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Closely associated with the social elite, the lute occupied a central place in the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. In this first comprehensive study of the instrument's role in seventeenth-century Netherlands, Jan W. J. Burgers explores how it functioned as the universal means of solo music making, group performance, and accompaniment. He showcases famous and obscure musicians; lute music in books and manuscripts; lute makers and the international lute trade; and the instrument's place in Dutch literature and art of the period. Enhanced by beautiful illustrations, this study constitutes an important contribution to our knowledge about the lute and its Golden Age heyday.
An accessible introduction to the political, economic, literary, and artistic heritage of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.
How did painters and their public speak about art in Rembrandt's age? This book about the writings of the painter-poet Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of Rembrandt's pupils, examines a wide variety of themes from painting practice and theory from the Dutch Golden Age. It addresses the contested issue of 'Dutch realism' and its hidden symbolism, as well as Rembrandt's concern with representing emotions in order to involve the spectator. Diverse aspects of imitation and illusion come to the fore, such as the theory behind sketchy or 'rough' brushwork and the active role played by the viewer's imagination. Taking as its starting point discussions in Rembrandt's studio, this unique study provides an ambitious overview of Dutch artists' ideas on painting.
Is it possible to talk about Dutch art after 1680 outside the prevailing critical framework of the "age of decline"? Although an increasing number of studies are being published on the art and society of this period, genre painting of this era continues to be dismissed as an uninspired repetition of the art of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age. In this stunningly illustrated study, Aono reconsiders the long-dismissed genre painting from 1680-1750. Grounded in close analysis of a range of paintings and primary sources, this study illuminates the main features of genre painting, highlighting the ways in which these elements related to the painters' close connections to, on the one hand, collectors, and on the other, to classicism, one of the dominant artistic styles of that time. Three case studies, richly supplemented by a catalogue of 29 selected painters and their work, offer the first clear picture of the genre painting of the period while providing new insights into painters' activities, collectors' tastes and the contemporary art market.
This volume of essays derives from a memorable interdisciplinary symposium. At issue were various fundamental questions about the nature of Dutch sixteenth-and seventeenth-century society that fall under three broad categories: civic culture, art, and religion. The fourteen papers presented in this volume offer a number of fascinating insights into these and other questions that, taken together, greatly enrich our perception and understanding of this rich and varied society.
Sex and Drugs Before the Rock ’n’ Rollis a fascinating volume that presents an engaging overview of what it was like to be young and male in the Dutch Golden Age. Here, well-known cohorts of Rembrandt are examined for the ways in which they expressed themselves by defying conservative values and norms. This study reveals how these young men rebelled, breaking from previous generations: letting their hair grow long, wearing colorful clothing, drinking excessively, challenging city guards, being promiscuous, smoking, and singing lewd songs. Cogently argued, this study paints a compelling portrait of the youth culture of the Dutch Golden Age, at a time when the rising popularity of print made dissemination of new cultural ideas possible, while rising incomes and liberal attitudes created a generation of men behaving badly.
This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.
Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt a...
Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg -- the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?