Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History – serie

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.

'Painting contains a divine force which not only makes the absent present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.' Taking up Alberti's connection between divine power, mimesis and friendship, this study explores the artistry of the Utrecht portrait specialist Anthonis Mor. It considers Mor's work in relation to reformation debates, and to the challenges to dynastic authority that took place during his lifetime, tracing the breakdown and transformation of belief in 'friendship' or love as a means of binding abstract authority and the embodied world together. Although Mor succeeded Titian as principal portraitist to the Habsburgs, his ambition was not limited to portrayal in a narrow sense. His work enters into dialogue with the elevated conceptions of the artist being enunciated by his humanist friends, and with devotional and allegorical imagery. The book brings Mor's arresting vision to a wider public and reveals its centrality to a broader understanding of how authority was conceived and reshaped in the sixteenth-century.previously published as hardback with isbn 9789040084218.

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.