Medieval Art In The Northern Netherlands Before Van Eyck

Fifty years after his death (25 March 1963) and 75 years following the publication of De Noord-Nederlandsche Schilderkunst, G.J. Hoogewerff's comprehensive five-volume study on early painting in the Northern Netherlands serves as a starting point for exciting new research by Dutch art historians. In this book, based on the Proceedings of the Congress '75 years after Hoogewerff', renowned and promising scholars comment on the value of Hoogewerff's work, his academic choices, and the role his research has played in art history from the twentieth century to the present day. New perspectives on medieval Dutch painting, sculpture, and book illumination will entice and fascinate the reader. Dutch medieval art, we now know, cannot be accurately studied without considering the functional environment, the artistic exchange among diverse media and disciplines, and the larger context of European culture as a whole.

Met bibliografie en register.

This volume, published in association with the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), contains the results of research by scientists, conservators and art historians into the materials and techniques of early paintings from the Northern Netherlands in the museum's collection. In order to investigate the materials used by the artists, including the provenance of the materials and the methods of preparation and application, 14 paintings and frames were examined. Information on the panels, grounds, underdrawings, pigments, oils, diluents etc. are explored in relation to the descriptions in mediaeval texts and treatises. This richly illustrated book gives a clear understanding of the lost skills, forgotten materials, and technical secrets of medieval painting - a world so different from ours - thereby making the materials and methods of the medieval past less foreign to us.

A significant new interpretation of the emergence of Western pictorial realism When Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) completed the revolutionary Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, it was unprecedented in European visual culture. His novel visual strategies, including lifelike detail, not only helped make painting the defining medium of Western art, they also ushered in new ways of seeing the world. This highly original book explores Van Eyck’s pivotal work, as well as panels by Rogier van der Weyden and their followers, to understand how viewers came to appreciate a world depicted in two dimensions. Through careful examination of primary documents, Noa Turel reveals that paintings were consistently described as au vif: made not “from life” but “into life.” Animation, not representation, drove Van Eyck and his contemporaries. Turel’s interpretation reverses the commonly held belief that these artists were inspired by the era’s burgeoning empiricism, proposing instead that their “living pictures” helped create the conditions for empiricism. Illustrated with exquisite fifteenth-century paintings, this volume asserts these works’ key role in shaping, rather than simply mirroring, the early modern world.

An illustrated scholarly analysis of the art and the cultural interpretations of the Flemish Primitives.

This volume explores a basic question in the historiography of art: the extent to which iconology was a homogenous research method in its own immutable right. By contributing to the rejection of the universalizing narrative, these case studies argue that there were many strands of iconology. Methods that differed from the ‘canonised’ approach of Panofsky were proposed by Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff and Hans Sedlmayr. Researchers affiliated with the Warburg Institute in London also chose to distance themselves from Panofsky’s work. Poland, in turn, was the breeding ground for yet another distinct variety of iconology. In Communist Czechoslovakia there were attempts to develop a ‘Marxist iconology’. This book, written by recognized experts in the field, examines these and other major strands of iconology, telling the tale of iconology’s reception in the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain. Attitudes there ranged from enthusiastic acceptance in Poland, to critical reception in the Soviet Union, to reinterpretation in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, and, finally, to outright rejection in Romania. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and historiography.