16th Century Netherlandish Art

In de kunst-en cultuurgeschiedenis van Noord-Europa hebben de late 15de en vroege 16de eeuw altijd bijzonder tot de verbeelding gesproken. Tot op de dag van vandaag wordt erover gediscussieerd of die een laatste fase van de middeleeuwen zijn of een vroege manifestatie van een internationale renaissance. Juist het gevoel te maken te hebben met een overgangsperiode maakt deze tijd zo fascinerend. In dit boek bespreken vijftig kenners vijftig kunstobjecten in de historische context van dit 'herfsttij', soms ook met aandacht voor hun voortleven en receptie in later tijd. Deze miniaturen hebben steeds één kunstwerk als onderwerp, wat uitnodigt tot gras-duinen in een schat aan thema's, wetenswaardigheden en benaderingswijzen. Maar ook biedt dit rijk geïllustreerde boek een prachtig mozaïek van recente inzichten in de schilderkunst en sculptuur, teken- en prentkunst, architectuur en toegepaste kunst uit de tijd van Jheronimus Bosch en Desiderius Erasmus. Dit boek verschijnt naar aanleiding van het afscheid, in juni 2019, van prof.dr Jos Koldeweij als hoogleraar Kunstgeschiedenis van de middeleeuwen en de vroegchristelijke tijd aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an
advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the
experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it
often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art.
Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the
emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed
as recoverable, indeed reproducible.
This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures
operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute
works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis;
or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he
responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their
status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure,
makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally,
they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that
the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being
verbally produced.

This project, undertaken by Joanna Woodall in collaboration with Stephanie Porras, makes available online the entire series of prints in Hendrik Hondius’s 1610 edition of the Pictorum aliquot celebrium praecipuae Germaniae inferioris effigies. As a series of portrait prints of well-known artists, accompanied by Latin poems, the book is a distinctively Netherlandish form of ‘art literature’. It formed an alternative to the biographical literature that emerged in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century and was the model for Karel van Mander's Schilderboek (1604). Picturing the Netherlandish Canon incorporates an online, interactive website (https://sites.courtauld.ac.uk/netherlandish-canon/) and provides high-quality images of all the prints, together with the first English translation of all the Latin texts.  The book includes a jointly authored introduction and two substantial essays by Stephanie Porras and Joanna Woodall. These facilitate a closer and more precise analysis of both individual prints and the series as a whole.

In his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi of 1567, the Italian merchant and humanist Ludovico Guicciardini described Antwerp as the warehouse of the world where all kinds of commodities were traded and displayed. Early modern Antwerp’s pre-eminent position depended upon links between material trade and exchange and the circulation of information, knowledge and beliefs. In this multidisciplinary volume of the NKJ, articles by leading scholars in the fields of art and material culture, literature and history explore ways in which value was propagated in the city from its so-called golden age, before the Revolt of the Netherlands, far into the seventeenth century.

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)

Call for papers – RSA San Juan 2023
9–11 March 2023
"Ambivalent Harmonies: Representing Peace at War in
the Early Modern Iberian Habsburg Worlds".
Deadline: July 31, 2022
Images and texts praising a merciful and triumphant Christendom circulated within the Habsburg Global Empire were often but a fraught fictional rendering of social practices.
While publicizing an idea of an inclusive Universal Catholic Monarchy, they were at odds with everyday practices on the ground. Minorities, outsiders and political enemies were often not fully integrated into ideals and models of concord and tolerance.
This panel seeks interdisciplinary contributions dealing with printed books and images, as well as diplomatic and missionary studies that explore the nuances of optimistic representation of peace and harmony in the Iberian and the Italian Peninsula, the Netherlands, Asia and the Americas.
It seeks to analyze how these views were articulated, challenged and exchanged through the Habsburg Monarchy and its spaces/networks of allegiance/interference.
It further questions the role of moralizing ideas in the construction of Spanish sovereignty within early modern Europe as well as in evangelizing projects.
*
This panel is sponsored by the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies, Chicago.
https://www.newberry.org/center-renaissance-studies-programs 

We encourage proposals on these issues from all fields of early modern studies. Global approaches are also welcome.

Organizers:
Maria Vittoria Spissu, Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna and Marta Albalá-Pelegrín, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

To submit a paper proposal for this panel, please send a Word or PDF document to Maria Vittoria Spissu [mariavittoria.spissu@unibo.it] and Marta Albalá-Pelegrín [martaa@cpp.edu], by July 31, 2022.

Please ensure that the document includes the presenter’s first and last name; academic current affiliation and title (or “Independent Scholar”); e-mail address; paper title (15-word maximum); paper abstract (150-word maximum); short CV / résumé (300-word maximum, with the year of your PhD or other terminal degree completion year–past or expected; please, follow the guidelines on https://www.rsa.org/general/custom.asp?page=ConferenceSubmissionsGuide#guidelines 

Participating in RSA San Juan 2023 requires RSA membership and conference registration.