Review of Ulrike Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), in Historians of Netherlandish Art Newsletter and Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 1 (April 2017): 32-33. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
Recently two studies were published by authors who, like me, are art historians and in which they present their findings on early modern phenomena that are related to my dissertation research from 2003, The House and the Rules of Thought. There is also a great deal of overlap between the two studies. The authors use the same textual and visual source material from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, relate to the same art-historical literature and bring in comparable knowledge from surrounding disciplines. What makes that these authors, despite their similarities, took different directions? What choices have they made, and based on which principles? And what new insights do their studies offer us? Moreover, both publications make me wonder: what has happened in this field of research over the past decades?
In recent decades, the historical significance of the panel paintings by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and the Flémalle group has been subject to debate. This essay analyses the shifts in gilding practices that accompanied the introduction of the fifteenth-century ars nova, arguing that the new panel painting marked a self-conscious departure from the luxury arts by asserting its value through representation alone, rather than through material worth. From the 1420s-30s onwards, Netherlandish panel paintings rejected gold-leaf backgrounds, and they also increasingly either relegated gilding to small details such as halos and heavenly rays, or incorporated it into pictorial representation. In addition, these paintings display a particularly intensive visual dialogue with contemporary sculpture and brocaded textiles, as a means of exploring painting’s superior capacity to depict persuasive surfaces in spatial depth. In establishing its independence from other contemporary art forms, and in promoting the intrinsic value of representation, early Netherlandish panel painting presaged the high status of painting in the ensuing centuries of the western canon, even though, in other respects, these works remained firmly rooted in earlier tradition. The rise of early Netherlandish painting thus sheds important light on the role of periodization within art-historical interpretation. Where a number of recent studies have perceived temporal instability within the content of medieval and Renaissance images, this essay proposes that historiographical assessment should take into account the specific material and conceptual qualities of different artistic media, and weigh the relative importance of their perceived references forwards and back in time. The research for this project developed over many years and eventually coalesced into a size and shape in between a typical book and a typical journal article. Digital publication on the University of York’s History of Art Research Portal enables this essay to be presented at its full length, incorporating far more material—especially a greater number of detailed illustrations—than is possible in traditional printed journals. Publication at full length also enables it to combine typically disparate methodologies and sub-fields: historiography, methodological reflection, technical analysis, and close looking at artworks in different media, from luxury objects and sculpture to panel painting. Most critically, the visual apparatus of digital publication supports this essay’s emphasis on the importance of contingent looking within particular lighting circumstances, a feature rarely considered in art-historical studies.
The past is always present: The image of early Netherlandish art in the long nineteenth century
Oud Holland – Journal for Art of the Low Countries
In 1881, the American collector Stephen Whitney Phoenix bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a painting by the artist Wilhelm (Guillaume) Koller (1829-1884/1885) entitled Hugo van der Goes painting the portrait of Mary of Burgundy (fijig. 1). Koller, who trained in Vienna and Düsseldorf, moved in 1856 to Belgium, where he exhibited this painting at the Brussels Salon of 1872. 1 The picture imagines an encounter between Van der Goes (ca. 1440-1482) and Mary of Burgundy (1457-1482), shown as a child seated on the lap of her young stepmother Margaret of York (1446-1503). Behind them is likely Charles the Bold (1433-1477), who married Margaret after the death of Mary's mother, Isabella of Bourbon (1434-1465). 2 Koller's painting offfered nineteenth-century audiences an appealing, if fijictional, image of an esteemed northern European artist depicting a moment in the domestic life of a noble dynasty closely identifijied with the history and heritage of Belgium. 3