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How today’s questions surrounding monuments and the ways we commemorate our past first arose in Rembrandt’s time Monuments occupy a controversial place in nations founded on principles of freedom and self-governance. It is no accident that when we think of monuments, we think of statues modeled on legacies of conquest, domination, and violence. The Monument’s End reveals how the artists, architects, poets, and scholars of the early modern Netherlands contended with the profound disconnect between the public monument and the ideals of republican government. Their experiences offer vital lessons about the making, reception, and destruction of monuments in the present. In the seventeenth ...
How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to...
"A history of shells in early modern Europe, and their rich cultural and artistic significance"--
Since its invention by Andrea Alciato, the emblem is inextricably connected to the natural world. Alciato and his followers drew massively their inspiration from it. For their information about nature, the emblem authors were greatly indebted to ancient natural history, the medieval bestiaries, and the 15th- and 16th-century proto-emblematics, especially the imprese. The natural world became the main topic of, for instance, Camerarius’s botanical and zoological emblem books, and also of the ‘applied’ emblematics in drawings and decorative arts. Animal emblems are frequently quoted by naturalists (Gesner, Aldrovandi). This interdisciplinary volume aims to address these multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying ideologies – scientific, artistic, literary, political and/or religious. Contributors: Alison Saunders, Anne Rolet, Marisa Bass, Bernhard Schirg, Maren Biederbick, Sabine Kalff, Christian Peters, Frederik Knegtel, Agnes Kusler, Aline Smeesters, Astrid Zenker, Tobias Bulang, Sonja Schreiner, Paul Smith, and Karl Enenkel.
The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherland...
Annabel M. Patterson offers here a reassessment of the place of Hermogenes, a Greek rhetorician of the second century A.D., in literary history. She shows that the literary men of the European Renaissance-scholars, critics, and poets-found Hermogenes' Concerning Ideas both important and extremely useful, and she finds that they vigorously applied his concepts to create "a lovely conformitie." The author first gives the history of this treatise on style and a detailed critical analysis of the Seven Ideas or categories of style. The book then demonstrates genre by genre how knowledge of the Seven Ideas can improve one's understanding of poetic development, especially in England, and reveals ho...
Table of Contents: Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Introduction - Eric Jan Sluijter, The Nude, the Artist and the Model: The Case of Rembrandt - Erna Kok, The Female Nude from Life: On Studio Practice and Beholder Fantasy - Victoria Sancho Lobis, Printed Drawing Books and the Dissemination of Ideal Male Anatomy in Northern Europe - Paul Taylor, Colouring Nakedness in Netherlandish Art and Theory - Hubert Meeus, Two Founts of Ivory: Nudity on Stage in the Seventeenth Century Low Countries - -Johan Verberckmoes, Is that Flesh for Sale? Seventeenth-Century Jests on Nudity in the Spanish Netherlands - Ralph Dekoninck, Art Stripped Bare by the Theologians, Even: Image of Nudity / Nudity of Image in the Post-Tridentine Religious Literature - Veerle De Laet, Een Naeckt Kindt, een Naeckt Vrauwken ende Andere Figueren: An Analysis of Nude Representations in the Brussels Domestic Setting.
Issued in connection with an exhibition held Oct. 5, 2010-Jan. 17, 2011, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Feb. 23-May 30, 2011, National Gallery, London (selected paintings only).
Saints walking around headless, vagina-shaped wounds and a Jesus being crushed like a grape: welcome to medieval man's intriguing perception of the world. Thanks to a growing fixation on the body and body parts, some of the works of art created in the late Middle Ages meet with amazement and sometimes incomprehension today. How should we, from our position in the present, look at these works of art from so long ago? Body Language introduces you to the role of the body in devotion in the late Middle Ages (1300-1500) and to the surprising/sometimes bizarre works of art associated with it. Once you have finished this book, your view of the body will have changed forever. This publication concludes a multi-year research project on the body in the Middle Ages that was conducted at the University of Amsterdam. It will be presented at an exhibition of the same name that will feature at the Catharijne Convent Museum. Exhibition: Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, The Netherlands (25.09.2020 – 17.01.2021).
Anthropomorphism – the projection of the human form onto the every aspect of the world – closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays – are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such work, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume address how the anthropomorphic model is fraught with contradictions and tensions, between magical and rational, speculative and practical thought. Contributors include Pamela Brekka, Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Ralph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christopher P. Heuer, Sarah Kyle, Walter S. Melion, Christina Normore, Elizabeth Petcu, Bertrand Prevost, Bret Rothstein, Paul Smith, Miya Tokumitsu, Michel Weemans, and Elke Werner.