Plenary
Addresses
Later
Netherlandish Art (and Scholarship)
Larry
Silver When
I was a student, I liked to think of myself as a 'young Turk,' though now perhaps
with so many of my colleagues here today younger than I am, I should consider
myself instead as a 'moldy oldie.' Back in the early 1970s, a small group of us
here today began exploring what was then a non-existent field of sixteenth-century
Northern art, caught in what the Dutch proverb calls 'between stools.' It was
neither Italian Renaissance, which was then the dominant paradigm and the intellectual
center of the entire discipline, nor was it the celebrated prior century of Jan
van Eyck, of those 'primitifs flamands' often taken to be a counterpart and contemporary
of the pictorial experimentation of Florence. Neither was it the upcoming 'Golden
Age' of Dutch seventeenth-century painting (but not of sculpture or architecture),
for which it was only occasionally cited as a lesser prelude. These
were the views imbedded in the canonical scholarly work of Erwin Panofsky, whose
major monographs ? Early Netherlandish Painting of 1953 and Albrecht
DY(R)rer of 1948 ? had generally defined the role of Northern art in relation
to Italy and the overall phenomenon of a nascent artistic modernity. Panofsky
followed the lead of founding Belgian and Dutch scholars as well as of German
connoisseur, Max Friedl?nder, whose very term, "altniederl?ndische Malerei,"
he then freely borrowed in literal English translation. Whether
or not we are comfortable with such terms as the ?new art history,? we have learned
to be more methodologically self-conscious since then. We do not have to be deconstructionists
to realize that our attention to an artist like DY(R)rer predisposes us to several
distinct modern biases ? towards named artists, towards painters, towards trends
like the celebrated Flemish naturalism that are considered progressive for the
illusionistic art of the following four centuries. As a result, we do not often
attend to anonymous craftsmen, nor to other media, including the most expensive
ones like tapestry or armor, which were so important in the Burgundian court world
of Huizinga (as was so well discussed by Martha Wolff), let alone other media,
such as ivories and alabasters, wood sculptures, stained glass, or illuminated
manuscripts, which seem still to have the taint of vestiges from an earlier, lingering,
medieval visual culture, even though they still persist, well into the sixteenth
century, alongside the new printed books and single sheets of prints. Our
initial neglect of German art, where paintings were often anonymous and still
painted with real gold, often went unnoticed, reinforced by the stigma attached
to German culture by justifiable biases, generated by twentieth-century politics.
French and English and Spanish art were similarly consigned to cultural oblivion
? as backwaters relative to Flemish art. Bohemian or Polish art lay beyond both
the political gulf of a Cold War Iron Curtain as well as a Slavic language barrier.
Even early Dutch painting of the fifteenth century had to wait until 1980 for
a modern analysis from Albert Ch?telet.
Today,
geographical boundaries have been expanded broadly to encompass all of Central
Europe, scholarship led especially by Thomas Kaufmann, following the earlier,
more regional apologetics of Jan Bialostocki of Poland. Indeed, we are likely
now to look at the contact between Europe?s art and other regions of the world
after 1492, whether we look at Spain and the New World, or else the Portuguese
and then the Dutch, in Africa and Asia. We find a broader vision underlying the
important recent anthology, edited by Claire Farago, a specialist in Italian art,
appropriately entitled Reframing the Renaissance (1995). One groundbreaking
exhibition catalogue on America, ?bride of the sun,? was prepared in 1992 by Paul
Vandenbroeck. Another, Terra Australis (1988) was the collaboration between
William Eisler and Bernard Smith. International collaborations by Jesuits abroad
have recently been examined by Gauvin Bailey. We begin now to study the reciprocal
importance of foreign ventures on Dutch visual culture, particularly in the form
of maps and atlases, as in the recent volume by historian Benjamin Schmidt. In
an era of increasing interest in what is termed cultural geography, there is still
too little connection between art history and the current researches in history
or literature from a postcolonial perspective. In addition, we visual specialists
have left out the profoundly visual world of cartographers, in spite of what we
learn from such fundamental Dutch map scholars as Gunther Schilder and Kees Zandvliet,
that there is a continuous tradition linking the later sixteenth century mapmaking
to the Golden Age. Here new researches and a workshop at this conference by Mari't
Westermann, featuring such younger scholars as Rebecca Parker Brienen, are beginning
at long last to tackle the rich legacy of foreign travel imagery and publications
in colonizing Holland.
Recent
decades have somewhat redressed prior deficiencies for neglected visual culture
in Flanders: tapestries have benefited from the ongoing expertise of Guy Delmarcel,
architecture from the researches of Krista De Jonge, wooden sculptures from Lynn
Jacobs, and stained glass from Ellen Konowitz as well as Tim Husband?s outstanding
Cloisters exhibition of 1995. Stephen Scher and others have redressed the omission
of attention to the political and intellectual mementos of bronze medals in both
Germany and the Netherlands of the sixteenth century. We still lack work on French
decorative arts, especially the brilliant Limoges enamels of the sixteenth century
and the experimental ceramics of Palissy. Despite a major exhibition in Nuremberg
of 1985, the crucial work of Wenzel Jamnitzer and German metalwork of Munich and
Prague remains to be re-investigated. We can all thank Frits Scholten for his
magnificent exhibition catalogue on Adriaen de Vries, and hope that other great,
boundary-crossing bronze sculptors receive increased attention in future. There
has even been renewed attention to temporary, if grandiose, spectacles as objects
of study, such as the entries and festivals of cities and courts; a notable contribution
to this research was the 1998 NKJ volume, Hof-, staats- en stadscermonies,
edited by Mark Meadow. Even hidden artworks, the preparatory drawings by artists,
has been revealed through the ongoing infrared technology and intensive researches
of the Louvain-le-Neuve group, of the team at the National Gallery London, and
of Molly Faries and Maryan Ainsworth, especially in her book-length study of Gerard
David.
German
art has also begun to receive more attention, especially in the Anglophone world,
led by such figures as Thomas Kaufmann, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Joseph Koerner,
Christopher Wood, Christiane Andersson, Alison Stewart, Pia Cuneo and Andrew Morrall.
The recent catalogue on Tilman Riemenschneider by Julian Chapuis and the ongoing
researches into Adam Kraft by Corine Schleif are deepening our contemporary understanding
of the important sixteenth-century media of wood and stone sculptures. A stellar
example of collaboration between German and American scholars occurred just last
year in the re-examination of stained glass in both Germany and Switzerland in
the exhibition "Painting on Light" by Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix.
Chipps Smith has produced a lavish book on German sculpture of the later sixteenth
century, simultaneously shedding light on neglected media and masters, while also
addressing the larger part of the sixteenth century, so often neglected, after
the departures of Durer and Holbein; moreover, he is now completing a volume on
Jesuit churches throughout Germany, going well beyond the usual emphasis on Reformation
patronage in the homeland of Martin Luther. J?rg Breu in Augsburg has benefited
from the joint attentions of both Pia Cuneo and Andrew Morrall. Another young
scholar, Susan Maxwell, is working on the court culture of Wittelsbach Munich.
Nowhere
has recent scholarship contributed more to our understanding of a medium and its
international ramifications than in the burgeoning culture of prints, whether
woodcuts or intaglios. Here, too, the reigning paradigms have shifted significantly
since Panofsky, who still defined prints primarily in terms of the signal masterworks
of a single peintre-graveur, DY(R)rer. Other printmakers were still barely attended
to when I was a student, but the growth industry of monographs on prints has begun,
starting with founding masters of the fifteenth century, to Lucas van Leyden and
Hendrick Goltzius in the sixteenth. It is astonishing today to realize that these
two later major artists only began to receive serious scrutiny in the 1970s ?
with the work of Dutch scholars, led by Filedt Kok for Lucas and Reznicek for
Goltzius, as well as of Americans, such as Parshall for Lucas and Melion for Goltzius.
We can now eagerly anticipate the multi-media Goltzius exhibition next year, co-sponsored
by museums in Amsterdam, Toledo and New York. Beyond
such titans, we begin to attend to artists who were virtually invisible before
the sixteenth century became an object of study, for example Maarten van Heemskerck,
for whom we owe such a debt to Ilja Veldman, or Martin de Vos by Christiaan Schuckman.
Even in Germany, we need to single out the studies devoted to such printmakers
as Altdorfer (by Winzinger and Mielke), the Nuremberg Kleinmeister (Stephen Goddard),
and even Hans Holbein the Elder (Christian MY(R)ller). No German artist has had his
stock rise higher than Hans Baldung, whose paintings (von der Osten) and graphics
(Matthias Mende as well as Marrow and Shestack) have both been objects of study.
We also now have a synthetic overview of both German and Netherlandish printmaking
by Peter Parshall (along with David Landau for Italy) in their penetrating study
of The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (1994). Perhaps
nowhere else besides printmaking do we see so many new questions and insights
raised in the past quarter-century. First, artistic production. Parshall and Landau
outline the collaborative aspects of printmaking as a process as well as the importance
of experimentation in techniques. They also point to the role of both cutters
of woodblocks and publishers in both Antwerp and Nuremberg. Timothy Riggs first
began this revaluation process by focusing on the later professional publisher
of prints, by Bruegel and numerous other artists, ?Aux Quatre Vents? in Antwerp,
Hieronymus Cock. In 1993 Riggs and Silver together attempted to address a different
kind of print production, undescribed by the concept of peintres-graveurs: the
phenomenon of the professional engraver, who collaborated with a publisher to
realize prints after the designs of painters or draftsmen. Riggs?s pioneering
work spawned studies on publishers and professional printmakers, including Galle
and Cort (by Manfred Sellink), Coornhert and the family de Passe (by Ilja Veldman),
the brothers Wierix (by Marie Macquoy Hendrickx), and Hendrick Hondius (by Nadine
Orenstein). We now have impressive, comprehensive publications of the corpora
of these printmakers, by the New Hollstein, by the Illustrated Bartsch, and by
Sound and Vision Interactive. The
study of works of art has become more interpretive in the last quarter century.
ndeed, while one of the principal current approaches has remained close focus
on the individual artworks or artists, that attention has taken on a more sophisticated
self-awareness. One way we might characterize this interpretation is the application
of phenomenology to the object of study. Here I think in particular of Joseph
Koerner?s deep reading of the complexities, even contradictions, of DY(R)rer?s 1500
Munich Self-Portrait as well as the intertextual reference and inversion
between DY(R)rer?s art as theme and the subsequent art of Baldung as variation. In
similar fashion, Christopher Wood has joined Koerner?s project of locating the
roots of modern artistic self-consciousness in the chiaroscuro drawings and landscape
subjects of Albrecht Altdorfer. For
the Netherlands, Reindert Falkenburg?s analyses of religious paintings of both
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proceeds from a powerful empathic experience
of the works themselves but also builds upon either contemporary spiritual literature
or even classic pieces, such as his current work, using St. Augustine as a foundation
of understanding the central panel of Bosch?s Garden of Delights. Mark
Meadow?s close study of Bruegel?s Netherlandish Proverbs painting of 1560
reveals not only important structures of juxtaposition within the picture but
also close affinities with patterns of thought in Renaissance commonplace books.
Though there has not been a great deal of attention to French sixteenth-century
art, similar interpretive close readings of works have formed a major contribution
to our sense of newly emerging artistic identity. Here I want to single out the
analysis by Catherine Randall of complex French court architecture as a counter-cultural
reaction by Calvinist designers to a dominant Catholic society during the Wars
of Religion as well as the far-ranging dissertation by Rebecca Zorach of a culture
of excess in Fontainebleau ornament. Beyond
what we might term the visual rhetoric of the work of art, we also find scholars
giving new attention to the dialogue between Renaissance verbal rhetoric in its
multiple forms and the purposes of visual art. I have already mentioned Mark Meadow,
and here I also am thinking of Falkenburg?s use of the rhetorical trope, familiar
from Erasmus and his contemporaries, of ?paradoxical encomium.? Walter Melion
has also worked on formative texts, beginning with Karel van Mander?s crucial
Schilderboeck of 1604 as well as the writings on art by Ortelius and Lampsonius;
lately Melion has turned his analytical mind to the vast text-image dialogue in
Nadal?s illustrated religious tracts and related publications of the Counter-Reformation
in Antwerp. Connections between Netherlandish urban Chambers of Rhetoric and the
visual arts were investigated in a 1993 Amsterdam conference, where Meadow, Falkenburg,
and Nina Serebrennikov made groundbreaking interventions in dialogue with scholars
of rederijkers. From
the opposite side of the equation, the ongoing studies of early modern, urban,
bourgeois literature by Herman Pleij, particularly his books of the Blue Ship,
the Snow Puppets of 1511, and the Land of Cockaigne, have illuminated
visual motifs of Netherlandish art. Almost the inverse of Pleij?s consideration
of shared and historically situated visual and verbal culture is Keith Moxey?s
recent work, notably his Practice of Theory and Practice of Persuasion,
which argue for a radical indeterminacy or fully subjective construction of
meaning in visual interpretations as well as history in general.. Authorship and
argument, that is, rhetoric, he argues, shape art historical writing to fulfill
the ideology and interested purpose of the narrative. One
aspect of Netherlandish art that has finally begun to receive necessary attention
is the contribution of style to the understanding of a picture?s effect and message.
There is still too little analysis of the mimetic turn in the fifteenth century
in terms of either the analysis of meaning or of theories of seeing, namely what
is coming to be called ?visuality? (Robert Nelson, ed. 2000), but there has been
some real headway in the interpretation of that imported, Italianate formal presentation,
often known as Romanism, in sixteenth-century Flanders. A major 1995 catalogue
by Nicole Dacos, Fiamminghi a Roma, tackled the documentary and forensic
side of this issue. Beyond this foundation of travelling artists, there has been
a variety of interpretive studies, led by Eric Jan Sluijter?s investigations of
both Italianate ideal physical forms and classical mythological subjects. In both
Sluijter?s dissertation on the ?heydensche fabulen? in Dutch painting as well
as his instructive essays, many of them collected in the recent volume entitled
Seductress of Sight, Sluijter focuses his attention primarily on the generation
of Goltzius and its repercussions for later Dutch art. It is not difficult to
understand how nationalistic art historians would have seen such imported forms
and subjects as ?foreign,? opposed to a mimetic indigenous tradition of landscapes
or genre images during the sixteenth century, preferring a Bruegel to a Frans
Floris or a Heemskerck, for example, but it is gratifying to see such topics finally
addressed as part of the fuller art historical record. Recent exhibitions, such
as "Bruges and the Renaissance" as well as "Dutch Classicism in
Seventeenth-Century Painting," also redress an earlier, willful omission.
To a certain extent the same research is happening on the level of individual
artists, most notably Jan Gossaert, who is the focus for two promising younger
scholars, Ariane Mensger and Stephanie Schrader. Moxey?s
recent methodological deconstruction of the discipline reverses his own earlier,
social historical interpretations of artworks, particularly prints, ranging from
Master ES and the Housebook Master to Nuremberg woodcuts in his Peasants, Warriors,
and Wives. There he often interrogated the relationship between broadsheet
images and their accompanying texts by the likes of Hans Sachs. Representations
of soldiers in particular have received focused attention by the historian of
warfare, J. R. Hale, and by a new anthology on art and warfare, edited by Pia
Cuneo. A more anthropological and cultural reading of the figures of fools, peasants,
and beggars is provided by Paul Vandenbroeck in both his study of Bosch ?between
folk life and city culture? as well as in his catalogue essay, Beeld van de
andere, Vertoog over het zelf. Artistic representations of various genre subjects
in prints formed the basis of a rich survey by Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten in
their 1997 Mirror of Everyday Life. Family history has become a topical
issue, both in respect to the relations between the sexes and the rearing of children.
Historians have made notable contributions to this literature, most notably Stephen
Ozment for Germany; for the Netherlands Jeroen Dekker has provided new foundations,
and the role of art has recently been reasserted for images of children in the
exhibition Pride and Joy, by Jan Baptist Bedaux and Ruddi Ekkart. Here,
too, we can single out the interpretive investigations of portraiture that have
become much more prominent, led by Joanna Woodall. And patronage studies have
never been stronger. I think, for example, of Corine Schleif?s work on Nuremberg
patricians, and I anticipate in particular the forthcoming study of Margaret of
Austria by Dagmar Eichberger. Considerations
of sex and gender have inflected many another study of our period, led by the
fine prints catalogue by Diane Russell and Bernadine Barnes, entitled Eva/Ave.
There is also a forthcoming anthology on gender issues, edited by Alison Stewart
and Jane Carroll, entitled Sisters, Saints and Sinners , which will add
to such interpretations. Witchcraft issues have been well explored for both Germany
and the Netherlands, by numerous historians, led by Lyndal Roper and Charles Zika,
as well as art historian Linda Hults and the co-authors of an important Dutch
anthology of 1985, Tussen heks en heilige. Images of rape, often taken
from illuminated manuscripts and military prints, have been sensitively analyzed
by Diane Wolfthal. However, there is still too little attention paid to a more
positive eroticism during a period in which the erotic became thematized for mythological
figures as well as more ordinary humans. This material has been given closer analysis
for Italy recently by Bette Talvacchia, but a seminal essay by Janey Levy on the
Behams? erotic engravings in the 1988 Kleinmeister exhibition remains an isolated
study for Northern art. Some attention to studies of the erotically charged female
nude for DY(R)rer and Baldung (Sigrid Schade and Joseph Koerner) as well as Cranach
(Charles Talbot) take on this topic for some of the leading German artists, but
more artists and depth of analysis are still needed. Recently the period significance
of clothing has received a sensitive reading by English literary historians Anne
Jones and Peter Stallybrass. The actual social roles of female patrons, particularly
the rulers Margaret of Austria (Dagmar Eichberger), Mary of Hungary (Dirk van
den Boogaert), Catherine de? Medici (Sheila Ffolliott), and Elizabeth I of England
(Roy Strong), have lately received due attention. As
these considerations of cultural and social issues suggest, one of the things
that has changed dramatically over the past quarter century (has it truly been
that long?) is the quality and the quantity of our conversations. Art history
as a discipline, I am fond of saying, is by its very name interdisciplinary between
the internal history of art itself and the role of art as history, as the visual
culture of any culture under study, whether that be late medieval, early modern,
Renaissance, Reformation, or an emerging national or even imperial culture. Our
conversations have become richer during this period ? conversations within the
HNA across the Atlantic, conversations between museums and academies (exemplified
by our joint meeting with the curators of CODART), conversations between art historians
and other kinds of historians, including historians of literature, science, religion,
and politics. Some of what I propose to chart here in the remaining time will
be the records of such dialogues. However,
I also want to point out that the boundaries between regions and centuries, which
seemed so sacrosanct when I began ? discreetly organized into North vs. South,
Renaissance vs. Reformation, fifteenth vs. sixteenth vs. seventeenth centuries,
as this conference roster of speakers maintains ? now begin, quite legimately,
to blur. We now see continuities where once we saw differences or breaks. Even
the toughest boundary of all, between modern Belgium and Holland, has become fluid,
as the keen current interest in Pieter Bruegel can even attract scholars from
both parts of Brabant and remind us of the common language behind the Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, which devoted several recent issues to both Bruegel
and the emerging art market of his era.
Indeed,
Bruegel scholarship offers a useful index of what has been happening of late in
our field more generally. Rhetorical interpretations of Bruegel?s work range from
the rather literal association of the artist with ancient Roman satirical texts
by Margaret Sullivan to the issues of imitation and emulation of earlier visual
models evoked by both Mark Meadow and Nina Serebrennikov. Walter Gibson continues
to use contemporary literature to support his readings of imagery in relation
to contemporary cultural attitudes. Matt Kaveler reads Bruegel images of peasant
labor and leisure in relation to larger issues of social order, while Larry Silver
considers Bruegel?s output in relation to the market pressures to be a second
Bosch or an identifiable ?brand name? artist while also considering the artist?s
ongoing preoccupations with nascent capitalism in the busy port city of Antwerp.
A recent, major contribution to Bruegel and the nascent world of mapping was produced
by Nils BY(R)ttner. Another is the iconological study of Erasmian elements in Bruegel
by JY(R)rgen MY(R)ller, entitled Das Paradox als Bildform. And of course we are
all indebted to the great exhibition of Bruegel graphics last year, organized
by Nadine Orenstein and Manfred Sellink. In
similar fashion, a recent volume, DY(R)rer and his Culture, was jointly edited
by art historian Eichberger and historian Zika, and it features a mixture of authors
from both disciplines. Topics include: views of nature and early collections,
Germanic patriotism and representations of both local landscape and contemporary
soldiers, images of witchcraft and of love, ?ways of seeing,? problems of censorship
and allegories of virtue, and the historiography of DY(R)rer?s canonical status and
collecting. What we discover in reading the entirety of this book is how much
and in how many ways the artist DY(R)rer participated in his contemporary culture. One
area where art history has contributed greatly to this same kind of interdisciplinary
understanding of a major early modern phenomenon is the foundational contribution
of visual imagery to taxonomic representation of the natural world at the advent
of the scientific era. Peter Parshall has written magisterially about ?counterfeit?
images, especially replicable printed images, whose verisimilitude made them major
contributors to the taxonomic classification of the natural world in the sixteenth
century birth of early modern scientific knowledge. We have learned much of DY(R)rer?s
animals and their legacy from both Fritz Koreny and Colin Eisler. Lately Pia Cuneo
has carefully studied the visual and verbal understanding of horses, hippology
in sixteenth-century German art. Christopher Wood has underscored the importance
of the concept of ?curiosity? to that era of collecting and learning, and Claudia
Swan has discussed de Gheyn?s vivid drawings within the learned culture of Leiden
University, especially Carolus Clusius. Interestingly, such conversations are
not just confined to art museums: one of the most fascinating exhibitions on the
subject of scientific wonder stemmed from the Amsterdam Historical Museum, its
De wereld binnen handbereik ehibition of 1992. Like
the multidisciplinary interests of early modern collectors of natural wonders,
modern scholars have also collaborated with art historians to consider this crucial
period of knowledge expansion. Historians Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen have
just published essays from a rich conference, Merchants and Marvels, where
art history meets with commerce and science. Roberta Olson?s collaboration with
astronomer Jay Passachoff complements her researches into the representation of
comets. Related contributions to art history have also come from historians ?
Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998).
But art historians have also made major contributions to the understanding of
knowledge through its visual codification; most notably here two recent exhibitions
deserve mention: the 1997 study of the humors by Zirka Filipczak, Hot Dry Men/Cold
Wet Women; and the 2000 examination of ?Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern
Europe? by Claire Sherman, Writing on Hands. I
am really not sure that the so-called ?new art history,? at least in its dialogue
with history or historical anthropology, is so very different from what many of
us a generation ago were accustomed to calling ?art in context.? Ironically, this
approach to attempting an interpretive but verbally and ethnographically grounded
analysis was a much more significant movement in literary history, where it has
come to be called ?the new historicism.? Our current research moves into a more
inclusive notion of what constellates ?visual culture? in its historical period,
permitting attention to objects, often anonymous, that were not previously considered
artworks at all. Jan van der Stock?s close study of sixteenth-century Antwerp
archives, Printing Images in Antwerp (1998) offers a newly inclusive range
of all printed images, including wallpapers and anonymous, cheap religious images,
in a newly encompassing presentation of published visual works. Similarly, Parshall
devotes attention in his book to religious images, broadsheets, town plans, and
maps, as well as what we would now call ?scientific illustrations,? such as herbals.
Parshall?s
rethinking of print culture reminds us how long we have neglected both the production
and the consumption of anonymous, inexpensive woodcuts in the formative years
of printmaking, but David Areford is preparing an exhibition on these works, which
offers particular attention to the uses of these prints in private devotions and
pilgrimages, offering important continuity with devotional images in illuminated
manuscripts, especially favorite saints or indulgenced images, such as the Virgin
in the Sun or the Holy Wound of Christ, with accompanying prayers. For such images
we return to the late medieval practices drawn by Huizinga and lately by Eamon
Duffy?s history, Stripping the Altars. Wonderful studies of visual culture
in the late medieval affective spirituality of pre-Reformation Germany were sketched
by the late, great Bob Scribner, culminating in his study of their transformations
into ?popular propaganda? in early Reformation prints, For the Sake of Simple
Folk (1981), or in the more specialized consideration of Passion imagery and
contemporary practices of public corporal punishment for criminals, Mitchell Merback?s
The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel. Indeed,
such studies of religious affect return us to the very experience of art works,
to such general studies as Hans Belting?s Likeness and Presence (1994;
German ed. 1990), subtitled ?a history of the image before the era of art,? defined
by the author as our very own watershed early modern period, particularly the
Reformation in the North. Well beyond our period but still firmly based within
it lie continuities of evocative and emotive visionary works, as outlined by David
Freedberg for both erotic and religious images, including humble votive images
or pilgrimage souvenirs, in his Power of Images (1989). Freedberg?s
work has also attended to the fear and loathing of images in the form of iconoclasm,
particularly the 1566 destruction of images in the Netherlands. But earlier, German
Protestant iconoclasm has received considerable interest from religious historians,
such as Carlos Eire (War against the Idols, 1986), Lee Palmer Wandel (Voracious
Idols and Violent Hands. 1995) and Sergiusz Michalski (Reformation and
Art). Earlier attempts to define Lutheran art have been evaluated by Peter
and Linda Parshall in their 1986 analytical bibliography, particularly of the
many historical ehibitions of the 1983 Luther year. Now the Marian images in Reformation-era
Germany have been examined in the dissertation by Bridget Heal, while the Reformation
content of Augsburg artist J?rg Breu has been examined by Andrew Morrall in his
new monograph. If
I have here often stressed the dialogue between art history and sister disciplines
of the humanities, I should also stress that art history has recently come to
be a major contributor to economic history. Here some of the work has been collaborative
across disciplinary lines, led chiefly by art historian Hans van Miegroet and
his colleague from economics, Neil De Marchi. This pair has participated in another
major trend of the past quarter-century ? the return to the archives, and there
they have found troves of dealers? inventories that have permitted both quantitative
and qualitative assessments of these taste-makers and exporters of Netherlandish
art to other parts of Europe and the emerging colonial worlds. Other major contributors
to the study of art markets and economic or social history of art are Michael
Montias, John Loughman, and Martin Jan Bok, who have devoted considerable energies
to prices and inventories of Dutch art of the seventeenth century, which lies
beyond my focus. The very subject of the market as a site of transaction, usually
of vegetable produce, also forms a subject in its own right for sixteenth-century
Flemish painting, with considerable implications for issues of commodification
and the cash nexus of human interactions, as we have learned from Elizabeth Honig.
Subjects of money and its corrupting power form a staple of later Netherlandish
art, as outlined by economic historian Basil Yamey in his understated book, Art
and Accounting. At the outset of the sixteenth century, the active art market
in Bruges and the issues of art production for that market have received attentive
investigation by Jean Wilson, as articles by Dan Ewing, Lynn Jacobs, and Filip
Vermeylen, have amplified this Flemish picture for the Antwerp art market. More
broadly, an ambitious collaboration in progress about the Antwerp art market and
its methods of production has been undertaken by Groningen colleagues Max Martens
and Molly Faries. Another important collaborative project, the Mapping Markets
Project, includes the talents of Andrew Morrall, Michael North, Neil De Marchi,
and Hans van Miegroet.
What
I see emerging at present, therefore, is an art history that is more truly collaborative,
making use of the best questions and scholarship from adjacent disciplines: literature,
history, science, economics, or politics. While we still have much to learn from
re-examinations ? of archives, of underdrawings, of objects themselves ? we surely
see and learn many new things about the objects we study when we reflect anew
about methods and questions, or when we are challenged to use visual culture to
contribute to the general knowledge about other aspects of culture: family or
gender, values or knowledge, wealth, status or power. When we follow the lead
of such scholars as Reindert Falkenburg or Eric Jan Sluijter, both of whom practice
their own dialogue across the Atlantic as well as across the chronological habits
of dividing by centuries, when we make active collaborations, such as Max Martens
and Molly Faries on the Antwerp art market or Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika
on the culture of Albrecht DY(R)rer, we are all enriched for the enlarged conversation.
Let us remember that our discipline is built on that conceptual dialogue between
art and history, between objects and culture, between past and present. The sixteenth
century is a complex, tumultuous period, but also a period firmly situated between
the Flemish ars nova and the Dutch Golden Age, between late medieval and
early modern history, between regionalism and international colonialism. We should
strive to be at least as flexible and receptive as the artists and media we seek
to study (think Durer), to be conscious of our modern biases and our scholarly
methods, as we engage in the ultimate dialogue ? at once to analyze the differences
between ourselves and the media and culture of a lost age, while continually making
the connections that necessarily link those very remnants to our present age.
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