Thijs Weststeijn – författare

Samuel van Hoogstraten was not only one of Rembrandt’s most succesful pupils and a versatile painter. His experiments in optical illusion also attracted the interest of the natural scientists of his time. Furthermore, he wrote some of the first Dutch novels, plays, and a treatise on painting. After travelling to Rome, Vienna, and London he introduced European courtiers’ manners in the Low Countries. In this book, a collective of specialists with different backgrounds sheds light on the facets of Van Hoogstraten’s work that demonstrates in a unique manner how art, literature, and science were interrelated in the Dutch Golden Age. The contributors devote special attention to his theory of art and his literary writings, the role of paintings in his social network, his contacts in Italy and Britain, and finally the art of his master, Rembrandt. Bringing to the fore hitherto unknown works and highlighting new connections between word and image, the book is an important contribution to our understanding of Van Hoogstraten’s universal art and its implications for Early Modern cultural history.

As the wooden piles under Amsterdam begin to rot, water levels rise in Venice, and the 4,500-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro flood in Pakistan. Compaction of peat soil in northern England is causing Hadrian’s Wall to collapse. The bricks of excavated Babylon are exploding due to increasing salt levels. Melting permafrost in Siberia is endangering the ancient burial mounds of the Scythian civilisation. In the US, hurricanes have partially destroyed the heritage of New Orleans and Puerto Rico, while the 2019 wildfires forced the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to close.The climate crisis is threatening historical heritage all over the world, with higher temperatures, more storms and fires and, of course, rising water. Monuments, buildings, inner cities and cultural landscapes are at risk, and museums such as the Louvre have already started relocating parts of their collections to climate-proof storage facilities. Written by a highly regarded art historian, The Future of the Past addresses this urgent issue and asks us to include the fate of beauty in our conversations on climate change.  Extreme weather means we have to approach history in new ways. Historical heritage now confronts us not only with the past, but also the future.

How did the classical tradition survive on the North Sea shores? This richly illustrated book explores the interplay between art and erudition in the seventeenth century. It analyses the sources, editions, and reception of Franciscus Junius’s writings to chart how ideas about Northern European painting, from Van Dyck to Rembrandt, developed as a counterweight to the Italian tradition. Thus the language of art in Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients appears to be related to his seminal work in the field of Germanic linguistics and his discovery of the shared pre-Christian civilization of Holland and England. Junius’s innovative pairing of scholarship to the painter’s practice illuminates the reception of antiquity and the creation of an Anglo-Dutch artistic Arcadia.

What was the cultural impact of early meetings between Chinese and Europeans? This book explores visual, literary, and scholarly representations of the Celestial Empire and Western countries against the backdrop of actual encounters. Based on rare Chinese and, correspondingly, European (especially Dutch) sources and archival documents, the volume covers a range of cultural expressions from the applied arts to philosophy. Special attention goes to the ideals and realities of trade and diplomacy of the Dutch East India Company in China. Foreign Devils and Philosophers approaches global history from a cultural perspective and illuminates the reciprocal dynamic of aversion and admiration: Chinese and Westerners could appear as sages or savages in each other’s eyes.

The first step towards the development of a comparative history of the humanities.

This much-awaited second volume investigates the changes in subject, method and institutional context of the humanistic disciplines around 1800, offering a wealth of insights for specialists and students alike. Point of departure is the pivotal question whether there was a paradigm shift in the humanities around 1800 or whether these changes were part of a much longer process. The authors provide an overarching perspective including philology, musicology, art history, linguistics, historiography, philosophy and literary theory. They also make clear that the influence from the East, from the Ottoman Empire to China, was crucial for the development of the European humanistic disciplines.

Volume III in the first comparative history of the humanities, focusing on the period 1850-2000.