Picturing Men And Women In The Dutch Golden Age

Taking as their premiss the subjective experience of art, the authors look at how paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer & other masters were displayed & comprehended in the 17th century.

A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.

This captivating volume paints a broad portrait of daily life in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Taking the reader into the heart of the Dutch Golden Age, Derek Phillips uses a wide variety of sources in order to provide a wealth of domestic detail: from how people washed their clothes and cooked their meals to how they lived, married, and raised their children. Well-Being in Amsterdam's Golden Age covers the terrain of merchants' offices, regents' drawing rooms, and servants' quarters through a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, revealing the processes linking equality and well-being in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and beyond.

The scholarly essays in this book focus on the theme of art and social change in Western art from the Renaissance to about 1950. The edited volume includes contributions by scholars with a range of professional backgrounds and affiliations. Their essays address some aspect of the theme and engage with one or more artworks in the collection of La Salle University Art Museum. Topics include religious iconography, portraiture, landscape, journal illustrations, and Modernist abstraction. These essays on the collection add to the body of scholarship which situates works of art in contexts that help reveal and explain changes in social, political or cultural values. The book is lavishly illustrated, with 104 color illustrations.

Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll includes essays by Catherine Belsey, Harry Berger, Jr., Philippa Berry, Raphael Falco, Jean E. Howard, Lena Cowen Orlin, Patricia Parker, Phyllis Rackin, Bruce R. Smith, Barbara Maria Stafford, Peter Stallybrass, and Susanne Woods. With sections on England at the Margins, Researching the Renaissance, The Human Figure on the Stage, and Artificial Persons, the collection makes interventions in historiography as well as history, literary interpretation, and also literary criticism. Some of the issues are England's marginal status in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century world; the re-centering strategies of the Renaissance public theater in both time and space; mutually reinforcing fallacies engendered by common practices of canon formation and historical narrative; the central meanings of marginal characters in Shakespeare and Milton;

This book is the first comparative study of early modern English and Dutch women writers. It explores women’s rich and complex responses to the birth of the public sphere, new concepts of privacy, and the ideology of domesticity in the seventeenth century. Women in both countries were briefly allowed a public voice during times of political upheaval, but were increasingly imagined as properly confined to the household by the end of the century. This book compares how English and Dutch women responded to these changes. It discusses praise of women, marriage manuals, and attitudes to female literacy, along with female artistic and literary expressions in the form of painting, engraving, embroidery, print, drama, poetry, and prose, to offer a rich account of women’s contributions to debates on issues that mattered most to them.

Sheds new light on how masculinity was understood, lived, performed and viewed during a period of huge change. Premodern masculinity was multivalent and dynamic, a series of intersecting, conflicting, and mutating identities that nevertheless were distinct and recognizable to people and their societies. The articles collected here examine a variety of means by which masculinity was constructed, deconstructed, and transformed across time, geographies, and cultures. Articles range across the twelfth to seventeenth century, from western Europe to the Volga-Ural region, from the Christian west to the Muslim east, from Ottomans to Mongols and Persians, from Baudri of Bourgueil to Blaise de Monluc; while topics include the chivalric hero, the effeminate man, beards, and spurs, represented variously in literature, historical documents, and art. Finally, in that period of great transformation that is the sixteenth century, they show how masculinity moved away from the traditional and recognizable to become something different and distinct from its premodern expressions.

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers a account of the genre's comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches by which Rembrandt problematizes standard group portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader's enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters' expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four returns to examine them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt's painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as theartist's covert parody of the sitters.