A Golden Age Of Painting

This beautifully illustrated, expansive overview of Dutch and Flemish art during the 17th century illuminates the creative achievements of one of the most important eras in western art. The Golden Age in Holland and Flanders roughly spanned the 17th century and was a period of enormous advances in the fields of commerce, science--and art. Still lifes, landscape paintings, and romantic depictions of everyday life became valued by the increasingly wealthy merchant classes in the Dutch provinces, while religious and historic paintings as well as portraits continued to appeal to the Flemish patronage. The Golden Age brought us Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, and Van Dyck, but it was also the period of Frans Hals' revolutionary portraiture, Adriaen Brouwer's depictions of the working class at play, Jan Brueghel's velvety miniatures, and Hendrick Avercamp's lively winter landscapes. Norbert Wolf applies his vast understanding of the interplay between history, culture, and art to explore the forces that led to the Golden Age in Holland and Flanders and how this period influenced later generations of artists. Accompanied by luminous color illustrations, Wolf's accessible text considers the complex political, religious, social, and economic situation that led to newfound prosperity and, thus, to an enormous artistic output that we continue to marvel at and enjoy today.

Is it possible to talk about Dutch art after 1680 outside the prevailing critical framework of the "age of decline"? Although an increasing number of studies are being published on the art and society of this period, genre painting of this era continues to be dismissed as an uninspired repetition of the art of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age. In this stunningly illustrated study, Aono reconsiders the long-dismissed genre painting from 1680-1750. Grounded in close analysis of a range of paintings and primary sources, this study illuminates the main features of genre painting, highlighting the ways in which these elements related to the painters' close connections to, on the one hand, collectors, and on the other, to classicism, one of the dominant artistic styles of that time. Three case studies, richly supplemented by a catalogue of 29 selected painters and their work, offer the first clear picture of the genre painting of the period while providing new insights into painters' activities, collectors' tastes and the contemporary art market.

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors’ predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.

The seventeenth century heralded a golden age of exploration, as intrepid travelers sailed around the world to gain firsthand knowledge of previously unknown continents. These explorers also collected the world’s most beautiful flora, and often their findings were recorded for posterity by talented professional artists. The Golden Age of Botanical Art tells the story of these exciting plant-hunting journeys and marries it with full-color reproductions of the stunning artwork they produced. Covering work through the nineteenth century, this lavishly illustrated book offers readers a look at 250 rare or unpublished images by some of the world’s most important botanical artists. Truly global in its scope, The Golden Age of Botanical Art features work by artists from Europe, China, and India, recording plants from places as disparate as Africa and South America. Martyn Rix has compiled the stories and art not only of well-known figures—such as Leonardo da Vinci and the artists of Empress Josephine Bonaparte—but also of those adventurous botanists and painters whose names and work have been forgotten. A celebration of both extraordinarily beautiful plant life and the globe-trotting men and women who found and recorded it, The Golden Age of Botanical Art will enchant gardeners and art lovers alike.

Luis de Morales, known as El Divino because of his intensely religious subject matter, is the most significant and recognisable Spanish painter of the mid-sixteenth century, the high point of the Spanish and Portuguese counter-reformations. He spent almost his entire working life in the Spanish city of Badajoz, not far from the border with Portugal, and did not travel outside of a small area around that city, straddling the border. The social, political and cultural environment of Badajoz and its environs is crucial for a thorough understanding of Morales’s output, and this book provides context in detail – considering literature and liturgical theatre, the situation of converted Jews and Muslims, the presence of Erasmianism, Lutheranism and Illuminism (Alumbradismo), devotional writing for lay people, and proximity to the Bragança ducal palace in Portugal as a means of explaining this most enigmatic of painters.

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.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this volume presents full-page, color reproductions (each accompanied by a biography and commentary) of 105 early 19th-century paintings by 17 Danish artists--landscapes, marines, portraits, scenes of everyday life, and figure studies--clearly linked to the mainstream of Northern Romanticism. 9.25x12.25" Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo--these are but a few of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of Spain's golden age of painting. In this authoritative and handsome book, an enlarged, extended, and revised version of his Golden Age of Painting in Spain, eminent Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period. Focusing on the interaction between art and the socioeconomic and political conditions that prevailed in Spain's golden age, this book offers information about religious beliefs, social attitudes, the activities of patrons and collectors, and how these were absorbed and interpreted by painters. The author sets the history of Spanish paintings within a European context and explores Spain's contact with artistic centers in Italy and the Netherlands. He discusses not only Spanish artists but also such non-Spanish painters as Titian, Ruben, and Luca Giordano, who either worked in Spain or influenced other artists there. Brown also examines the collections of foreign paintings that Spanish noblemen and prelates assembled and how these collections affected the production of art and the social status of the Spanish artist. In this up-to-date and innovative analysis of two hundred years of Spanish painting, Brown describes a country that brilliantly transformed the artistic impulses it received from abroad to fit the needs of its own society.