The Primacy of the Image in Northern Art 1400-1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver is an anthology of 42 essays written by distinguished scholars on current research and methodology in the art history of Northern Europe of the late medieval and early modern periods. Written in tribute to Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the topics are inspired by Professor Silver's renowned scholarship in these areas: Early Netherlandish Painting and Prints; Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting; Manuscripts, Patrons, and Printed Books; Durer and the Power of Pictures; Prints and Printmaking; and Seventeenth-Century Painting. Studies of specific artists include Hans Memling, Albrecht Durer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick Goltzius, and Rembrandt.

Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally. -- .

In serveying how painting and sculpture were considered through the early 18th to the mid-19th century, this volume traces the development of modernism in art and theory.

Almost Eternal: Painting on Stone and Material Innovation in Early Modern Europe gathers together an international group of ten scholars, who offer a novel account of the phenomenon of oil painting on stone surfaces in Northern and Southern Europe. This technique was devised in Rome by Sebastiano del Piombo in the early sixteenth century and was practiced until the late seventeenth century. This phenomenon has attracted little attention previously: the volume therefore makes a significant and timely contribution to the field in the light of recent studies of materiality and the rise of technical Art History. Contributors: Nadia Baadj, Piers Baker-Bates, Elena Calvillo, Ana Gonsalez Mozo, Anna Kim, Helen Langdon, Johanna Beate Lohff, Judith Mann, Christopher Nygren, Suzanne Wegmann, and Giulia Martina Weston.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (c.1606-1669) was the most talked-about painter of the 17th-century - and quite possibly of the following centuries too. His prodigious talent, extraordinary emotional truth, and reckless disregard of artistic convention astonished, delighted and often dismayed his contemporaries; and the full gamut of these reactions is revealed in the three early biographies published here for the first time in their entirety in English. Sandrart, a German painter and writer on painting, actually knew Rembrandt in Amsterdam; Baldinucci, also an artist contemporary with Rembrandt, was one of the greatest early connoisseurs of prints; and Arnold Houbraken, who studied under some of Rembrandt's pupils, wrote the earliest major biographical account of the artists of Holland. These extraordinary documents give a vivid picture of Rembrandt's shattering impact on the art world of his time - not only as a painter, but as a supremely successful manipulator of the market, a dangerous example to the young, and an unavoidable challenge to any sense of decorum and rule-giving. Rooted firmly in the 17-century realities of Rembrandt's life, they bring into sharper focus the qualities of originality and psychological acuity that remain Rembrandt's trademark to this day. The introduction by Charles Ford situates these biographies in the context of 17th-century appreciation of art, and the trajectory of Rembrandt's career. The translations have been specially prepared for this edition by Charles Ford, aided by Ulrike Kern and Francesca Migliorini, and in part following the work of Tancred Borenius.

This book examines the intersections between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the 'matrimonial barrier' to encompass representations of married life including issues of spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women's writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.

Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London's crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London's artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history. -- .

This is the first scholarly study to focus on satirical prints of women in the late eighteenth century. The period c.1760-1800 was the golden age of graphic satire: thousands of copper-plate engravings, humorous and/or critical in tone, were published. They were sold in London and the provinces and exported overseas, and were viewed by nearly all sections of the population. These prints both reflected and sought to shape contemporary debate about the role of women in society. While attitudes varied considerably, the general consensus was that women were more visible in society than ever before - on the streets, on the stage, on the walls of the Royal Academy, on the hustings, and in the pleasure gardens. The satirical prints of the period reveal perceptions of women and their behaviour as prostitutes and courtesans, wives and mothers, old maids and widows. Cindy McCreery's detailed exploration of this relatively neglected genre extends our knowledge of contemporary attitudes towards women and offers an important new dimension to our understanding of Georgian culture.

A 'How to' book featuring painting techniques used by Dutch Renaissance Masters such as Rembrandt and Rubens, Bruegel and Bosch. This beautifully illustrated book for practising artists and art students examines everything there is to know about the techniques used by the Dutch Masters of the Golden Age. From the preparation of surfaces and the creation of paints and pigments to the methods used, award-winning artist Brigid Marlin considers how these skills can work in modern settings and includes stunning representations of contemporary artists' work. Discover the techniques and materials used by Rembrandt in his portraits, how to achieve balance and tension, rhythm and points of interest in the style of Bruegel and Rubens, and how to recreate luminous still-life paintings like those of the Van Eyck brothers. Projects include clear, step-by-step demonstrations to replicate these almost-forgotten techniques as well as examples of works which they inspired.

Godefridus Schalcken: A Late 17th-century Dutch Painter in Pursuit of Fame and Fortune is the first book in English dedicated to the entire artistic output of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706). It examines the artist's paintings and career trajectory against the background of his ceaseless pursuit of fame and fortune. Combining a comprehensive analysis of Schalcken's artistic development and style with our increasing biographical knowledge, it provides an authoritative overview of Schalcken's ample production as an artist. It also integrates his art into the circumstances of his life in relation to his ambitious career aspirations, exploring how economic conditions, a concomitantly oversaturated art market, talent and ambition, demographics, and even sheer luck all played a role in Schalcken's great professional success. Since Schalcken's art, like that of all Dutch painters, provides a plethora of information about seventeenth-century culture-its predilections, its prejudices, indeed, its very mind-set-the book inevitably links his work to the broader socio-cultural contexts in which it was created.

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects. -- .

Wallpaper's spread across trades, class and gender is charted in this first full-length study of the material's use in Britain during the long eighteenth century. It examines the types of wallpaper that were designed and produced and the interior spaces it occupied, from the country house to the homes of prosperous townsfolk and gentry, showing that wallpaper was hung by Earls and merchants as well as by aristocratic women. Drawing on a wide range of little known examples of interior schemes and surviving wallpapers, together with unpublished evidence from archives including letters and bills, it charts wallpaper's evolution across the century from cheap textile imitation to innovative new decorative material. Wallpaper's growth is considered not in terms of chronology, but rather alongside the categories used by eighteenth-century tradesmen and consumers, from plains to flocks, from China papers to papier mache and from stucco papers to materials for creating print rooms. It ends by assessing the ways in which eighteenth-century wallpaper was used to create historicist interiors in the twentieth century. Including a wide range of illustrations, many in colour, the book will be of interest to historians of material culture and design, scholars of art and architectural history as well as practicing designers and those interested in the historic interior.

Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.

A discussion of sensibility, sensation, perception and painting, Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art is an original work which argues that the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy of moral sense played a central role in shaping ideas explored by figures such as Cezanne and Monet over one hundred years later. Proposing that sensibility not reason was the basis of morality, the philosophy of moral sense gave birth to the idea of the supremacy of the imagination. Allied to the belief that the imagination flourished more freely in the primitive history of humanity, this idea became a potent inspiration for artists. The author also highlights Thomas Reid's method in his philosophy of common sense of using art and artists to illustrate how perception and expression are intuitive. To be truly expressive, artists should unlearn what they have learned and record their raw sensations, rather than the perceptions that derive from them. Exploring the work of key philosophical and artistic protagonists, this thought-provoking book unearths the fascinating exchanges between art, philosophy and literature during Enlightenment in Scotland that provided the blueprint for modernism.

Chinese-Islamic studies have concentrated thus far on the arts of earlier periods with less attention paid to works from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). This book focuses on works of Chinese-Islamic art from the late seventeenth century to the present day and bring to the reader's attention several new areas for consideration. The book examines glass wares which were probably made for a local Chinese-Muslim clientele, illustrating a fascinating mixture of traditional Chinese and Muslim craft traditions. While the inscriptions on them can be related directly to the mosque lamps of the Arab world, their form and style of decoration is characteristically that of Han Chinese. Several contemporary Chinese Muslim artists have succeeded in developing a unique fusion of calligraphic styles from both cultures. Other works examined include enamels, porcelains, and interior painted snuff bottles, with emphasis on either those with Arabic inscriptions, or on works by Chinese Muslim artists. The book includes a chapter written by Dr. Shelly Xue and an addendum written by Dr. Riccardo Joppert. This book will appeal to scholars working in art history, religious studies, Chinese studies, Chinese history, religious history, and material culture.

Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England traces major concepts including: the creation of the visual effects of accuracy through careful action and training; the development of visual judgment and connoisseurship; the role of an epistolary network in the production of knowledge; balancing readers' expectations with representational conventions; and the effects of collecting on the creation and circulation of knowledge. On the one hand, this study uncovers how approaches to knowledge production differed in the seventeenth century as compared with the twenty-first century. On the other, it reveals how the early modern struggle to sort through an overwhelming quantity of visual information - brought on by major changes in image production and circulation - resonates with our own.

This is the first book to address the long art history of dynastic marriage exchange between Denmark and Britain between 1600 and 1900. It explores an intersection of three themes trending in early modern studies: portraiture, gender and the court as a centre of cultural exchange. This work re-evaluates the construction and staging of gender in Northern consort portraiture over a span of three hundred years, examining the development of the scientific and social paradigms inflecting consort portraiture and representation, with a view to excavating portrait images' agency at the early modern moment of their conception and making. The consort's liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages and sometimes religion, has often been equated with political weakness, but this new work argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity. As such, consort imagery drew upon gender as a generative resource of motifs and ideas. Each chapter is informed by new archival research and introduces the reader to little known, yet astonishing works of art. Collectively, they seek to trace a shift in practices of identity formation over time; the transition from an emphasis on rank to an increasingly binary emphasis on gender.

A series of interconnected essays on love and courtship as themes in Dutch art, this study examines pictorial subjects and artists that have never been considered together: paintings and prints of "garden parties" by David Vinckboons and Esaias van de Velde, merry companies by Willem Buytewech, paintings of courting couples observing peasant festivities by Jan Miense Molenaer, two portraits by Frans Hals and two important landscape etchings by Rembrandt. Nevitt places these works in the context of the culture of love at the time, which manifested itself in the social practices of courtship and a variety of amatory texts.

Modern art begins with Goya. He was the first to create works of art for their own sake, and he lived in a time of incredible cultural and social dynamism when the old concepts of social hierarchy were being shaken by the new concept of equality for all. He saw his world ripped apart by Napoleon's armies and then suffered the reactionary backlash as the old order was restored. Against this epic canvas, Goya painted his own observations of humanity, transforming his youthful images of gaily dancing peasants into his mature penetrating studies of human suffering, despair, perseverance and redemption. Goya's art rises above the chaos of his times, and signals the real revolution of personal expression and independent spirit that would be the generative force behind the modernist movement in art.

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Durer's intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation' in their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual arts have received little attention in the history of art, until now. Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters, including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others. Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong - in people's minds and close to home.

Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally. -- .

First published in 2000, this is an examination of the collection of art works through an anthropological study of modes of exchange and the social roles of material culture. Focusing on the figure of Sebastiano Resta, Genevieve Warwick brings to light a shadowy, yet crucial chapter in the history of collecting, that of the great migration of art objects out of Italy to northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Her study pins the history of collecting to broader changes in European economic history and analyzes the epistemological frameworks for viewing that accompanied this transfer of artistic wealth. Warwick also demonstrates how early modern art collecting was shaped by the social mores of elite 'arts of love'.

As queen consort and dowager, Hedwig Eleonora (1636-1715) held a unique position in Sweden for more than half a century. As the dominant collector and patron of art and architecture in the realm, she left a strong mark on Swedish court culture. Her dynastic network among the Northern European courts was extensive, and this helped to make Sweden a major cultural center in Northern Europe in the later seventeenth century. This book represents the first major scholarly publication on the full range of Hedwig Eleonora's endeavours, from the financing of her court to her place within a larger princely network, to her engagements with various cultural pursuits, to her public image. As the contributors show, despite her high profile, political position, and conspicuous patronage, Hedwig Eleonora experienced little of the animosity directed at many other foreign queens and regents, such as the Medici in France and Henrietta Maria in England. In this way, she provides a model for a different and more successful way of negotiating the difficulties of joining a foreign court; the analysis of her circumstances thus adds a substantial dimension to the study of early modern queenship. Presenting much new scholarship, this volume highlights one extremely significant early modern woman and her imprint on Northern European history, and fosters international awareness of the importance of early modern Scandinavia for European cultural history.