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Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Fall of the Rebel Angels is the first comprehensive book on one of the most cherished masterpieces of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
This book is also available in Paperback Erudite Eyes explores the network of the Antwerp cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), a veritable trading zone of art and erudition. Populated by such luminaries as Pieter Bruegel, Joris Hoefnagel, Justus Lipsius and Benedictus Arias Montanus, among others, this vibrant antiquarian culture yielded new knowledge about local antiquities and distant civilizations, and offered a framework for articulating art and artistic practice. These fruitful exchanges, undertaken in a spirit of friendship and collaboration, are all the more astonishing when seen against the backdrop of the ongoing wars. Based on a close reading of early modern letters, alba amicorum, printed books, manuscripts and artworks, this book situates Netherlandish art and culture between Bruegel and Rubens in a European perspective.
This focused volume presents a deep exploration and new interpretations of the winter paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569). By applying new methodological approaches and interdisciplinary research to these masterpieces of Flemish Renaissance art, including Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) and The Census at Bethlehem (1566), both at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the book offers an enhanced understanding of the painter's relationship to his time and the extent to which his winter landscapes were meant to reflect real-life situations. After tracing how these paintings have been understood over time, the essays propose new insights into such issues as whether Bruegel depicts the plight of the local populace during winter and whether The Census at Bethlehem challenges or reaffirms central power structures. Abundantly illustrated, Bruegel's Winter Scenes is both a thorough examination and a celebration of these widely admired images. Distributed for Mercatorfonds.
Barbara Kaminska’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community is the first book-length study focusing on religious paintings by one of the most captivating Netherlandish artists, long celebrated for his secular imagery. In a period marked by a profound religious, economic, and cultural transformation, Bruegel offered his sophisticated urban audience complex biblical images that required an engaged, active viewing, not only sparking learned dinner conversations, but facilitating the negotiation of values seen as critical to maintaining a harmonious society. By considering the novelty of Bruegel’s panels used in convivia alongside his small, intimate grisaille compositions, this study ultimately shows that Bruegel renewed the idiom of religious painting, successfully preserving its ritualistic and meditative functions.
In early modern Europe, discernment emerged as a key notion at the intersection of various domains in both learned and artisanal cultures. Often used synonymously with judgment, ingenuity, and taste, discernment defined the ability to perceive and understand the secrets of nature and art, and became explicitly connected with a kind of knowledge available only to experts in the respective fields. With contributions by historians of art and historians of science, and with geographic coverage focusing on the Low Countries and their multiple connections to different parts of the world, this volume reframes recent scholarship on what the editors term 'cultures of knowledge and discernment' in the early modern period. The collection is innovative in its focus on investigating types of knowledge linked to what was then called the 'science' (scientia) of art, to artistic expertise and connoisseurship, and to 'secrets of art and nature.'
Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600) internationalized Flemish miniature painting in the sixteenth century unlike any other artist. He enriched the natural sciences as well, particularly entomology, with exquisite depictions owing to his keen gift of observation. Upon viewing his breathtaking works, it is all the more surprising that he Hoefnagel developed his own talent as a self-taught artist. The painter belongs to a circle of highly educated artists and humanists who were active in the late sixteenth century at the most important European courts. It is within this environment that he created his illuminations in comprehensive codices of religious and worldly content. After training as a painter in Antwerp, his son Jacob Hoefnagel (1575-1632/33) followed in his father's footsteps, dazzling the art chamber at the imperial court in Prague with his works. He, however, concentrated primarily on mythological and allegorical scenes. With an analytical gaze and scholarship-based texts, this richly illustrated volume introduces readers to the visual worlds of the miniaturists that, just as they did then, continue to arouse mesmerized admiration in the eyes of the beholder.
European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with wh...
This book is about representations of the devil in English and European literature. Tracing the fascination in literature, philosophy, and theology with the irreducible presence of what may be called evil, or comedy, or the carnivalesque, this book surveys the parts played by the devil in the texts derived from the Faustus legend, looks at Marlowe and Shakespeare, Rabelais, Milton, Blake, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Mann, historically, speculatively, and from the standpoint of critical theory. It asks: Is there a single meaning to be assigned to the idea of the diabolical? What value lies in thinking diabolically? Is it still the definition of a good poet to be of the devil's party, as Blake argued?
Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere.
This book speaks about a world of mute objects ranging from plant bulbs, divining rods, and archeological findings to drawn, painted, or printed images. It describes the functions of these objects as ambiguous and polyvalent carriers of knowledge, and it analyzes the ways in which networks of scholars, craftsmen, mathematicians, anatomy professors, or merchants active in the Low Countries attributed new meanings to them. The book examines a period in which cities like Antwerp and Amsterdam were nodal points in the international exchange of goods, news, and skills. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 1)