A treatise on Dutch art on par with Vasari's critical history of Italian art, Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (or Book on Picturing) has long been recognized for its critical and historical influence—and yet, until now, no comprehensive account of the book's conception, aims, and impact has been available. In this in-depth analysis of the content and context of Van Mander's work, Walter S. Melion reveals the Schilder-Boeck's central importance to an understanding of northern Renaissance and Baroque art. By interpreting the terminology employed in the Schilder-Boeck, Melion establishes the text's relationship to past and contemporary art theory. Van Mander is seen here developing his critical categories and then applying them to Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish artists in order to mark changes within a culture and to characterize excellence for each region. Thus Melion demonstrates how Van Mander revised both the structure and critical language of Vasari's Lives to refute the Italian's claims for the superiority of the Tuscan style, and to clarify northern artistic traditions and the concerns of Netherlandish artists. A much needed corrective to the view that Dutch art of the period was lacking in theory, Melion's work offers a compelling account of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoretical and critical perspective and shows how this perspective suggests a rereading of northern art. Walter S. Melion is assistant professor of art history at The Johns Hopkins University.

Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander's Schilder-Boeck

Arts & Photography

Melion, Walter S.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

This work contains seven essays that address ways in which the visual arts act as cultural signifiers, articulating the identity of corporate entities and mediating exchanges between communities who present themselves through art.

Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts (Studies in the History of Art)

Barnes, Susan J.

Natl Gallery of Art

This new volume opens up our understanding of the design, production and market for Biblical prints and illustrated Bible images in 16th century Flanders, and explores the central role they played in one of the most dramatic artistic and religious transformations in European history. Prints are often seen as merely following artistic developments in the more prestigious medium of painting and, in turn, the visual arts are seen as mirroring changes in society, but this groundbreaking book challenges these views. Featuring approximately 130 engravings, woodcuts, and illustrated Bibles and books by Lucas van Leyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Philips Galle, Hendrick Goltzius, Hieronymus Wierix and others, it reveals that biblical prints were a dynamic force both in the transformation of Northern European art between Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt van Rijn, and in the intensified attention to Scripture in the religious turmoil of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century

Clifton, James

GILES

The thirteen essays in this volume, first presented at Emory University's Lovis Corinth Colloquium II, The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700', explore the varied forms, functions, and meanings of meditative imagery and image-making in England, France, and the Low Countries. Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500 -1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of pictorial images produced and/or circulated in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France as templates for the meditative life and its spiritual exercises. Our epigraph ut pictura meditatio (as is a picture, so is meditation) connotes the ways in which pictures facilitated meditative prayer and, conversely, the extent to which such prayer was experienced visually. Our essayists are prominent scholars in the fields of art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, all of whom study the ways in which visual images served to structure the interior religious life of laity and clergy in the early modern period. The volume asks how and why images were used not only to initiate, sustain, and structure kinds and degrees of meditative and contemplative devotion, but also to figure the souls cognitive operations, its negotiation between states of being, between interior and exterior sense, between corporeal and spiritual sight. Implicit in this questioning are further explorations of the nature and scope of the interplay among mental, visual, and verbal images, and the subject positions such images allowed the votary to represent and inhabit. These questions touch upon issues of identity, subjectivity, and figuration that should be of interest to historians of art, literature, religion, and society.

Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700 (Proteus)

Brepols Publishers

Written by the poet-painter Karel van Mander, who finished it in June 1603, the Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) was the first systematic treatise on schilderconst (the art of painting / picturing) to be published in Dutch (Haarlem: Paschier van Wes[t]busch, 1604). This English-language edition of the Grondt, accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, provides unprecedented access to Van Mander's crucially important art treatise. The book sheds light on key terms and critical categories such as schilder, manier, uyt zijn selven doen, welstandt, leven and gheest, and wel schilderen, and both exemplifies and explicates the author's distinctive views on the complementary forms and functions of history and landscape.

Karel Van Mander and His Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting: First English Translation, with Introduction and Commentary (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual Histor)

BRILL