The sets of landscape etchings produced in the second decade of the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde drew on and contributed to a print culture that played a key role in defining "Dutch" landscape. Examination of these printed landscape series as part of a wide-ranging print culture underscores the consistent interrelationship of landscape, history, and politics. To varying degrees, the contemporaneous descriptive geographies, histories, allegorical tableaux, didactic prints, and poetic anthologies considered in this study provide parallels for the prints' serial structure, journey theme, and commemorative motifs. Moreover, as part of a wider enterprise of Dutch self-definition, they provide cultural guidelines for the interpretation of landscape in prints and paintings. Levesque's study of the Dutch seventeenth-century experience of place is two-tiered. She addresses the journey through landscape as an interpretive framework, the spatial structure of knowledge, the benefits of travel from the point of view of humanists, and the growth of a Dutch national self-consciousness expressed through landscape. She also provides a close reading of the structure and motifs in the print series of Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde.

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

In response to the dominance of Latin as the language of intellectual debate in early modern Europe, regional centers started to develop a new emphasis on vernacular languages and forms of cultural expression. This book shows that the local acts as a mark of distinction in the early modern cultural context. Interdisciplinary in scope, essays examine vernacular strands in the visual arts, architecture and literature from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Contributions focus on change, rather than consistencies, by highlighting the transformative force of the vernacular over time and over different regions, as well as the way the concept of the vernacular itself shifts depending on the historical context. Contributors include James J. Bloom, Jessica E. Buskirk, C. Jean Campbell, Lex Hermans, Sun Jing, Trudy Ko, David A. Levine, Eelco Nagelsmit, Alexandra Onuf, Bart Ramakers, and Jamie L. Smith

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources – including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs – Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the seventeenth-century poet Constantijn Huygens. Probing their conception of nature as 'the first Book of God' and art as its representation, Bakker identifies a world view that has its roots in the traditional Christian perceptions of God and creation. Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt imposes a new layer of interpretation on the richly varied landscapes of the great masters. In so doing it adds a new dimension to the insights offered by modern art-historical research. Further, Bakker's explorations of early modern art and literature provide essential background for any student of European intellectual history.

In recent years many historians have argued that the Reformation did not - as previously thought - hamper the development of Northern European visual culture, but rather gave new impetus to the production, diffusion and reception of visual materials in both Catholic and Protestant milieus. This book investigates the crosscurrents of exchange in the realm of illustrated religious literature within and beyond confessional and national borders, and against the background of recent insights into the importance of, on the one hand material, as well as on the other hand, sensual and emotional aspects of early modern culture. Each chapter in the volume helps illuminate early modern religious culture from the perspective of the production of illustrated religious texts - to see the book as object, a point at which various vectors of early modern society met. Case studies, together with theoretical contributions, shed light on the ways in which illustrated religious books functioned in evolving societies, by analysing the use, re-use and sharing of illustrated religious texts in England, France, the Low Countries, the German States, and Switzerland. Interpretations based on points of material interaction show us how the most basic binaries of the early modern world - Catholic and Protestant, word and image, public and private - were disrupted and negotiated in the realm of the illustrated religious book. Through this approach, the volume expands the historical appreciation of the place of imagery in post-Reformation Europe.