Issued in connection with an exhibition held Oct. 5, 2010-Jan. 17, 2011, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Feb. 23-May 30, 2011, National Gallery, London (selected paintings only).
This is the first in-depth historical study of Jan Gossart (ca. 1478–1532), one of the most important painters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Providing a richly illustrated narrative of the Netherlandish artist's life and art, Marisa Anne Bass shows how Gossart’s paintings were part of a larger cultural effort in the Netherlands to assert the region’s ancient heritage as distinct from the antiquity and presumed cultural hegemony of Rome. Focusing on Gossart’s vibrant, monumental mythological nudes, the book challenges previous interpretations by arguing that Gossart and his patrons did not slavishly imitate Italian Renaissance models but instead sought to contest the idea that the Roman past gave the Italians a monopoly on antiquity. Drawing on many previously unused primary sources in Latin, Dutch, and French, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity offers a fascinating new understanding of both the painter and the history of northern European art at large.
For the catalogue of the 1965 monographic exhibition in Rotterdam and Bruges on Jan Gossart (ca. 1472-1532) a compilation was made of 68 documentary references pertaining to the artist's life and works. Now, forty-five years later, there has been a reassessment of Gossart and his oeuvre which has resulted in a new catalogue raisonne, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance. The present text, Jan Gossart: The Documentary Evidence accompanies this volume. This tome covers more than 130 documents, including inventories, accounts, biographies, descriptions and other records about Gossart's life and works, up until the mid-18th century. These mainly archival records have been re-examined and transcribed anew, and subsequently discovered documents have been added. Each transcription is accompanied by a short description and comment as well as published references. The book includes photographs of original records. Additionally, two of Gossart's works for which most of our knowledge is based on documentary evidence are discussed: the so-called Salamanca Triptych and the famous, now lost, Middelburg Altarpiece.
The Renaissance of Etching is a groundbreaking study of the origins of the etched print. Initially used as a method for decorating armor, etching was reimagined as a printmaking technique at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany and spread rapidly across Europe. Unlike engraving and woodcut, which required great skill and years of training, the comparative ease of etching allowed a wide variety of artists to exploit the expanding market for prints. The early pioneers of the medium include some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who paved the way for future printmakers like Rembrandt, Goya, and many others in their wake. Remarkably, contemporary artists still use etching in much the same way as their predecessors did five hundred years ago. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of new information, The Renaissance of Etching explores how artists in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France developed the new medium of etching, and how it became one of the most versatile and enduring forms of printmaking. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.
Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.
Recent technical examinations of Early Netherlandish art have propelled in-depth studies of key works far beyond traditional connoisseurship methods. Ingenious new applications, as well as a prodigious amount of comparative technical documentation, have changed our views of standard workshop practices, including issues of materials and techniques, and details about the precise nature of collaboration. The studies presented in this book illustrate the variety of approaches and findings in what can be called the new connoisseurship. Here the reader will find alternative methods of evaluating Jan van Eyck's Saint Barbara and Ghent Altarpiece, Dirk Bouts's canvas paintings, Jacb Cornelisz van Oostsanen's Berlin Sketchbook, the Evora Altarpiece and the Saint Anne Altarpiece from Gerard David's workshop, Jan Gossart's Malvagna Triptych, and a triptych by Pieter I Claeissens. These individual studies will be of interest not only to aficionados of Early Netherlandish painting, but also to students who are keen to learn about the pivotal role of technical studies for this period of art history.
Three consecutive generations of Habsburg princes and princesses spent part of their early lives in Mechelen, a fiefdom of the Habsburg Netherlands and an important centre for politics, culture, and early childhood education in the 15th and 16th centuries. Other powerful families from all over Europe also sent their children to Mechelen - the most famous is perhaps Anne Boleyn, who later became Queen of England. This catalogue documents an exhibition of children's portraits, manuscripts, toys, jewellery, and educational treatises from Mechelen, illuminating the historical, pedagogical, and artistic background of these works. Included here are early childhood portraits by well known artists, including Jan Gossart, Berard van Orley, and Juan de Flandes and educational tracts by Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. Exhibition: Museum Hof van Busleyden, Mechelen, Belgium (26.03-04.07.2021).
This book presents the first sustained study of the stunning drawings of Roman ruins by Haarlem artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574; in Rome, 1532–ca. 1537). In three parts, Arthur J. DiFuria describes Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman training, his time in Rome, and his use his ruinscapes for the art he made during his forty-year post-Roman phase. Building on the methods of his predecessors, Van Heemskerck mastered a dazzling array of methods to portray Rome in compelling fashion. Upon his return home, his Roman drawings sustained him for the duration of his prolific career. Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome concludes with the first ever catalog to bring together all of Van Heemskerck’s ruin drawings in state-of-the-art digital photography.