The present book considers the development of figurative wall painting in the southern Low Countries over a period of two centuries, between circa 1300 and 1500. The region had a long-standing tradition of monumental figurative painting, of which the earliest, romanesque, examples are still preserved at Tournai and Ghent. Despite the central role that figurative wall painting clearly continued to play in the art, propaganda, and liturgy of the courts and churches of the late medieval southern Low Countries, the medium has been largely overlooked in comparison with the attention paid by art historians to other contemporary art forms. A variety of factors have contributed to this neglect, of which the most significant are undoubtedly the random survival, and the often damaged condition, of extant wall paintings, as well as the frequently remote locations and difficulty of access to the buildings housing them. Benign neglect and active vandalism have ensured that only a fraction of the great wall painting ensembles of the late medieval era have survived. Today, only fifty or so individual murals or ensembles of the Late Gothic period -not including a large number of tomb paintings -once in the churches and monasteries, town halls and guild chapels, castles and hotels of the southern Low Countries, have survived the passage of time, wars, iconoclasm, and changing fashions of interior decoration. These include many previously unrecorded wall paintings discovered beneath layers of whitewash in churches and private residences within the last twenty-five years or so, and restored by conservation staff.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

A beautiful overview of the development in style of the miniature. From the anonymous and modest early Romanesque illustrations to the luxurious late Gothic miniatures of Simon Marmion or Lucas Horenbout who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, exported their Flemish masterpieces as far afield as Spain and Russia. Never before has the reader-viewer been presented with such a complete overview of the art of Flemish miniatures from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries. Never before has a book presented such a fascinating history of eight centuries of the art of miniatures from the Low Countries. Never before have so many miniatures - more then 600 colour illustrations - been reproduced in one book. This publication offers an overview of the style of the Flemish miniature, from the anonymous and modest early Romanesque illustrations to the luxurious late Gothic miniatures, some of which were exported as far afield as Spain and Russia.