Constructing Political Ideologies
and National Identities in Netherlandish Art
Barbara Haeger,
Nicola Courtright, and Susan Koslow
haeger.1@osu.edu
This workshop included
four short presentations that provided very different
ways of exploring the questions involved. Leopoldine
Prosperetti and Susan Koslow focused on representations
of the sovereign that draw upon traditional Habsburg
strategies. Koslow focused on the state portrait,
demonstrating its use as a diplomatic instrument and
in furthering dynastic aims and contrasting this image
of embodied sovereignty with the diverse symbols of
the Dutch Republic whose form of government did not
invest power in a single person. Prosperetti, on the
other hand, examined several pictures by Jan Brueghel
in which, she argued that the Archdukes appear as
embodiments not of dynastic power but of divine favor
who procure protection for their subjects by their
devout nature. Thus, the pictures can be seen as a
manifestation of the benefits of Habsburg piety, displays
of which constituted an important means for achieving
religious uniformity which was essential to the unity
and identity of the state.
Like religion, language
is unquestionably a potent force in achieving unity
and identity, and the study and standardization of
language is often linked to emerging civic and national
entities. In his paper, David Levine explored this
development in the northern Netherlands and examined
the connection between the style of Frans Hals and
the Dutch characterization of their language, acknowledging
its roughness and lack of elegance, while celebrating
its ingenious structure. Perry Chapman also considered
the role of a kind of language in her exploration
of the emergence of the sorts of images that participate
in the formation of an imagined community and a sense
of patriotic identityA during the Twelve YearA-s Truce.
Among other things, she argued that a vernacular allegory
developed, one which replaced the Renaissance humanist
language of erudite symbolic representation with a
native pictorial idiom of mundane motifs.
In the discussion
that followed, various issues raised by the presentations
were debated. The most debated was the question regarding
what the term national identity signifies and whether
or not we can use it in the context of the seventeenth-century
Netherlands.
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