During the seventeenth century, Dutch portraits were actively commissioned by corporate groups and by individuals from a range of economic and social classes. Ann Jensen Adams examines four portrait genres - individuals, the family, history portraits, and civic guards. Adams argues that as individuals became unmoored from traditional sources of identity, such as familial lineage, birthplace, and social class, portraits helped them to find security in a self-aware subjectivity and the new social structures that made possible the 'economic miracle' that has come to be known as the Dutch Golden Age.
Luca Del Baldo's Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality is an extraordinary testament in the recent history of visual studies. It brings together a group of outstanding scholars who have devoted their lives to art history, philosophy, history, ethnology, focussing predominantly on questions of human perception and imagination. Working from photographs provided by the scholars, Luca del Baldo painted his series of 96 portraits reproduced in this book. The portraits are accompanied by texts written by the persons portrayed, in response to their portrayal, and as an exchange: the artist gifted the original painting to the portrayed person, and the portrayed gifted her or his response. "The result is a unique and profound conversation between image and text focussed on the enigma of the human face in all its mediations." (W.J.T. Mitchell)
This lively collection of essays examines the link between public opinion and the development of changing 'Netherlandish' identities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This is the first survey of the diverse critical understandings of seventeenth-century Dutch art from its origins to the present. Appreciated in the eighteenth century by amateurs and collectors, Dutch art during the Romantic age became a focus of ideological interest. From the late nineteenth century onward, it developed into a subject of scholarly research, indeed one of the foundational fields of art history in the modern era. This study provides insight into the various artistic, literary, political, and philosophical approaches that Dutch painting has inspired over the ages.
Despite the active tradition of scholarship on Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, scholars continue to grapple with the problem of how the strikingly realistic characteristics of art from this period can be reconciled with its possible meanings. With the advent of new methodologies, these debates have gained momentum in the past decade. Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, which includes classic essays as well as contributions especially written for this volume, provides a timely survey of the principal interpretative methods and debates, from their origins in the 1960s to current manifestations, while suggesting potential avenues of inquiry for the future. The book offers fascinating insights into the meaning of Dutch art in its original cultural context as well as into the world of scholarship that it has inspired.
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.
Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination with wonder, excess, irrationality, and rebellion against order. The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque delves into this contradiction to provide a sweeping survey of the Baroque not only as a style but also as a historical, cultural, and intellectual concept. With its thirty-eight chapters edited by leading expert John D. Lyons, the Handbook explores different manifestations of Baroque culture, from theatricality in architecture and urbanism to opera and dance, from the role of water to innovations in fashion, from mechanistic philosophy and literature to the tension between religion and science. These discussions present the Baroque as a broad cultural phenomenon that arose in response to the enormous changes emerging from the sixteenth century: the division between Catholics and Protestants, the formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutist monarchies, the colonization of lands outside Europe and the mutual impact of European and non-European cultures. Technological developments such as the telescope and the microscope and even greater access to high-quality mirrors altered mankindâs view of the universe and of human identity itself. By exploring the Baroque in relation to these larger social upheavals, this Handbook reveals a fresh and surprisingly modern image of the Baroque as a powerful response to an epoch of crisis.
This book examines the encounter between Impressionist painting and Parisian consumer culture. Its analysis of Impressionist paintings depicting women as consumers, producers, or sellers in sites such as the millinery boutique, theater, opera, café-concert and market revises our understanding of the representation of women in Impressionist painting, from women¹s exclusion from modernity to their inclusion in its public spaces, and from the privileging of the male gaze to a plurality of gazes. Ruth E. Iskin demonstrates that Impressionist painting addresses and represents women in active roles, and not only as objects on display, and probes the complex relationship between the Parisienne, French fashion, and national identity. She analyzes Impressionist representations of commodity displays and of signs of consumer culture such as advertising and shop fronts in views of Paris. Incorporating a wide range of nineteenth-century literary and visual sources, Iskin situates Impressionist painting in the culture of consumption and suggests new ways of understanding the art and culture of nineteenth-century Paris. Ruth E. Iskin holds a PhD from UCLA. She has received the Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum. Her publications include essays in The Art Bulletin, Discourse, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She teaches art history and visual culture at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Extensive account of the cameo’s production history and how audiences affirm their mastery of celebrity culture. Stars and Silhouettes: The History of the Cameo Role in Hollywood traces the history of the cameo as it emerged in twentieth-century cinema. Although the cameo has existed in film culture for over a century, Joceline Andersen explains that this role cannot be strictly defined because it exists as a constellation of interactions between duration and recognition, dependent on who is watching and when. Even audiences of the twenty-first century who are inundated by the lives of movie stars and habituated to images of their personal friends on screens continue to find cameos surprising and engaging. Cameos reveal the links between our obsession with celebrity and our desire to participate in the powerful cultural industries within contemporary society. Chapter 1 begins with the cameo’s precedents in visual culture and the portrait in particular—from the Vitagraph executives in the 1910s to the emergence of actors as movie stars shortly after. Chapter 2 explores the fan-centric desire for behind-the-scenes visions of Hollywood that accounted for the success of cameo-laden, Hollywood-set films that autocratic studios used to make their glamorous line-up of stars as visible as possible. Chapter 3 traces the development of the cameo in comedy, where cameos began to show not only glimpses of celebrities at their best but also of celebrities at their worst. Chapter 4 examines how the television guest spot became an important way for stars and studios to market both their films and stars from other media in trades that reflected an increasingly integrated mediascape. In Chapter 5, Andersen examines auteur cameos and the cameo as a sign of authorship. Director cameos reaffirm the fan’s interest in the film not just as a stage for actors but as a forum for the visibility of the director. Cameos create a participatory space for viewers, where recognizing those singled out among extras and small roles allows fans to demonstrate their knowledge. Stars and Silhouettes belongs on the shelf of every scholar, student, and reader interested in film history and star studies.
