16th Century Netherlandish Art

In this lucid account, Stephanie Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe during the Renaissance period (c.1400–1570). She explains how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic and religious change, while redefining the status of art. Porras discusses not only paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry and armour. Each chapter presents works from a roughly 20-year period and also focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and art works. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centres of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products. This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

A Documentation paper for my entry in the Kingdom of Ealdormere Pentathlon competition in 2017. This paper is about the creation and hand sewing of a girls’ clothing – Flemish 1560 - Girl’s Smock, Kirtle, Gown/coat, Hat and Apron based on a child in Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s Children’s Games painting.

Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, this essay describes how a particular kind of image--the devotional icon--could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin's body and the corporal reality of Christ. Treating Mary's unsullied essence as painting's self reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma--the anticipation of her Son's death--to an epistemology of endurance.

Die Kunst Jan van Eycks markiert mit ihrer neuartigen Öltechnik, ihrer präzisen Beobachtung der sichtbaren Welt und ihrem hohen ästhetischen wie intellektuellen Reflexionsniveau nicht allein die »Geburtsstunde« der niederländischen Malerei, sondern sogleich deren ersten glanz¬vol-len Höhepunkt. Die vorliegende Studie spürt der außergewöhnlichen, zu Lebzeiten einsetzenden und sich in der Folgezeit weit verbreitenden Fama des burgundischen Hofkünstlers erstmals umfassend nach. Sie fragt nach der Vorbildlichkeit seiner innovativen Bildideen und untersucht deren Rezeption nördlich der Alpen seitens der nachfolgenden Künstlergenerationen. Darüber hinaus nimmt sie die kunstliterarischen Quellen in den Blick, die Jan van Eyck früh als zweiten Apelles und pictor doctus rühmen und im 16. Jahrhundert – als Reaktion auf Giorgio Vasaris Legende der Erfindung der Ölmalerei – zum Gründervater einer autonomen niederländischen Maltradition erheben.

Essay is devoted to underdrawings – preparatory sketches made directly on a primed panel or canvas and gradually covered with layers of paint during the painting process. A number of 16th-century Netherlandish paintings from the collection of the National Museum have been analysed using infrared photography (IR), revealing what lies beneath the layers of paint. The results are summarized in the essay with presentation in detail of three of the most interesting examples: Joos van Cleve wings of the "Saint Reinhold altarpiece", "Caritas" by an anonymous artist and "The Lamentation Triptych" by Jean Bellegambe.

New documentary discoveries and technical analysis reveal that a portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, founder of St John's College, Cambridge, was painted c. 1510 by the Netherlandish immigrant artist Meynnart Wewyck. It may be the earliest known full-length portrait of an English woman.

Within a century, Maerten de Vos’s design St Michael the Archangel moved rapidly between and across immigrant, courtly, mercantile and religious networks: copied by a Venetian print publisher, painters in Spain and in viceregal Lima and by ivory sculptors in colonial Manila. Using this print’s global circumnavigation as a formative case study, this article considers how early modern prints “went viral,” traversing vast geographic and cultural distances, working across and between various social networks in a manner analogous to contemporary digital media. Considering early modern print’s virality expands the study of the means of artistic production to a wider consideration of reception and dissemination. Beyond the binary of original and copy, virality helps to animate and illuminate the complex, multi-directional movement, reception and use of early modern prints in a global field.

Het onderwerp van dit artikel is de HUIK, een eigenaardige mantel, die tussen 1520 en 1640 zo populair was bij de Nederlandse huisvrouwen dat makers van kostuumprenten hem afbeeldden als haar kenmerkende kledingstuk. De huik wordt beschreven uit kleermakersoogpunt, met veel aandacht voor materiaal, typologie en de mooie schilderijen en tekeningen die als bron dienen.
This article, in Dutch describes the 'hoyk', which in the 16th C. was a particular type of cloak, or mantle, worn by Dutch housewives (and Dutch refugees abroad, but apparently no one else). Richly illustrated, English summary and picture captions included.

Many of Agnolo Bronzino's tapestry cartoons of monumental allegorical, devotional, and narrative subjects avoid or minimise some significant tapestry genres of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, including verdures, millefleurs, and courtly scenes with landscapes. In contrast, Bronzino's friend and colleague Francesco Bachiacca contributed cartoons that invoke
these traditionally northern European subjects, as well as designs for grotesques, for the conventionally Flemish tapestry medium. I argue that Bronzino's first experiments in the medium engaged in a visual dialogue between Italian and Flemish styles that reflects the cultural mix and eclectic taste of the Florentine court of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and Duchess Eleonora of Toiedo.
While the recent exhibitions in New York and Florence celebrate
Bronzino's art, including tapestries, as distinctly Florentine and Medicean, the first decade of tapestry production in Florence reveals a significant appreciation for northern European art and the cultivation of a variety of styles among members of the pre-Vasarian equipe at the hybrid ltalo-Hispanic, Medici-Toledo court.

Nur wenige Künstler der Renaissance haben ihre Romreise so ausführlich dokumentiert wie der Holländer Maarten van Heemskerck, der zwischen 1532 und 1537 vorrangig Relikte antiker Skulptur, Ruinen sowie die römische Stadtlandschaft studierte. Über zweihundert Zeichnungen und drei Gemälde sind erhalten und werden mit über dreißig gezeichneten Kopien in dem vollständig farbig illustrierten Katalog erstmals zusammengeführt.
Wie begründet sich das Interesse des reisenden Künstlers an Rom und der Antike? Was prägt die Auswahl und Vielfalt seiner Studienobjekte, seine variierenden kreativen Darstellungsmodi? In welchen lokalen und sozialen Kontexten agierte er? Die Autorin untersucht diese und weitere
Fragestellungen und bietet eine umfassende Analyse des Materials einschließlich einer Teilrekonstruktion des ehemaligen Zeichnungsbuches.
Die Darlegung der wechselnden Funktionen und der weiteren Überlieferungsgeschichte der Zeichnungen vervollständigen die Untersuchung. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der von der Forschung bislang kaum gewürdigten außerordentlichen künstlerischen Qualität der römischen Studien, die zwischen sachlicher Präzision im Detail und bildkompositorischer Imagination oszillieren.
München: Hirmer Verlag, ISBN: 978-3-7774-3294-6

This volume contains a statistical study of 287 Early Netherlandish paintings with domestic settings.  Issues explored within the book include an investigation of the application and benefits of statistical methodologies in art historical literature, a discussion of the characteristics that define domesticity in fifteenth and early sixteenth century imagery, and an analysis of the construction and decoration of paintings with home settings.  The results of the statistical study are compared to information culled from fifteenth and early sixteenth century household inventories to suggest that painters and their workshops manipulated depictions of domestic settings and the objects contained within them to signify workshop or civic identity within accepted iconographical frameworks.