In seventeenth-century Brussels, the careers of painters were shaped not only by their artistic talents but also by the communities to which they belonged. This book explores the intricate relationship between the social structures and artistic production of the 353 painters who became masters in the Brussels Guild of Painters, Goldbeaters, and Stained-Glass Makers between 1599 and 1706. This innovative study combines quantitative digital analysis with detailed qualitative case studies, offering a novel approach to the social history of art. By examining the various communities in which these artists operated, this book provides new insights into how early modern painters — both in Brussels and beyond — created their art, earned a living, and navigated the complexities of urban life. Painters and Communities in Seventeenth-Century Brussels also presents the first overview of the Brussels Baroque, with extensive biographical lists of the city’s master painters.

Prior to the modern age laughter raised passions and activated the body to sweat and shake. Derision was not distinguished from joy. Deceiving the senses by tricks or funny stories made all people laugh loudly, regardless of class. Johan Verberckmoes describes, in this innovating book, the hotchpotch of comic images and stories in 'Flandes' during the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs, from 1500 to 1700. It challenges the Bakhtinian idea of a caesura in the history of laughter around 1600.

The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists - Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou and others - have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars and general readers alike.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer are still household names, even though they died over three hundred years ago. In their lifetimes they witnessed the extraordinary consolidation of the newly independent Dutch Republic and its emergence as one of the richest nations on earth. As one contemporary wrote in 1673: the Dutch were 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbours'. During the Dutch Golden Age, the arts blossomed and the country became a haven of religious tolerance. However, despite being self-proclaimed champions of freedom, the Dutch conquered communities in America, Africa and Asia and were heavily involved in both slavery and the slave trade on three continents. This substantially revised second edition of the leading textbook on the Dutch Republic includes a new chapter exploring slavery and its legacy, as well as a new chapter on language and literature.

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