbroek, America: Bride
of the Sun (exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1992); William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images
of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge, 1995).
78
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542–
1773 (Toronto, 1999).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
367
Zandvliet.79 A new exhibition, Encounters, examines the broader interactions of Europe with Asia from both points of view.80
Increasing interest in what is termed cultural geography has begun to
prompt some art history, such as Farago’s Reframing anthology and
Kaufmann’s Geography of Art. In addition, although visual specialists have
ignored the profoundly visual world of cartographers, the achievements of
map scholars remind us of the continuity between later sixteenth-century
mapmaking and the Dutch Golden Age.81 The forthcoming volume on
early modern maps organized by the late, lamented David Woodward, will
consolidate this important field across Europe for art historians as well as
other scholars.82
Such studies of geography point to the importance of visual images in
the recording of new knowledge. One area where art history has contributed greatly to this same kind of interdisciplinary understanding of a major
early modern phenomenon is the foundational contribution of visual imagery to taxonomic representation of the natural world at the advent of the
scientific era. Peter Parshall examines “counterfeit” images, especially replicable printed images, whose verisimilitude made them major contributors
to sixteenth-century taxonomic classification of the natural world; Dürer’s
animal images and their legacy have also been closely studied.83 In a special
issue of Word & Image Christopher Wood underscores the general importance of the concept of curiosity to the era of collecting and learning, and
Claudia Swan discusses de Gheyn’s vivid naturalistic drawings within the
learned culture of Leiden University, especially Carolus Clusius.84 Of
course, the study of Dutch flower pieces, largely beyond our chronological
79
Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World,
1570 –1670 (Cambridge, 2001); Zandvliet, 2002 (n. 76 above).
80
Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–
1800 (exhibition catalogue, London, 2004).
81
Kees Zandvliet, Mapping For Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and their
Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16 th and 17 th Centuries (Amsterdam, 1998);
Kagan, 2000 (see n. 69 above).
82
David Woodward, ed., History of Cartography, volume on Renaissance-early modern
Europe (forthcoming).
83
Parshall, 1993 (n. 29 above); Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant
Studies of the Renaissance, trans. Pamela Marwood and Yehuda Shapiro (Boston, 1988);
Colin Eisler, Dürer’s Animals (Washington, DC, 1991).
84
Christopher Wood, “‘Curious Pictures’ and the Art of Description,” Word & Image
11 (1995): 332–52; Claudia Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the Life: Defining a
Mode of Representation,” Word & Image 11 (1995): 353–72; see now Swan, Art, Science,
and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge,
2005).
368
R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
limits, has richly bloomed in scholarship.85 More general scientific wonder
persisted in the Low Countries.86
Like the multidisciplinary interests of early modern collectors of natural wonders, modern scholars have also collaborated with art historians to
consider this crucial period of knowledge expansion.87 For astronomical
observation, particularly comets, Roberta Olson has used art to pursue
knowledge and its associated values.88 Related contributions to art history
have also come from science historians.89 But in return, art historians have
also made major contributions to the understanding of knowledge through
its visual codification, such as Filipczak on humors and Sherman on
memory and knowledge in early modern Europe.90
Social interpretations of artworks, particularly prints, have made them
primary documents, albeit sometimes of values rather than contemporary
appearances. This is particularly true for German graphic images, subject of
a cluster of studies by Moxey that interrogate the relationship between
broadsheet images and their accompanying texts by the likes of Hans
Sachs.91 Representations of soldiers in particular have received focused
attention by both historians of warfare and art historians;92 images of
85
Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600 –1720 (New Haven, 1995); Alan Chong
and Wouter Kloek, Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550 –1720 (exhibition catalogue, Cleveland, 1999).
86
Ellinnor Bergvelt and Renée Kistemaker, De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse
kunst en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585 –1735 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1992);
Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
(Chicago, 2004).
87
Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art
in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002).
88
Roberta Olson, Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art (New York, 1985); Roberta
Olson and Jay Pasachoff, Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in
British Art and Science (Cambridge, 1998). See also Larry Silver, “Nature and Nature’s God:
Landscape and Cosmos of Albrecht Altdorfer,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 194–214.
89
Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150 –1750
(Cambridge, MA, 1998).
90
Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Hot Dry Men/Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in
Western European Art 1575–1700 (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997); Claire Richter
Sherman, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (exhibition
catalogue, Carlisle, PA, 2000).
91
Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation
(Chicago, 1989).
92
J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1990); Pia Francesca
Cuneo, Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Leiden,
2002); David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550 –
1672 (Leiden, 2002).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
369
punishment form the background even for images of saintly martyrdom in
German art.93 For Netherlandish art, Paul Vandenbroeck offers a more
anthropological and cultural reading of outcast figures such as fools, peasants, and beggars; he has also considered the role of dance in art and
culture.94 Artistic representations of various genre subjects in Dutch prints
are analyzed by de Jongh and Luijten.95 The topical issue of family history,
both in respect to the relations between the sexes and the rearing of
children, enables art historians to build upon historians’ recent findings:
they reveal that art asserted positive images of children, at least in
Holland.96
Feminist considerations of sex and gender have inflected many another
study of our period. A fine catalogue of prints is complemented by an
anthology on gender issues.97 Witchcraft issues — well-explored for both
Germany and the Low Countries (including artworks) by historians98 —
are also addressed by art historians, including a study of the wider pictorial
cycle of the “Power of Women.”99 Images of rape and of male domination,
often taken from illuminated manuscripts and military prints, have also
been sensitively analyzed.100 However, there is still too little attention paid
93
Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1998).
94
Paul Vandenbroeck, ed., Beeld van de andere, Vertoog over het zelf: Over Wilden en
narren, Boeren en bedelaars (exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1987); De kleuren van de geest:
Dans en trance in Afro-Europese Tradities (Ghent, 1997).
95
Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: Genre Prints in the
Netherlands 1550 –1700 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1997).
96
Jan Baptist Bedaux and Rudi Ekkart, Pride and Joy: Children’s Portraits in the
Netherlands 1500 –1700 (exhibition catalogue, Haarlem, 2000).
97
H. Diane Russell and Bernadine Barnes, Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque
Prints (exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC, 1990); Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart, eds.,
Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Aldershot, 2003).
98
See Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze (New Haven, 2004); Charles Zika, Exorcising Our
Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2003).
99
Art historians include Linda Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in
Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2005); Petty Bange et al., Tussen heks en heilige. Het
vrouwbeeld op de drempel van de moderne tijd, 15de/16de eeuw (Nijmegen, 1985). For the
“Power of Women” cycle, see Yvonne Blyerveld, Hoe bedriechlijck dat die vrouwen zijn.
Vrouwenlisten in de beeldende kunst in de Nederlanden circa 1350 –1650 (Leiden, 2000);
Susan Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia,
1995).
100
See Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives
(Cambridge, 1999); Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight,
Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001).
370
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to the erotic in a more positive sense during a period in which the erotic
became thematized for mythological figures as well as more ordinary humans. While this material has been closely analyzed for Italy by Bette
Talvacchia, an essay by Janey Levy on the Behams’ erotic engravings remains isolated, except for some studies of erotically-charged female nudes
by Dürer and Baldung.101
Feminist interests also prompted recent cultural studies, such as the
study of the period significance of clothing by English literary historians
Jones and Stallybrass.102 Interest in the actual social role of female patrons
is enjoying a major revival, particularly for female rulers: Margaret of
Austria, Catherine de’ Medici, and Elizabeth I of England, as well as the
first Stuart queen in England, Anna of Denmark.103
A final social issue that has been garnering increased attention in recent
decades is the economics of art history. Research has chiefly focused on the
Netherlands, revealing both the market institutions and personal side of art
sales through dealer networks.104 The work of Montias and of De Marchi
and Van Miegroet has also extended well into the seventeenth century.
101
Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton,
1999); Janey Levy, “The Erotic Engravings of Sebald and Barthel Beham: A German
Interpretation of a Renaissance Subject,” in The World in Miniature: Engravings by the
German Little Masters, ed. Stephen Goddard, 40–53 (exhibition catalogue, Lawrence, KS,
1988). For Dürer’s and Baldung’s nudes, see Sigrid Schade, Schadenzauber und die Magie
des Körpers: Hexenbilder der frühen Neuzeit (Worms, 1983); Joseph Koerner, 1993 (n. 16
above); Charles Talbot, “Baldung and the Female Nude,” in Hans Baldung Grien: Prints and
Drawings, ed. James Marrow and Alan Shestack, 19–37 (exhibition catalogue, New Haven,
1981).
102
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Memory (Cambridge, 2000).
103
See, respectively, Dagmar Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst.
Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlande
(Turnhout, 2002); Sheila ffolliott, “The Ideal Queenly Patron of the Renaissance: Catherine
de’ Medici Defining Herself or Defined by Others?” in Women and Art in Early Modern
Europe: Patrons, Collectors, & Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence, 99–110 (University Park,
1997); Starkey, 2003 (n. 71 above); Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England
(Philadelphia, 2001).
104
See Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s
Golden Age (Turnhout, 2003); Dan Ewing, “Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460–1560: Our
Lady’s Pand,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 558–84; John Michael Montias, “Cost and Value in
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,” Art History 10 (1987): 455– 66, and “Socio-Economic
Aspects of Netherlandish Art from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: A Survey,” Art
Bulletin 72 (1990): 358–73; Neil De Marchi and Hans Van Miegroet, “Art, Value and
Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994):
451– 63, “Exploring Markets for Netherlandish Paintings in Spain and Nueva España,”
A R T S A N D MIN D S
371
Considering the implications of the art market for objects, other scholars
have analyzed the effects of the money economy, whether in the choice of
monetary themes for images or else new production processes to satisfy a
growing consumer culture.105 One intriguing, wide-ranging recent anthology, Merchants and Marvels, even brings together art collecting, science,
and commerce.106
These considerations of cultural and social issues suggest that the quality and quantity of interdisciplinary conversations over the past generation
have expanded even beyond Baxandall, let alone the pioneering formulations of Panofsky. As its very name declares, art history as a discipline is
inherently interdisciplinary — between the internal history of art itself and
the role of art as history — as the visual culture within any culture under
study, however defined: late medieval-early modern-RenaissanceReformation, or any emerging national or princely culture. Conversations
across disciplines readily engage other historians of literature, science, religion, society, economics, and politics. One result has been the dissolving
of those invisible but persistent conceptual boundaries between regions and
centuries, which once seemed so sacrosanct — discreetly organized into
North versus South, Renaissance versus Reformation, fifteenth versus
sixteenth versus seventeenth century. Continuities now abound where once
we defined differences or breaks. Even the hardiest boundary of all, between modern Belgium and Holland, has lately become fluid, as evidenced
by keen current interest in Pieter Bruegel by scholars from both parts of
Brabant, reminding us of the shared language behind the Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek or of the historical term, Netherlandish, for art in
this period, rather than Flemish or Dutch art for the seventeenth century.107
Indeed, current Bruegel scholarship offers a useful index of what has
been happening of late in our field more generally. Rhetorical interpretations range from literal associations with ancient Roman satirical texts or
contemporary literature, as well as issues of imitation and emulation of
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 81–111, and “Rules versus Play in Early
Modern Markets,” Recherches Economiques de Louvain 66 (2000): 145–65.
105
See Basil Yamey, Art and Accounting (New Haven, 1989); Jacobs, 1998 (see n. 7
above); Jean Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages (University Park,
1998); Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven,
1998); van der Stock (see n. 51 above); Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise
of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia, 2005).
106
See n. 87 above.
107
See the special issue devoted to Bruegel of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47
(1997).
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R E N A IS S A N CE Q U A R T ERLY
earlier visual models.108 Kavaler reads Bruegel images of peasant labor and
leisure in relation to larger issues of social and economic order, while Silver
considers Bruegel’s output within art market pressures to be a second Bosch
or an identifiable “brand name” landscape or peasant artist, while also
responding to challenges posed by Antwerp’s rapid urban changes and
incipient capitalism.109 Joseph Gregory revisits ambitious Bruegel religious
pictures in order to analyze their content and to consider their spirituality
in terms of contemporary religious redefinition.110
In similar fashion, a recent volume, Dürer and His Culture, features a
varied, interdisciplinary mixture of authors and includes the following
topics: images of nature and early collections; Germanic patriotism as a
precondition for representations of local landscape and contemporary soldiers; images of witchcraft and of love; “ways of seeing”; problems of
censorship and allegories of virtue; and the historiography of Dürer’s canonical status and collecting.111 To read this entire book is to discover how
much and how variously Dürer participated in his contemporary culture,
and how it can now be supplemented with a thoughtful cultural reconsideration of Dürer by a scholar of church history.112
The so-called “new art history,” at least in its dialogue with history or
historical anthropology, lies close to what, many generations ago, was called
“art in context.” Ironically, this attempt to forge interpretation within
verbal and ethnographic analysis was much more significant for literary
history, where it has come to be called “the new historicism.” But current
art-historical research does move into a more inclusive vision of what
constitutes visual culture in its historical period, permitting attention to
objects, often anonymous, that were not previously considered artworks at
all, such as the full range of all printed images in sixteenth-century Antwerp
or the entire roster of prints — religious images, broadsheets, town plans,
108
For Bruegel and Roman satire, see Margaret Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants (Cambridge,
1994); for Bruegel and contemporary literature, see Walter Gibson, “Artists and Rederijkers
in the Age of Bruegel,” Art Bulletin 63 (1981): 426 – 46, and The Art of Laughter in the Age
of Bosch and Bruegel (Groningen, 2003). Meadow, 1997 (see n. 42 above), looks at imitation
and emulation.
109
See Ethan Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge,
1999); Silver, 2005 (n. 105 above).
110
Joseph Gregory, Contemporization as Polemical Device in Pieter Bruegel’s Biblical
Narratives. Forthcoming.
111
See n. 46 above.
112
David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and
the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, 2003).
A R T S A N D MIN D S
373
and maps, as well as what we would now call “scientific illustrations” (such
as herbals) — in standard histories of prints.113
Emerging at present, then, is a more truly collaborative art history,
making use of the best questions and scholarship from adjacent disciplines.
While we still have much to learn from reexamination of basic data —
archives, underdrawings, and of the objects themselves — we surely see and
learn many new things about our objects of study when we reflect about
methods and questions, or when we are challenged to use visual culture in
order to contribute to general knowledge about other aspects of culture:
family and gender, values and knowledge, status and power. Active,
cross-disciplinary collaborations — such as De Marchi and Van Miegroet
on the art market, or Eichberger and Zika on the culture of Albrecht
Dürer114 — enrich the enlarged conversation and keep the focus on the
purposes and audiences for which artworks of all kinds were made. For a
discipline named art history, built on the dialogue between art and history,
between objects and culture, between past and present, our early modern
period in Northern Europe remains complex and tumultuous — a period
unsteadily situated between the Flemish ars nova and the Dutch Golden
Age, between late medieval and early modern history, between regionalism
and international exploration. As scholars, we should strive to be at least as
flexible and receptive to culture as the artists and media we seek to study
(think Dürer), and to be critical and conscious of both our modern biases
and our scholarly methods while we engage in the ultimate dialogue — at
once to analyze differences between ourselves and the media and culture of
a lost age, while continually making those connections that necessarily link
those very remnants to our present.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
113
See van der Stock (n. 51 above); Landau and Parshall (n. 48 above); Parshall, 1993
(n. 29 above); Origins of European Printmaking (see n. 49 above).
114
Nn. 104 and 46 above, respectively.