Northern Renaissance Art

In this lucid account, Stephanie Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe during the Renaissance period (c.1400–1570). She explains how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic and religious change, while redefining the status of art. Porras discusses not only paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry and armour. Each chapter presents works from a roughly 20-year period and also focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and art works. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centres of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products. This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

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.

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Der „Kitzinger Tucherschrank“ befand sich ursprünglich wohl im zweiten Obergeschoss des Kitzinger
Rathauses, im dortigen Sitzungssaal. Diese ehemalige Ratsstube ist mit einer Wandvertäfelung
und einer schweren, mit perspektivischen Fantasielandschaften verzierten Tür ausgestattet, die
den hohen Stand der Kitzinger Schreinerkunst im 16. Jahrhundert erkennen lassen.
Der Tucherschrank, der sich bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert noch dort befunden haben soll, ist
in seiner Ausführung etwas älter als dieses Vertäfelungswerk. Er ist als nicht höfisches und
für eine öffentliche Funktion konzipiertes Möbel Ausdruck eines gesteigerten bürgerlichen
Selbstbewusstseins, welches das gängige Repertoire des antiken Formenkanons offenbar genauso
kennt, wie es hohes kunsthandwerkliches Können freizusetzen vermag.

This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary edition of the Sixteenth Century Journal: "How have present political issues affected the way you do research?" In arguing that what once afforded study of the "Northern Renaissance" its pride of place in art historical scholarship was the central role played by acts of iconoclasm surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing responses in the formulations of new kinds of works of art, this essay then claims that the urgency of the present moment is to call attention to other instances of trauma, where violences may not have produced as much speech. A drawing by Christoph Jamnitzer and prints by Albrecht Dürer are here used to locate representations of the scream--and representations of the suppression of the scream--to advocate for a history of art that gives voice to those victims of brutality whom scholars have preferred, in the past, to suppress below the register of audibility.

Using Telč and Slavonice as examples, the dissertation deals with a number aspects
of art production in seigniorial towns at the beginning of the Early Modern Age,
focusing especially on subject burghers living in these towns, who were ordering (and
sometimes also creating) various works of art. It is particularly the issue of “burghers
ordering works of art”, mentioned in the first part of the thesis, which points out that
it is not possible to use one umbrella term for all activities related to creating works of
art in the urban environment, but also the great diversity of the orders analyzed in the
dissertation which both suggest that subject burghers as a social group, albeit often
neglected, are an important part of art history research.
The population analysis clearly shows that the social structure of small towns
mainly consisted of craftsmen, small merchants and people who earned their living
as farmers. Both towns also had their “elites”: these were typically active in town
administration, had certain economic strength and were closely interconnected
through family relationships and friendships. The social ambitions of these burghers
are often evident from their need for public self-presentation, which is particularly
visible in the complex, elaborate decoration of their town houses: the house fronts and
the lower halls. (A separate topic to be considered here is rather infrequent equipment
of the houses with luxurious objects, for which we have rare evidence in some of the
burghers’ testaments.)
The elite burghers as individuals were also directly related to collective actors
in the urban society, the most important of which – given the time and place –
were guilds. Guilds had a strong influence on urban life and apart from dealing
with professional interests of their members, they also had major religious & social
functions. The organization, traditions and rituals of guilds required adequate
facilities – in small seigniorial towns it was probably the houses of guild masters where
various guild events were being held. In some specific cases, it is therefore difficult to
distinguish between collective works of art and individual ones, as the work related to
one house owner could be significant both for the person who ordered it, and for the
guild that this person was a member of.
Another very important topic that needs to be taken into consideration in the
towns throughout the sixteenth century is the religious situation. Less significant art
realizations sponsored by burghers and created in buildings owned by the Catholic
Church until the mid-sixteenth century are in contrast with other works of art
that appeared once Martin Luther’s Reformation theses became widespread.
In Slavonice, such “Reformation” art is a crucial source, providing evidence of religious
transformation of the Catholic urban society during the Lutheran period (which
lasted more than fifty years and was actively supported by town councils) until
the Reformation started to be repressed towards the end of the 16th century by
interventions of the Lords of Hradec. The iconography of some of the Slavonice art
realizations and its interpretation in the context of the Reformation makes
a significant contribution to the fund of “Reformation Art” created in the Czech lands.
For Telč, neither written nor visual sources are available, which is why it was not
possible to carry out the same analysis there – this, however, makes the Reformation
works of art preserved in Slavonice even more significant.
The comparison of these two closely related, but also considerably different
towns highlighted the specific features of both locations representing typical
seigniorial towns: a town that used to be the main residence of the lords, and a town
where the nobility and the officials taking care of the demesne administration
were not permanently present. The big difference between a residential and nonresidential
town is particularly evident when we look how much the nobility changed
the appearance of the town. In Telč, there was major construction going on in the
residence of Zachariáš of Hradec, which had begun in the mid-sixteenth century,
and the town was changing accordingly to be in harmony with the appearance of the
residence (the evidence can be found, for instance, in the integrated project concept
for building new arcades of the town houses, or in the construction of the new town
hall). Another feature that is characteristic of Telč is the dynamic development of the
suburban area in the second half of the sixteenth century, which seems to be closely
related to the residential function of the town. In Slavonice, on the other hand,
it is easy to notice the high number of seigniorial signs on house facades as well as in
representative parts inside the houses. This is certainly caused by different heritage
funds in the two towns, yet one can also assume that the owner of the town was
symbolically always present in Telč due to the remarkable castle building, visible
from virtually any part of the town, while in Slavonice the presence of the nobility
was much more expressed through coats of arms. Furthermore, we have evidence
that the artists working in the residential town were not only Czechs but also Italians
(who participated in the construction and decoration of the residence of Zachariáš
of Hradec, but somewhat affected the urban area as well). In Slavonice, no activities
of Italian artists are reported, and it is obvious from the analysis of the buildings and
related paintings and sgraffitos that these were created by people who had been trained
in the Czech-Moravian-Austrian border region. The residential town hosted a very
diverse group of artists, while the local centre, which had no major orders placed by
the nobility, provided more opportunities to local artists (although they were active
in a relatively large area as well).
Several short analyses of the art scene in Telč and Slavonice throughout the 16th
century show that although burghers from small seigniorial towns could not compete
with their contemporaries from royal and other significant towns and cities, their
role in creating many different works of art is irreplaceable. As individuals, town
councilors or guild members, they actively participated in creating their own life space.
The appearance of towns, and residential towns in particular, was definitely largely
affected by the local nobility; however, there was a number of other factors too.
The society had many different colours and strata, and this fact is clearly reflected
in art realizations appearing in the urban organism.

The Kunstkammer of Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol
contained also manuscripts and albums with graphic
artworks. Among those preserved at the KHM Wien, a rare album of engravings of buildings of central ground plans by J. A. du Cerceau is identified in the text. It is possible to consider that it could have had some influence on the complex solution of the Star Summer Palace in Prague, especially on its basement (cellar).

The Northern Renaissance has been viewed as an extension of the artistic and cultural bloom in Italy, with the travels taken by Northern artists such as Albrecht Durer to support that claim. However, this assumption of inherently tying the success of the North to that of Southern Italy’s overlooks the creative transformations of image-making by individual artists in areas such as Germany and the breaking away from traditional ideas of subject matter, medium, and stylistic visual representation both in Italy and in different Northern societies as well. By looking at the rise of the drawing as its own autonomous work of art through the work of Albrecht Durer, the development of the landscape genre in the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, and the emergence of monochrome wood sculpture under Tilman Riemenschneider, one can view how these achievements both characterize the Northern Renaissance and mark a historical rupture from previous artistic traditions.

Depuis 4 ans, ce retable (1) a été transféré à l'Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique pour une restauration complète. A cette occasion, on a pu découvrir la très haute qualité artistique de cette oeuvre, exceptionnelle à plus d'un égardSa provenance, son dernier emplacement, sa taille, ses matériaux, sa décoration sont autant d'éléments qui demandent une analyse détaillée. En effet, si le monument de Maximilien II de Hénin-Liétard date d'environ 1625, année du décès de ce 6e comte de Boussu. Or, le retable date d'environ 1550. Il est donc bien antérieur au mausolée de Maximilien II. Dans ce cas, d'où vient-il ? Le château de Boussu voisin comportait une chapelle privée qui aurait très bien pu contenir ce retable. La chapelle du château de Mariemont, propriété de Marie de Hongrie, abritait d'ailleurs un retable d'albâtre de ce type. L'inventaire du Gouverneur de Binche de 1557 en fait mention. Cette oeuvre est en fait un retable domestique, et non la niche (2) supérieure traditionnelle présente sur un retable baroque. Il est aisé de constater la différence sur les exemples qui suivent.

Europe, north of the Alps sanctioned as a threshold for the artistic pursuit of Northern Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch. The captivating and imaginative world in Hieronymus Bosch’s oeuvre mystify and entice its spectators through his innovative artistic developments. The Garden of Earthly Delights provides a unique visionary experience through its distinct paradisiacal landscape, luscious vegetation, and sensuality juxtaposed with malignant beings, obscure objects, overt nudity, and religious figures. The triptych’s vignette of scenes and thematic ambiguity foster an array of interpretations. The Garden’s most prominent interpretation indicate that the left wing depicts the beginnings of Creation before the fall of Adam and Eve, the central panel, depicts men and women engaging in amatory pleasures and indulgence and thus, results in man’s consequences of sin serving as a moralizing message represented in the right wing. My proposed study will explore the notion of The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I as a potential patron through a figural representation of his first wife, Mary of Burgundy, who is depicted in the central panel. I will postulate that Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights can be seen as a metamorphosis of Eve, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary that is conveyed within Bosch’s central panel and most significantly the moralizing function it served amongst the nobility in the Brussels Palace.

wie in einem Neubau (Taf. IX) -dünne Mörteltropfen quellen aus den Fugen des steinernen Türgewändes, die glatten Dielenbretter erscheinen makellos, gerade verlegt. Erstarrt schweben Gabriel und Maria vor dem kippenden Raum in Konrad Witz' Nürnberger Verkündigung von 1440. 1 Ein Buch und -Gegenstand der folgenden Seitenein Schriftband, das sich aus den Händen des Engels nach vorn wölbt, sind die einzigen bewegten Akteure im Bild. Nicht die immaterielle Übermittlung der guten Nachricht, wie in einer Vielzahl mittelalterlicher Altarbilder üblich: eine Taube, ein Strahl, ein Leuchten -das Bild versteht die Verkündigung vielmehr als Empfang eines geschriebenen Textes, ein Pergament, das seinen Schatten auf das weiße Gewand des Engels wirft, Objekt ebenso wie Ereignis.

Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection, by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver, Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 366-70

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.

In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's Virgin and Child, a surviving portion of a diptych by Jan Gossart, this essay describes how a particular kind of image--the devotional icon--could refer to the process by which a painting is made and the meaning with which the creative act of making it is invested, and in doing so affirm the incomparable nature of the Virgin's body and the corporal reality of Christ. Treating Mary's unsullied essence as painting's self reflexive moment shifts the emphasis of images made in the Christian tradition from an epistemology of trauma--the anticipation of her Son's death--to an epistemology of endurance.

1. Hacia un corpus de arquitectura jesuítica. Bases actuales y líneas de trabajo futuro, por M.ª Isabel Álvaro Zamora y Javier Ibáñez Fernández 

2. La ratio aedificiorum di un'istituzione globale tra autorità centrale e infinità del territorio, por Richard Bösel 

3. Episodi emergenti dell'architetture gesuitica in Italia, por Richard Bösel 

4. La provincia di Sicilia, por Marco Rosario Nobile 

5. Le architetture della Compagnia di Gesù in Sardegna (XVI-XVIII secolo), por Emanuela Garofalo 

6. L'architecture jésuite en France: état de la question et perspectives de recherches, por Alexandre Gady y Pascal Julien 

7. Étienne Martellange: un architecte de la Compagnie de Jésus en France au XVIIe siècle, por Adriana Sénard 

8. The architecture of the jesuits in the Southern low Countries. A state of the art, por Joris Snaet y Krista de Jonge 

9. Jesuits architecture in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1564-1772, por Andrzej Betlej 

10. La arquitectura jesuítica en Castilla. Estado de la cuestión, por Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos 

11. La arquitectura jesuítica en Andalucía. Estado de la cuestión, por Alfredo J. Morales 

12. La arquitectura jesuítica en Valencia. Estado de la cuestión, por Mercedes Gómez-Ferrer 

13. La arquitectura jesuítica en Aragón. Estado de la cuestión, por Javier Ibáñez Fernández y Jesús Criado Mainar 

14. De historias globales y locales: una aproximación a la historiografía de la arquitectura de los jesuitas en Hispanoamérica, por Luisa Elena Alcalá 

15. Arquitectura de los jesuitas en Portugal y en las regiones de influencia portuguesa, por Paulo Varela Gomes y Rui Lobo 

16. Arquitectura jesuita en Filipinas y China, por Pedro Luengo

Techniken und Ästhetiken des Reflexionslichts in der Kunstliteratur um 1600 Walter Benjamins kurze Abhandlung Über die Malerei oder Zeichnen und Mal (1917) eröffnet mit einer provokanten Überlegung zum Wesen graphischer Linien, deren Charakteristikum für Benjamin-in Abgrenzung zu anderen Klassifikationen der Linie etwa als geometrisches Gebilde-ihre Beziehung zum Bilduntergrund darstellt; dergestalt, dass sich zeichnerische Linien und Untergrund stets reziprok zu einander verhalten. Lakonisch und ohne seinen Gedanken eine eingehendere Begründung folgen zu lassen schrieb er: Die graphische Linie ist durch den Gegensatz zur Fläche bestimmt. […] Die graphische Linie bezeichnet die Fläche und bestimmt damit diese, indem sie sich selbst als ihrem Untergrund zuordnet. Umgekehrt gibt es eine graphische Linie auch nur auf diesem Untergrunde, sodass eine Zeichnung, die ihren Untergrund restlos bedecken würde, aufhören würde, eine solche zu sein. […] Die graphische Linie verleiht ihrem Untergrunde Identität. 1 Der vorliegende Text entstand im Rahmen meiner vom Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut geförderten Dissertationsschrift. Erste Ideen zum hier skizzierten Themenfeld konnte ich im Sommer 2016 am Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in München im Rahmen der von Claudia Steinhardt-Hirsch organisierten Tagung Drawing. Imagination and Perception vorstellen. Ich danke den Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern des Kupferstichkabinetts der Hamburger Kunsthalle und des Kupferstichkabinetts der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, die mir bei der Recherche engagiert zur Seite standen.

Like many others before him, Dürer was fascinated by proportion and obsessed with absolute beauty. So much so, that the study and practice of these abstractions became his life's pursuit, which many scholars agree culminated with his Meisterstiche, his master engravings.

The construction of ‘sorcerers’ in the Formicarius, Malleus Malificarum, Die Emeis and other treatises presented a comparatively impoverished imagery, whereas imaging the male victims of feminine witchcraft, like the harridan-ridden Aristotle, the mortified Adam, or the stable groom victimized by hippomanes, came near to approaching the affective, abject power of feminized witch iconography—which is to say, the naked and eroticized feminine body.  More importantly, descriptions of male witches in the Malleus were based on specific, formulaic or ceremonial acts and not on grand theories of Natural Philosophy, which painted pictures of polluted physicality or sexually corrupted essential nature. Passages dealing with elite, masculine magic tended to present technical, imagistically boring reading compared to the richer, more dramatically detailed, sensationalistic sections on witches. They feature as less dramatic subjects for visual interpretation with far fewer classical antecedents and a far less universal symbol set. The closest exemplars of masculine iniquity, or ‘pollution,’ were to be found in the tropes surrounding ‘cuckolds,’ Jewish males, and addictive, ‘Faustian’ magicians – men who had lost control to the devil or his prime agent, Woman. And even these tropes relied, for their effect, upon the assignment of ‘effeminate’ attributes and the emotive language of contamination or pollution. Male witches deemed culpable for the usual, feminine stamp of maleficium were figured as woman-like in that they were constructed as ‘weak minded,’ or as ‘fools’ subject to demonic delusions and folly

Bei dem vorliegenden Beitrag handelt es sich um die überarbeitete Version des Vortrags, den der Autor anlässlich der Verleihung des Förderpreises ,Walther von der Vogelweide' am 3. Oktober 2015 im Bozner Waltherhaus gehalten hat. Im ersten Teil des Beitrags wird im Rahmen einer kurzen Einführung in das Schaffen des Südtiroler Renaissancemalers Bartlme Dill Riemenschneider eine Auswahl von Ergebnissen der diesem Künstler gewidmeten kunsthistorischen Dissertation des Autors vorgestellt. Im zweiten Teil wird unter dem Motto ,Transitregion und Kunsttransfer' ein Ausblick auf drei Themenfelder der Tiroler und Trentiner Kunstgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit gegeben, denen sich der Autor – sofern es die beruflichen Rahmenbedingungen erlauben – künftig gerne näher zuwenden würde.

Dogs have an enduring symbolism in images and texts that encompass both positive and negative meanings. During the German Renaissance, whole groups of people in remote regions of the world were portrayed with the heads of dogs in both literature and visual culture. This paper examines the monstrous race, the dog-headed cynocephali, within the social context of German Renaissance prints.

Les relations entre le texte et l’image ont été surtout étudiées sous l’angle de l’iconographie, de l’illustration et de la présence – occasionnelle et souvent paradoxale – de mots dans la peinture. C’était sans compter avec l’estampe qui constitue, dès la fin du XVe siècle, un champ d’expérimentation majeur pour tous ceux qui cherchent à concilier les qualités formelles, esthétiques et sémantiques d’un texte et d’une représentation artistique. Les techniques de gravure permettent en effet de réunir dans une même composition une grande variété de signes, verbaux et iconiques, dont l’ensemble constitue l’image : la « lettre » gravée est donc la partie écrite et effectivement lisible de l’estampe.
Centré sur la gravure de la Renaissance, ce livre explore une période particulièrement féconde, le XVIe siècle, qui a vu l’émergence en Europe d’une véritable industrie des arts de l’imprimé. Signatures, titres, légendes, dédicaces, commentaires, etc. sont passés au crible de l’analyse critique et interprétés suivant des méthodologies variées. Qui rédigeait les textes ? Comment étaient-ils gravés ? Quelle était la fonction des différentes inscriptions ? Comment étaient-elles lues et comprises par les usagers ? Ce livre offre, pour la première fois, une vision d’ensemble sur des questions d’écriture et de composition propres à l’estampe ; ce faisant, il nous invite à repenser de nombreux aspects de la création dans l’histoire artistique européenne.

Emmanuel Lurin est maître de conférences en histoire de l’art moderne à Sorbonne Université, Paris. Il s’intéresse aux relations entre l’estampe, la création artistique et la circulation des savoirs dans l’Europe du XVIe siècle.

Marianne Grivel a été conservatrice au Département des estampes et de la photographie à la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Spécialiste de l’estampe française, elle occupe la chaire d’histoire de l’estampe et de la photographie à Sorbonne Université, Paris.

What about body hair: axillary, pubic, chest, and leg hair?  Less visible in real life than head and facial hair, it nonetheless plays key roles in later medieval life and art.  Jolly offers an overview of the presence or absence of body hair on nudes in European art from the 13th through the 16th centuries.  Drawing on written sources about the body's production of hair, its grooming, and depilatory practices, she compares those contemporary perspectives and customs to artists' constructs of the nude.

Two sources leave telling traces of tensions in Albrecht Dürer's closest personal relationships. One, a letter that Dürer wrote to Willibald Pirckheimer, preserves for us a shocking and intimate exchange between the two men. Dürer sent the missive from Venice in 1506 and dated it "about fourteen days after St. Michael's Day," which places it in the middle of October. lt subsequently remained lost and forgotten for centuries together with other letters and papers behind a secret panel in a Nuremberg house. The subject of the discussion was the artist's wife, Agnes.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch baroque painter, sketcher, and printmaker who was not only one of the most prominent artist of all time, but made the foremost self-portraits of any other known artist.1 In his life Rembrandt suffered from a lot of misfortune than any other ordinary man. To be sure, it is no longer the fashion for critics to attack him both as artist and human being.2 Today the inquiry is done by writers of romantic biographies and films who mean to honor him. Their revised standard version of Rembrandt's life runs approximately as follows: "The child of poor, ignorant Dutch peasants, Rembrandt was born with near-miraculous skill in art. As an uneducated young man, he established himself in Amsterdam, and married with a beautiful, wealthy, sympathetic girl named Saskia, and enjoyed a short period of prosperity and fame. However, because man of genius are always misunderstood by the public, fate snatched him by the throat. The important burghers of the city, who may not have known much about art but knew what they liked, gave him an enormous commission-The Night Watch-in which the burghers were to be painted in traditional postures and lights. Rembrandt responded with a masterpiece-a fact unfortunately apparent only to him and his wife. Everyone else, from the burgers to the herring-peddlers, thought the painting was dreadful. Rembrandt's patrons hooted in rage and derision, demanding changes that the artist, secure in the knowledge that posterity would vindicate him, stubbornly refused to make."3 At this point, because it is not customary for a genius to suffer a single setback but to be overwhelmed by multiple catastrophes, Rembrandt's wife died, the Night Watch was ripped from the wall and placed in some indecorous location, his friends deserted him, and he was 1J.

The first, theoretical part of this study pursues the question of how meaning was generated and how an ambivalent-or polyvalent-object, for example, an allegory, was or can be understood. The interweaving of acts of interpretations involving things, ideas, nature, and-in the specific case of a work of art-the artist, that is to say, the material history of matter and artistic traditions, can be described as allegoresis. As this study demonstrates, the scholar who most vigorously shed light on the medieval exegesis of nature through allegoresis was Friedrich Ohly. The second part of the essay is a case study of an object executed in émail en ronde bosse, combined with an extremely fine relief carved in mother-of-pearl, that unfolds the various layers of the object's meaning through an analysis of the ambivalence of its iconographic motifs, its cultural origin (the courtly practices of gift-giving in French families), and its artistic origin in Paris about 1400, in the workshop of a goldsmith with an extraordinary expertise in only recently developed artistic techniques (rouge cler, émail blanc, painted enamel, and pointillé). The aim of this article is not to provide one interpretation of this object but, rather, to elucidate its ability to oscillate between multiple possible meanings and to reveal how insisting on just one of them would deprive the object of its ability to function in di erent contexts-secular and sacred. FIGURE 1. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, front view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent). FIGURE 2. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, back view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent).

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

BESCHRIJVING VAN DE TE BEGEVEN FUNCTIE In de context van het FWO Project dat wordt geleid door Frederik Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn (beiden Vakgroep Geschiedenis) en Maximiliaan Martens (Vakgroep Kunst-, Muziek-en Theaterwetenschappen) is een driejarige postdoctorale onderzoekspositie beschikbaar. Het doel is een studie van het sociale profiel van opdrachtgevers van schilderijen. Dit project focust op de sociale netwerken die aan de basis lagen van de vroege Nederlandse schilderkunst tussen c. 1400 en c. 1550. Onderzoekers zijn het allemaal eens dat de opbloei van de schilderkunst in de Bourgondisch-Habsburgse Nederlanden in hoge mate is gedreven door koopkrachtige elites die als opdrachtgever of koper optraden, maar er is geen enkele duidelijkheid over de mate waarin die sociale investeringen verbonden waren met elitevorming, verstedelijkingsprocessen, staatsvorming enzovoorts. In de literatuur circuleren bijvoorbeeld nog steeds diametraal tegenovergestelde interpretaties over deze schilderkunst als een in wezen hoofsadellijke dan wel nadrukkelijk stedelijk-burgerlijke kunst. Dit project gaat uit van de invloedrijke, maar nog niet empirisch onderbouwde stelling dat de opbloei van die schilderkunst geworteld was in een uitzonderlijk intensieve sociale dynamiek tussen oude en nieuwe elites in de Nederlanden. In de afgelopen twintig jaar zijn de datasets ontwikkeld die nodig zijn om deze hypothese te toetsen. Het project doet dit via een vergelijkende analyse van de sociale context van schilderkunst in Vlaanderen, Brabant, en Holland-Zeeland, welke regio's elk hun eigen sociale, economische, en politieke ontwikkelingen kenden. Naast deze eerder kwantitatieve invalshoek mikt het project op de kwalitatieve uitwerking van een handvol case-studies. De voornaamste taak van de postdoctorale onderzoeker is zelfstandig onderzoek. Daarnaast impliceert dit mandaat ook medebegeleiding van en samenwerking met een doctoraatsstudent die het sociale profiel van schilders tegen het licht houdt en co-publicaties met de projectleiders. Het project mikt op de opbouw van een database die mettertijd wordt gepubliceerd en een reeks onderzoeksartikels in Engelstalige peer-reviewed tijdschriften. De standplaats van de postdoctorale onderzoeker is de Vakgroep Geschiedenis van de Universiteit Gent (Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Gent), waarbij nauwe samenwerking met de Vakgroep Kunst-, Muziek-en Theaterwetenschappen is voorzien.

The painting Ascent into Heaven (ca. 1505-1515; dendrochronological dating: 1482-1490) kept in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice is one of the four eschatological panels (the other three are: Earthly Paradise, Fall of the Damned and Hell) which probably were in the collection of the Venetian Cardinal Domenico Grimani in the 1520s. The panels’ original arrangement and function are unknown. The paintings are not signed and their attribution to Jheronimus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516 ) is based largely on the grounds of stylistic criteria. In the study, I put Ascent into Heaven into two fundamental contexts for the iconographic analysis of this work: eschatological literature and early Netherlandish/ Flemish painting and in the context of near-death experiences (NDE) as well. My reflections focus on four motifs: the human soul, angel, tunnel, and light. The answer to the question posed in the title of the study must remain twofold. On the basis of the data gathered in the study, the content of the painting can be comprehended by references to the most frequently quoted sources of inspiration for Bosch: one painting by Dieric Bouts (left wing of the Last Judgement Altarpiece; Lille, Palais des Beaux Arts), two illuminations by Simon Marmion (Le livre des sept Ages du monde; Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Ms. 9047, fols. IV & 12r) and a literary work The Realm of Lovers (Dat rike der ghelieven) by Jan van Ruusbroec. Its content can be equally understood by reference to the role of the painter’s imagination (categories of inventio and fantasia), using his theological and astronomical knowledge as well his own optical-visual experience. The above line of interpretation that emphasizes the influence of biblical logosphere, takes into account undeniable religious experience of the painter from ‘s-Hertogenbosch resulting from being a member of the Church. The factor of an epistemological importance which influences the form of the answer to the title question is hypothetical non-verifiable Bosch’s personal transcendental experience, thus it becomes impossible to evaluate the translation of what is spiritual (experience) into visual (image). Due to the elusive, not fully scientific nature of NDE, this phenomenon has been excluded from the final conclusion, despite identifiable similarities between NDE and the panel from the Palazzo Ducale.

Annals of Arts (Selected Papers in English), 66/4 (2018)

Vasari notes that Pietro Torrigiano carved sculptures in wood but no such works have been identified. A sculpture of St. Francis of Paola may possibly be the first and its subject may also suggest Torrigiano' was active in Sicily before leaving Italy for Portugal and/or Spain.

This doctoral thesis explores a symbolic code which early modern colonial discourse
regularly invokes in order to mark non-Europeans as corrupted and fallen creatures. Drawing from a wide range of visual, verbal and performative texts, the study documents how images of spottedness areinstrumentalised to vilify unfamliar physiognomies and skin colour as symptoms of bestiality, of disease, and of unbridled lust. Whereas numerous Renaissance texts exploit this code of the spotted to popularise vaguely-defined concepts of ethnic segregation, some select works insightfully mimic this code to question its underlying rationale.

Having sketched out the multiple meanings attached to three archetypes of the spotted (the beast, the diseased body, and the lecher), the study proceeds to close-read this symbolism within three Shakespearean plays involving non-European characters: Titus Andronicus, Othello and The Tempest. The reading of those plays not only focuses on how imagery serves to construct character, but also how characterisation is used to expose the code of the spotted as a manipulative rhetorical device. The study concludes by reviewing its main findings within the larger contexts of Renaissance studies, and of critical theory on interethnic encounters.

The Last Judgement triptych, dated c. 1495 - 1505, from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges is currently considered by members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project as an undisputed work in the oeuvre of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516). In this article I demonstrate the connection (and thus the interpretation), based on two categories - inventio and fantasia, between the images of trumpet-playing angels and two musical instruments: a harp and a bell, fulfilling the function of penitentiary tools. My interpretation follows the expressive iconographical suggestion by Bosch. The two damned souls linked to the instruments are undergoing punishment of the senses (poena sensus). The driving force behind this refined form of torture, in response to amoral living seen in the light of Christian ethics, would be the angels - they play their instruments (straight aerophones with banners) turned in the direction of the harp and bell. The above hypothesis, in which I identify an unconventional task for angel trumpeters, is based on biblical foundations. Besides the accounts of angels adoring the God-Christ, their other mentioned dealings in the Bible are catastrophic towards individuals (2 Macc 3:26-27), communities (Gen 19:13.24-25), enemies of the chosen people (2 Kgs 19:35), the inhabitants of the earth in the vision of the final punishment (Rev 8:1-11:19; 15:1-16:21). The painter, within the context of his own iconographical game, departed from the traditional topos of an angel eschatological trumpeter and in reaching for motifs of instruments connected to King David (harp) and the Church (bell), went beyond the positive connotations related to them.