17th Century Netherlandish Art

Several series of Sibyls, of variable number and quality, that have been
previously attributed to different painters within Peter Paul Rubens’ circle, in foreign and Spanish collections, as well as in the art market, are here claimed to be by the hand of the Flemish master Jan van den Hoecke. The persistent confusion both in terms of attribution and identification of the subject matter is clarified in this paper, following on from Hans Vlieghe’s 1990 evidence. Tracing the now dispersed series as far as possible, the present article pays special attention to the eleven canvasses at Tessé Museum, Le Mans, as they appear part of a unique ensemble that still remains undispersed. For these series Jan van den Hoecke created an original iconography, with no formal precedents. Comparison of the different versions allows for a deciphering of the Latin texts accompanying each depiction, and for an identification of their literal sources. Judging by the numerous versions, the series of Sibyls must have rewarded the artist with great success, a demand that he
satisfied with a changeable effort.

La autoría del pintor flamenco Jan van den Hoecke se reivindica en varias series de Sibilas, de variable número y calidad, atribuidas a otros pintores de la estela de Peter Paul Rubens en colecciones españolas y extranjeras, así como en el comercio del arte. Tanto las atribuciones como la identificación de los asuntos son objeto de una gran confusión que persiste y se esclarece en este artículo, en base a lo avanzado por Hans Vlieghe en 1990. Se sigue la pista de los diversos ejemplares hoy dispersos en la medida de lo posible, prestando especial atención a los lienzos del museo de Tessé de Le Mans, por ser el único ejemplo existente de una serie que se conserva unida. Jan van den Hoecke fue el creador de una iconografía original que se distancia de los precedentes formales. La comparación entre los diferentes ejemplares permite descifrar los textos en latín que acompañan cada representación, precisando sus fuentes literarias. A juzgar por la elevada cantidad de versiones localizadas, es tema que le proporcionó éxito y demanda que satisfizo con esfuerzo cambiante.

Van Dyck’s paintings have been thoroughly analyzed in terms of style, iconography and patronage, but there has been no systematic analysis of how these pictures were recorded in Stuart inventories. Pictures attributed to Van Dyck are listed in several royal inventories from c.1639 to c.1688 – from those compiled by Abraham van der Doort c.1639 to the Commonwealth sale of 1649–51, to Charles II of c.1666–67, Henrietta Maria of 1669 and James II of c.1685–88. This article considers the subject matter and placement of Van Dyck’s pictures in a range of palace and room contexts, and charts change and continuity of display across the inventories. The article shows the potential for the close comparison of these royal inventories for understanding display, taste and dynastic politics at the Stuart court.

Title: Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
Author: J. Vanessa Lyon
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.

Download Table of Contents & Intro: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2um278k7/5ZvX0DCvTsh2XeHP5SpoAy/6364a537ac0e62749047271c8b372ce0/9789048536665_ToC_Intro.pdf

The marriage of Henrietta Maria (1609-1669) and Charles I (1600-1649) was presented in literature and prints as the joining of the ‘lily’ (France, the queen) and the ‘rose’ (England, the king). Harnessing these floral analogies, this article examines how Henrietta Maria’s fair face was invested with social, political and medical import, and as such was widely cultivated and enhanced through physic, sartorial choices and painted representations. Her skin texture and colouring were considered a mirror of her dynastic pedigree, marital status and good health. The white and red palette of the lily and the rose were intrinsic to longstanding ideals of facial colouring, and to youthful bloom and fertility. This colouring was marshalled by painters such as Anthony van Dyck in her portraits, and strategically deployed through her clothing. Her physician, Theodore de Mayerne, also provided her with prescriptions to clean, smooth and restore her face. As such, the queen’s facial skin functioned as a mirror of her quality, a paradigm of health and a canvas for artists, wardrobe specialists and physicians to cultivate and highlight her natural beauty. The analysis is built on a range of primary sources including treatises, wardrobe accounts, herbals and cosmetic recipes.

Carl Borromäus Ruthart (Gdańsk 1630–L’Aquila, after 1703), also known as Karl Ruthard, Carlo Ruttardo and Fra Andrea di Danzica is as fascinating as little known. He was most likely born in Gdańsk where he first learned to draw and paint, so the Gdańsk painting milieu of the ca. mid-17th century played a key factor in the development of his technique. His mature work was produced in a number of places in Europe, including Antwerp, Vienna, Venice, Rome and ultimately in L’Aquila. His most typical motifs were dramatic hunting scenes, and later religious scenes always in the midst of animals and objects. Especially the begin- nings of his career remain unknown.
Ruthart’s continuously popular animal scenes are kept in and purchased for museums and private collections on several con- tinents. The painter’s sacred works can be mainly found in the churches and museum collections of Rome and L’Aquila. There are also sketches of animals in various techniques and prints that are testament to Ruthart’s interest in studies. It is they that we will mainly use to follow the directions in which Ruthart looked for his models in his early career. Young Carl Borromäus’s interest in animal painting was surely influenced by certain particular features of Gdańsk culture. The 16th-century décor of Artus Court already shows an interest in hunting themes. Ruthart was influenced by such artists as Daniel Schultz, Samuel Niedenthal and Frans Snyders. A collection of Niedenthal’s drawings from Erlangen is lost but the exceptionally large collection of the artist’s work preserved at the Kupferstich-Kabinett (Print Collection) in Dresden. The chronology of Ruthart’s both early and later work is very difficult to determine because he very rarely signed them. His earliest signed work is a quick sketch from the National Museum in Gdańsk. A pen and wash drawing, it shows a dog at rest and is signed “Carl Ruthart/ geschehn[?] in Venetia,/ Den 22 Aug: 1655”. Four similar drawings by Ruthart, depicting single animals at the graphic art collection in Munich and are none-too-widely- known. The first sketch depicts a Sleeping Pig. It is a black chalk drawing on 24.1 × 39 cm blue paper. The next one made in the same technique on cream-coloured paper (14.1 × 18.5 cm), features a boar in profile. The other two, depicting a Calf and a Doe in motion are drawn in black and washed with white chalk. The last drawing is inscribed: „A. Rutharts del” at the bottom and „812” underneath it, written with bistre. ust like the Gdańsk drawing, the Munich sketches focus on the detail and are more toned down than his later work. In these studies of poses, Ruthart shows himself to be an astute observer, focused on depicting a specific animal at rest or posing it in motion. The similarities between both artists’ preparatory sketches and the very interest in the subject do not seem to be accidental. Stags, lions, leopards and all kinds of birds in Niedenthal’s drawings and paintings appear in similar ways in Ruthart’s paintings. Ruthart produced animal “portraits” similar to Niedenthal’s with oil on paper or canvas, for example the Wild Boar and Wolf from the former collection of the Marchesi Strozzi in Florence. A so-far record-breaking sum of €659,000 was paid in 2007 for a painting signed and dated by Ruthart depicting Adam Naming the Animals which, although painted in 1686, has a clear connection to the work of the Gdańsk painters’ milieu of the mid- 17th century. In fact, the subject repeats the iconography of the earlier mentioned painting of the same title, albeit in a somewhat different manner. The animal world fascinated Ruthart. He certainly gained the ability to carefully study various species of birds, animals and amphibians at the workshop of his master, most likely Niedenthal. His travels and the opportunity to see the work of Netherlandish and Italian painters developed him greatly, while his popularity with customers made him use his skills to create many works meant primarily for palace interiors.

World history of the Netherlands and Flanders: about the (im)possibility of an open, global, and non-nationalist history for a wider audience
Following the success of the Histoire mondiale de la France, 2018 saw the publication of the World history of the Netherlands and World history of Flanders. After the French example both volumes have three goals: to bring history to a wider audience; to give a global reading to the national past; and to offer a non-nationalist and non-teleological perspective. Eminently readable, both books succeed in their first goal. The second ambition is fulfilled by the World history of the Netherlands, but in the World history of Flanders the global dimension is underdeveloped. The verdict on their third aim is double-edged. Both volumes explicitly claim to be open-ended and reject traditional nationalist tropes, but several Dutch and-to a lesser extent-Flemish chapters have a subtext of banal nationalism. The genre of public history seems to be particularly susceptible to this type of teleology.

The most unusual of Van Dyck’s four portraits of James Stuart is that in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in which he proffers a fruit. Here identified as a quince, symbol of marriage, it allows the painting to be accurately dated. The portrait has intrigued many artists and writers, notably Marcel Proust.

De Amersfoortseweg werd rond het midden van de Gouden Eeuw aangelegd op de uitgestrekte heide tussen Amersfoort en Utrecht. Jacob van Campen, de architect van onder meer het Amsterdamse stadhuis, was de bedenker van de weg. lnitiatiefnemers waren het stadsbestuur van Amersfoort en de Staten van Utrecht. Men beoogde niet alleen een kortere en betere verbinding tussen de beide steden aan te leggen. Het project was er ook op gericht om een groot stuk woeste grond tot ontwikkeling te brengen, naar analogie van grote droogmakerijen als de Beemster en de Purmer. De verfraaiing van het landschap zou hand in hand gaan met economische ontwikkeling.

La carrera de las artistas mujeres fue con frecuencia confinada a permanecer oculta por
una historia del arte que prefirió resaltar los logros masculinos englobados dentro de un
canon preestablecido. Las pocas veces que lograron trascender, lo hicieron desde un
lugar de excepción o avaladas por sus historias particulares que intentaban suplir las
«falencias» derivadas de las dificultades para el acceso a una educación artística formal.
No obstante, a pesar de estos condicionamientos no fueron pocos los casos en los que
las obras de las artistas mujeres pasaron a engrosar los corpus de obras de artistas
hombres permaneciendo durante siglos erróneamente atribuidas. Estas particularidades
de la producción artística femenina pueden ser abordadas desde una perspectiva de
género que posibilite una mayor comprensión del indudable rol que las mujeres tuvieron
en el arte europeo de los siglos XVI y XVII. En este caso nos abocaremos al estudio de
la obra de las artistas Judith Leyster y Rachel Ruysch, desarrollada en los Países Bajos
durante el siglo XVII.

Research report for Stedelijk Museum Breda:
From a low perspective, with the horizon positioned at the bottommost quarter of the canvas, the viewer looks upon the scene as if standing alongside the artist on a river bank. Four ships create a hustle and bustle on the swaying water; one disappears just around the corner of the city wall in the direction of a harbour. The small sloop (‘praam’) on the left is transporting barrels. A smoking man sits on one of the barrels, while three men move and steer the vessel.

This year marks the quadricentenary of the first confirmed European arrival in Western Australia. On 25 October 1616, Dutch skipper Dirk Hartog and his crew landed at the northern tip of the island now named Dirk Hartog, in Shark Bay. Many have written about Hartog’s ‘accidental’ landfall and the inscribed pewter plate that he erected to mark his landing. This seemingly mundane event on the Western Australian coast earned Hartog a, then unforeseen, prominence in the legacy of seafaring history and in the early European history of Australia. It established him as a notable figure in the Age of Exploration. Today, the historical events and the physical remains of Hartog’s landing in Western Australia are firmly embedded within the context of European activity in the Indian Ocean region and, more specifically, Dutch exploration of the Australian coastline in the 17th century. This article sets out to provide a critical assessment of the life and seafaring activities of the first known European to set foot on Western Australian soil; and the history of Eendracht, the earliest known Dutch ship to explore the Western Australian coast.

Download the Introduction here!

Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg — the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?

"How did painters and their public speak about art in Rembrandt’s age? This book about the writings of the painter-poet Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of Rembrandt’s pupils, examines a wide variety of themes from painting practice and theory from the Dutch Golden Age. It addresses the contested issue of ‘Dutch realism’ and its hidden symbolism, as well as Rembrandt’s concern with representing emotions in order to involve the spectator. Diverse aspects of imitation and illusion come to the fore, such as the theory behind sketchy or ‘rough’ brushwork and the active role played by the viewer’s imagination. Taking as its starting point discussions in Rembrandt’s studio, this unique study provides an overview of Dutch artists’ ideas on painting.

The Visible World was awarded the Jan van Gelder Prize in 2009.

Reviews: Jan Blanc in Simiolus 33/4 (2007-8), Amy Golahny in Sehepunkte 10 (2010), nr. 6., Bram de Klerck in NRC Handelsblad, 13 February 2009.
"

The tile decorations in the cloister of the monastery of Sao Francisco in Salvador, based on the engravings to Otto Vaenius' Quinti Horati Flacci Emblemata (1607), have largely escaped the attention of scholars focusing on the reception of Dutch visual culture in colonial Brazil. An analysis of the way in which the book illustrations were transformed into large scale architectonic decoration leads to the twofold conclusion that in terms of iconography the Franciscans adapted Vaenius' neostoicism to their own ideological needs, and that in terms of design the images obtained a performative function in the context of Brazilian religious experience.

Now Online and in higher resolution: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/buettner2006

Trotz der Fülle bekannter biographischer Details ist nur in Ansätzen erklärt, wie Rubens seine Berühmtheit erlangte. Bislang sind die individuellen von den sozialen und politischen Faktoren seines künstlerischen Ruhms nicht getrennt betrachtet worden. Nur zu gern wurde von den Biographen – in demütiger Bewunderung – die Tatsache übersehen, dass Ruhm wesentlich durch Zuschreibung entsteht und weniger eine persönliche Lebensleistung darstellt. Im Zusammenspiel mit den überlieferten Werken, den Dokumenten und Selbstzeugnissen wird hier ein facettenreiches Bild der ökonomischen und sozialen Existenz des Malers und Diplomaten Peter Paul Rubens entworfen und  dessen Position in der Gesellschaft seiner Zeit bestimmt. Zugleich rücken die äußeren Bedingungen näher, unter denen Rubens’ Gemälde entstanden. Dadurch erscheinen auch die Werke in einem neuen Licht.

Compilation of 2636 artworks (sculptures, reliefs, paintings, frescoes, drawings, prints and illustrations) of 728 identified artists of the Low Countries, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. 202 pp. With an Index of Artists, a Directory of Owners and an extensive Bibliography. See further details in the link.
Available as paperback book ($15.00) or as hardcover book (€19.20).
Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.

"This essay takes up touch and intimacy as the criteria most fundamental to the design and intended impact of flower paintings. My contention is twofold. Firstly, the flower still life as a picture intimates a gesture of reciprocal exchange between itself and the viewer. Not only does touch guide the experience of these paintings; the elusiveness of the tactile sense also endows them with their particular allure...

My second and related contention is that the flower still life originated in dialogue with the early modern culture of friendship. When the humanist Juan Luis Vives described the communion between touch and sight as ‘a kind of friendship’—or when Leon Battista Alberti proclaimed painting, like friendship, to possess the ability to make the absent present and the dead seem still alive—both drew on a Ciceronian discourse that was common currency in the Renaissance. The friendship metaphor employed by Vives and Alberti aligns with the practices of early modern amicitia, a concept that encompassed ties of kinship and collegial enterprise. Letter-writing, gift-giving, and the keeping of friendship albums (alba amicorum) in turn informed the ways that the still-life genre first took shape. To paraphrase Vives and Alberti, early flower paintings functioned as living monuments, designed to perpetuate a tangible bond between the painting as giver and the viewer as recipient."

The essay examines Rembrandt's depiction of physicality and sexuality. The author points out how much these forms of representation are determined by Christian tradition and thus express the finiteness and frailty of the body, but also its indomitable eroticism. No other artist has depicted the human being in its biological course from childhood to old age as much as Rembrandt. This is part of Christian anthropology and clearly contrasts with Italian art, whose ideal of the body is often a form of abstraction.

Im Aufsatz wird Rembrandts Darstellung von Leiblichkeit und Sexualität untersucht. Der Autor weist auf, wie sehr diese Darstellungsformen durch die christliche Überlieferung bestimmt sind und damit die Endlichkeit und Hinfälligkeit des Körpers, aber auch seine unbezwingbare Erotik zum Ausdruck kommt. Kein anderer Künstler hat so sehr wie Rembrandt den Menschen in seinem biologischen Verlauf von der Kindheit bis ins Greisenalter dargestellt. Dies ist Teil christlichen Anthropologie und steht deutlich der italienischen Kunst gegenüber, deren Körperideal häufig eine Form der Abstraktion darstellt.

Accompanying the related exhibition, Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges  illuminates the early career of Rembrandt and his peers. Essays explore the artists in broader contexts, including Leiden’s historical and cultural profile, process and novelty in printmaking, the city’s art market and the history of collecting paintings by the master in Canada. The four essays, accompanied by entries on the works featured in the exhibition, offer profound insight into the motivations, aspirations and achievements of an extraordinary group of artists.

"Shells begin as movable dwellings for the mollusks who create them, but where a shell ends up is far from predetermined. They may go on to have many lives once their makers have left them behind. Whether subsumed into the geological landscape, reoccupied by a hermit crab, or repurposed by humankind, shells are more than exoskeletal remains of life past; they are persistently animable things. To admire a shell’s variegated surface, to feel its sculptural form in one’s hand, or to hear the echo of the sea in the architecture of its inner chamber, is to engage with a curious object that is also an uncanny subject. This chapter explores how early modern artists employed the pictorial realm to think through shells and their resonant histories, and it seeks to understand the encounters with shells that these pictures stage. I take as my starting point a simple premise: the life of a shell in a painting is never a still life..."

For the full volume, see: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215761/conchophilia

In several of the 100‐plus drawings that Haarlem artist Maerten van Heemskerck made while he was in Rome in the 1530s, he depicts the sculpture collections he visited in the Vatican, on the Capitoline and in the cortili and gardens of numerous Roman palaces. This is some of the earliest Northern ‘collection imagery’, and the collection environment commands as much of his pictorial attention as the sculptures themselves. The central argument of the essay is that van Heemskerck’s novel images related to period conceptions of the uses and functions of memory, and suggests that his drawings had an important afterlife in the Flemish pictures of collections genre of the early seventeenth century.

In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Ernst van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

In Francisco de Holanda’s original account, Michelangelo asserts that the art of the Northerners is only suitable for the feeble-minded and has a strong emotional effect on them, for it concentrates on the mere surface of things and on deceiving the eye: ‘in Flanders they paint to deceive the gaze directed at the external’. We do not know whether the master ever said this; what is more important is that contemporary Dutchmen took the statement seriously. Both Karel van Mander and Samuel van Hoogstraten repeated that Michelangelo regarded oil as only fit for the weaker sex (calling it vrouwen ambacht, woman’s craft, and wijvenwerk, wives’ work). In their treatises, which contain specific information on artists’ materials and practical issues such as brushwork, the gendered language attributed to Michelangelo resonates. The gender division was related to the Italian stereotypical view of painting materials in the Netherlands, an assumption rooted in the myth about the invention of oil paint. It was said that this Netherlandish technique was pitting a deceptive, seductive, and illusory art against the true conception of art based on antiquity’s linear purity.

Van Hoogstraten, for instance, said that Jan van Eyck only discovered oil paint ‘after long, alchemistic research’, a view he shared with his Italian predecessor, Vasari, who for the same reasons described Van Eyck as a ‘sophist’, seeking intellectual misdirection. As late as the eighteenth century, Arnold Houbraken condemned a style that indulged in the blending (verdrijven) of colors, which led to weak chiaroscuro and soft highlights, calling this a feminine (vrouwelyk) manner — in this, we hear a remote echo of De Holanda.

This article explores the afterlife of Michelangelo’s remarks in Dutch art theory. Even though the fresco versus oil dichotomy lost its practical significance for painters in the Netherlands, the opposition of a masculine versus a feminine choice of materials, brushes and illusionistic techniques kept determining the debate throughout the century. The male-female opposition thus adds to that great opposition that Jan Emmens identified as the key differentiation in Dutch art theory: the pitting of learned against vulgar painting, which was essentially an elaboration of the ancient division between the Attic and Asian styles in rhetoric. As this article argues, Emmens ignored the opposition’s fundamentally gendered nature.

It is striking that a very practical element of art theory — relating to binding medium, pigments and brushwork — became attached to a very indeterminate and wide-ranging one, namely gender. ‘Color’, in effect, appears as a problematic term with meanings ranging from the most material one (the pigment itself) to a metaphorical one (for instance, in relation to a woman’s makeup) and ultimately an ideological one (the ‘rhetorical colors’ that should be applied with utmost care for a text or artwork to remain persuasive). An echo of all these connotations resonates in the modern English — and Dutch — usage of the term ‘colored’ as, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, ‘imbued with an emotive or exaggerated quality’.