Arts and minds: scholarship on early modern art history (Northern Europe)*.

With the exception of a few notable artists--chiefly van Eyck, Durer, Bosch, and Bruegel--early modern art outside Italy received little attention as recently as a generation ago. To use a Dutch proverb, it "fell between stools": neither Italian Renaissance, the dominant paradigm and intellectual center of the entire discipline of art history since Burckhardt, nor the more celebrated Golden Age of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Moreover, scholarly focus lay exclusively on painting--not sculpture or architecture, let alone other media, usually lumped together and dismissed as "decorative arts" or, worse, "minor arts."

These views conditioned canonical scholarship, led by Erwin Panofsky. His major monographs--Early Netherlandish Painting and Albrecht Durer--defined the role of Northern art, chiefly in relation to Italy and as the foundations of nascent artistic identity. (1) For Panofsky, van Eyck in the Netherlands and Durer in Germany pioneered artistic naturalism and also initiated progress from medieval icons toward modern, aesthetic artwork. Panofsky built his account around Jan van Eyck, the first great, named founder of Flemish Primitives, whose very rubric was taken as establishing and defining the tradition of paintings that followed in Flanders and Holland.

Yet in coining his influential interpretive framework of hidden symbolism, Panofsky also acutely saw van Eyck's art through the culturally sensitive prior reading by Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle Ages. (2) Besides defining the first early modern art with van Eyck, this alternative vision simultaneously offered a late medieval harvest (Huizinga's metaphor), marked by symbolism in decline of religious thought crystallizing into images. Even for Panofsky half a century ago, the transitional character of fifteenth-century art posed a conceptual tension for art-historical periodization and interpretation.

Since then the history of Northern European art has been characterized by methodological self-consciousness as well as rich interdisciplinary dialogue. As a result, current scholarship now works to dispel a host of deep-seated modern biases: toward named artists, toward painting as the featured medium, and toward uncritical embrace of the celebrated Flemish naturalism as both progressive and foundational for the verisimilitude in art of the following four centuries. Today, research focuses much more frequently on anonymous craftsmen and on works in a range of different media, such as tapestries, which were clearly prized above panel painting in princely inventories. (3) Late medieval illuminated manuscripts have been reexamined for Flanders and France, as well as for Bavaria. (4) Many of these deluxe items stem from the late medieval, Burgundian court world outlined by Huizinga, which persisted within wider Europe well into the sixteenth century. Scholars also now give greater attention to innovations besides paintings--especially printed books and independent prints.

But the principal attention of art historians in recent decades has focused on the status and purpose of artworks, inaugurated by Michael Baxandall's inimitable consideration of a neglected art form, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. (5) Honed by experience as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Baxandall devotes chapters to the material itself, to the altarpieces' functions (and their inverse, iconoclasm), to the guild structure of production, and to the market. Unique in this analysis is his anthropological exploration of the period eye, drawing analogies to other rhetorical distinctions made in analogous local art forms such as Gothic calligraphic script and Nuremberg Meistersinger flourishes. Yet amidst all of his sensitivity to, even sympathy for, the German carved wooden retable, Baxandall still features works by named artists, and because he celebrates their accomplishment as a climax of an artistic development with a teleology, he regards their later fate (secular satisfactions) and subsequent influence by Italianate forms in works made for private collectors as both a corruption and a decline. His book is at its best when it offers holistic analysis of major carvings by major artists in the known contexts of their original sites. However, an antidote to the negative judgments about later German sculpture of the sixteenth century, with rich consideration of functions and contexts, is provided by Jeffrey Chipps Smith in German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance c. 1520-1580. (6) For the same period, Lynn Jacobs's study of carved Flemish retables applies Baxandall's approach to a contemporary Northern region and considers both medieval tastes and mass marketing. (7) Such investigations have remained hallmarks of the best art history on Northern art during the past quarter-century.

A model of the best contemporary examination of paintings resulted from a collaboration, again not from a university but by custodians for a single museum collection, the National Gallery, London. In Giotto to Durer, Susan Foister, curator of Netherlandish paintings, teamed with colleagues, both curators and conservators, to analyze early Renaissance painting, giving equal attention to Netherlandish masterpieces alongside Italian pictures. (8) Their discussion topics are revealing and useful to both scholars and students alike. The authors begin with the uses of painting, distinguishing broadly between Christian and secular purposes for civic, dynastic, and domestic art. Then they consider painting production, including the various terms of institutions (guilds and contracts, workshops), procedures (drawings and tools), and materials, especially the techniques of tempera and oil painting. Like Baxandall, they conclude the volume with commentaries on individual works.

Most recently, Foister has produced her own exemplary monograph, Holbein and England, in which she rings all the changes on a single artist, place, and period. (9) Utilizing her mastery of the archives as well as technical studies of the paintings and procedures--notably using the collection of careful portrait drawings studies (Windsor Castle)--she painstakingly reconstitutes an individual career of art production. Nor does she ignore a single medium. Besides the celebrated extant portraits and other paintings, Foister also attends systematically to a wide range of creativity: drawing designs by Holbein for lost goldsmithing work; his lost canvas and mural decorations for royal festivals and vanished guild halls; and his woodcut productions, including title pages for books. She reconstructs his circle of patrons, royal and noble as well as foreign (ranging from German trade representatives to French ambassadors), and fully reconsiders Holbein's complex relationship to the nascent Reformation in England, particularly in the wake of his prior departure from Basel because of the loss of religious commissions due to the Swiss Reformation. Even more to the point, she goes beyond the individual limits of Holbein to wider English visual culture in a variety of settings, particularly in private collections, to assess the presence of religious pictures as well as (largely imported) secular subjects. Here Foister's study complements a wide-ranging multimedia exhibition by Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547. (10) In the process, she not only has produced the authoritative study of one of Europe's greatest Renaissance portraitists but also has reconstituted his role within the neglected visual culture of an entire nation.

Foister's careful reconstruction of English pictorial purposes raises anew considerations of the status of the image in the Renaissance era. This reexamination of assumptions held by Panofsky and earlier generations has been one of the ongoing projects of recent interpretations. Two foundational books frame the period and provide basic terms of analysis, particularly for the status of the painted image. The first, Likeness and Presence by Hans Belting, is subtitled A History of the Image before the Era of Art. (11) It chiefly considers the heritage of icons as objects of veneration in the Christian tradition. In his final chapters, Belting examines "the crisis of the image at the beginning of the Modern Age," and he frames this transition within his basic, if traditional, distinction between medieval icons and modern, aesthetic objects first outlined in his The End of the History of Art? and explored further in his own focused exploration of Netherlandish painting. (12) A newer, self-conscious objectification of the image has been most vividly analyzed as reflexive "meta-painting" by Victor Stoichita in his The Self-Aware Image. (13) Stoichita actually sees the institution (instauration in the original French) of the easel picture as a foundational phenomenon beginning at the end of the Renaissance. His examples include still-lifes and gallery paintings--see also Zirka Zaremba Filipczak's Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550-1700 (14)--of the seventeenth century, as well as complex self-portraits of painters. (15)

Seeking the origins of the modern in Northern art of the sixteenth century has formed the core argument of several important discussions of "German Renaissance" painting, building upon the basic insights of Baxandall concerning both "secular satisfactions" and artistic "identities." Chief among these is Joseph Koerner's identification of a single work, Durer's frontal Self-Portrait (Munich, 1500), as the very inauguration of the entire era in a "moment of self-portraiture." (16) In similar fashion, Christopher Wood argues for the origins of landscape in Durer's younger contemporary, Albrecht Altdorfer, as a formative activity that established self-conscious, independent, representational works of art for a new community of discerning collectors of both independent drawings and panel paintings. (17)

Yet even as these scholars are locating the origins of modernity within German painting and drawings, David Freedberg has challenged the primacy of celebrating such art objects in aesthetic terms even within Hans Belting's "era of art." Freedberg still reaffirms the ongoing power of images to evoke deep feelings, either religious or erotic images--in all media, regardless of authorship (even anonymity). (18) Moreover, Freedberg has joined Baxandall in investigating the inversion of the power of images, witnessed by their systematic or partial destruction by opponents: that is, iconoclasm. (19) Certainly the continuing iconic

status of religious images in Germanic regions led to iconoclastic destruction, which has become a serious topic of investigation by various scholars, including historians Carlos Eire, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Sergiusz Michalski. (20)

The importance of visual culture within the late medieval affective spirituality of pre-Reformation Germany was sketched in a series of wonderful studies by the late Bob Scribner, culminating in his study of "popular propaganda" in early Reformation prints, For the Sake of Simple Folk. (21) Earlier attempts to define Lutheran art have been evaluated by Peter and Linda Parshall in their 1986 analytical bibliography, particularly the many historical exhibitions of the 1983 Luther year that tackled the subject again; (22) however, fine work on the subject of Marian images in Reformation-era Germany has been recently carried out in a dissertation by Bridget Heal, while the Reformation content of Augsburg has been examined by Andrew Morrall in his new monograph on artist Jorg Breu. (23) As noted above, wider, even crosscultural, examinations on iconoclasm have shaped recent exhibition catalogues. (24) The recovery of religious images by both Lutherans and Catholics in Northern Europe now forms a major subfield. For Lutheran images Koerner and Bonnie Noble have added to the overview by Werner Hoffmann. (25) An anthology on the Calvinist tradition and art edited by Paul Corby Finney breaks new ground on a neglected relationship. (26) Recently, Jesuit imagery has become a new frontier for analysis of the renewed role of visual art as part of the propaganda fidei. (27) Both architecture and, especially, prints (often published in Antwerp) revived and reasserted linkages between art and religion for the Counter Reformation of the Catholic Church. (28) These studies ultimately offer close study of text-image relationships, as well as the particular rhetoric of religious images and architectural settings.

A more focused study of how images actually work was provided by Peter Parshall's sensitive consideration of Passion images, utilizing the insights of Mary Carruthers on medieval and Renaissance memory systems--including both mimetic images and anthologies like the arma Christi--as they served as visual cues to provoke religious affect as well as more abstract spiritual understanding. (29) Reindert Falkenburg's analyses of Netherlandish religious paintings of both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries evoke the powerful empathic experiences (sometimes evoking smell and taste) of the works themselves, which reinforce the rhetoric of contemporary spiritual literature. (30)

One rhetorical aspect of visual art has finally begun to receive necessary attention: the contribution of style to a picture's effect and message. There is still too little real analysis of the mimetic turn in the fifteenth century in terms of either meaning or theories of seeing, what is coming to be called visuality. (31) However, scholars have drawn useful distinctions within late medieval and early Netherlandish paintings between vision and having visions, while stressing the empathic effects of devotional art. (32)

More resistant to interpretation has been the importance to meaning of newly imported, Italianate forms of presentation--often known as Romanism--in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art. One major catalogue tackled the documentary and forensic sides of this issue. (33) Ethan Matt Kavaler has addressed case studies in stone sculpture; (34) Larry Silver and Ariane Mensger have considered the contrasting style choices made by Jan Gossaert. (35) Kaufmann in several essays has considered wider issues of the tensions between such geographical diffusion and regional artistic identity. (36) Beyond this phenomenon of traveling artists, Eric Jan Sluijter's interpretations investigate both Italianate ideal physical forms and classical mythological subjects. (37) In recent years much greater focus has centered on the generation of Hendrick Goltzius, notably in a recent catalogue following a series of trenchant articles by Walter Melion. (38) It is not difficult to understand how nationalistic art historians of modern Belgium and the Netherlands would have seen such imported forms and subjects as foreign to a mimetic indigenous tradition of landscapes or genre images during the sixteenth century, preferring, for example, Pieter Bruegel to Frans Floris or Pieter Aertsen to Maerten van Heemskerck; nonetheless, it is gratifying to see such topics finally addressed as part of the fuller art-historical record. Recent exhibitions, such as Bruges and the Renaissance and Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting, suggest a redress of an earlier, willful omission. (39) In addition, German connections to Italian models, already the center of Durer appreciation, have been analyzed--as in the volume Renaissance Venice and the North (40)--in the wider context of fruitful exchanges, particularly in the Augsburg of Burkgmair and for the Elder and Younger Holbein and Breu. (41)

Beyond the purely visual rhetoric of the work of art, scholars now give attention to the dialogue between Renaissance verbal rhetoric in its multiple forms and the purposes of visual art. Mark Meadow has investigated Bruegel's proverbs, which led him to Renaissance collections of verbal commonplaces; he has also interpreted the artist's references to earlier Flemish art as a pictorial strategy that asserted traditional religious values and naturalism against Italian fashion. (42) Walter Melion has worked on formative art-historical texts, beginning with Karel van Mander's crucial Schilderboeck of 1604 as well as the writings on art by Ortelius and Lampsonius; similar studies on van Mander have been produced by Jurgen Muller and Doris Krystof, building on the foundational work of Hessel Miedema. (43)

Specific connections between Netherlandish urban Chambers of Rhetoric and the visual arts were investigated in a conference. There Meadow argued for Serlian architectural forms as a form of visual rhetoric to signal serious public address in paintings as well as formal civic pageants. Falkenburg found "paradoxical encomium," the serious presentation of humble subjects, in both paintings (Aertsen) and literature (such as Erasmus's Praise of Folly); Nina Serebrennikov investigated visual allegories of Painting and Sculpture by Bruegel and Frans Floris as parallels to the performances of rederijker spelen van sinne in contemporary Antwerp. (44) From the opposite side of the equation, the ongoing studies of early modern urban bourgeois Dutch literature by Herman Pleij have illuminated visual motifs of Netherlandish art and its wider culture. (45) A similar dialogue between art and cultural practice has been recreated around Durer and Germany. (46)

Inverting Pleij's consideration of shared, historically-situated complementarity between visual and verbal culture, Keith Moxey argues instead in his recent work--notably his Practice of Theory and Practice of Persuasion (47)--in favor of radical indeterminacy or fully subjective construction of meaning in any visual interpretations and within art history in general. He contends that authorship and argument--that is, rhetoric--shape art-historical writing to fulfill the ideology and interested purpose of the narrative. Thus, he argues--controversially--that the difference between current academic analysis and Nazi propaganda only marks a distinction of degree, not of kind, for custodians of cultural memory.

Nowhere does visual rhetoric play a greater role than in the wide-ranging variety of subjects used in printmaking, a major innovation of early modern Europe, dating from even earlier in the fifteenth century than Gutenberg's Bible. Recent scholarship has contributed greatly to our understanding of this burgeoning medium and the international ramifications of print culture, both woodcuts and intaglios. Here, too, the reigning paradigms have shifted significantly since Panofsky, who still defined prints primarily in terms of the signal masterworks of a single peintre-graveur (painter-etcher), Durer. Other printmakers, barely visible a generation ago, now stock a growth industry of monographs. We also now have a synthetic overview of both German and Netherlandish printmaking, The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550. (48) But the serious study of printmakers extends beyond these limits, both to encompass the anonymous woodcuts of the earlier fifteenth century as well as to consider specialist masters in a later era of professional printmakers. (49) The phenomenon of the painter-etcher from the origins of the medium of etching in the sixteenth century will receive a fresh investigation in an upcoming exhibition in 2006, while Susan Dackerman's exhibition of Painted Prints revised our habitual notion of viewing prints only in black-and-white. (50) Jan van der Stock has challenged the conventional fine-art definition of the print within the documented urban context of printer-publisher producers and local consumers of cheap images in sixteenth-century Antwerp. (51)

Other neglected, often expensive luxury media besides the tapestries and illuminated manuscripts discussed above, have been reexamined of late. For example, Stephen Scher and Jeffrey Chipps Smith have renewed attention to these political and intellectual mementos in the form of bronze medals in both Germany and the Netherlands. (52) Long a neglected specialty reserved for local antiquarians, Netherlandish architecture is now illuminated for palaces as well as churches and for stained glass. (53) Flemish metalwork, so often lost, has been addressed by Hugo van der Velden's thorough investigation of the goldsmith Gerard Loyet. (54) Additionally, crucial French decorative arts in the sixteenth century are finally receiving attention, especially Limoges enamels and the experimental ceramics by Palissy. (55) Performance art and spectacle, with temporary, if grandiose, structures--such as the entries and festivals of cities and courts--offer a new, more historical mass medium. (56)

Even hidden artworks, the preparatory drawings by artists, have been revealed through the ongoing intensive technological researches of Molly Faries and Maryan Ainsworth--mostly notably in Ainsworth's book-length study of Gerard David--as well as the technical studies by conservators at museums, such as the London National Gallery. (57) These technical discoveries not only shed (infrared) light on questions of attribution; they also provide invaluable insight into workshop procedures and production, especially copying.

In addition to the recuperation of neglected media, more distant corners of Europe besides the Netherlands have received renewed attention. Notably, the earlier general neglect of German art, especially in Anglophone scholarship, reinforced by the stigma attached to German culture after World War Two, is being well redressed. Moreover, in Germany other art centers besides Durer's Nuremberg are receiving much-needed attention now: Augsburg, Cologne, and the Rhineland up to Switzerland. (58) One exemplary collaboration between German and American scholars reexamined stained glass from both Germany and Switzerland in the exhibition Painting on Light. (59) Despite a major exhibition, crucial and innovative works by Wenzel Jamnitzer and other German metalworkers in Munich and Prague remain understudied. (60) Other than a study on German Gothic churches, German architecture remains neglected, yet Smith's new book on Jesuit churches of sixteenth-century Germany (2002) ventures far beyond the usual emphasis on Reformation patronage in the homeland of Martin Luther. (61) Though not often singled out as a cultural phenomenon, learned and courtly cultures in Germany have also received some good recent attention. (62)

Moreover, French and Spanish art are no longer considered backwaters relative to Flemish art. For France, Henri Zerner provides interpretive readings of sixteenth-century works within a newly emerging national identity, complementing recent attention to French prints and ecclesiastical tapestry cycles. (63) A far-ranging new book by Rebecca Zorach studies the culture of excess in Fontainebleau ornament to redefine both the purposes and the effects of art that shaped the French Renaissance. (64) For both French and Iberian connections to the innovations of van Eyck and Flemish painting, the wide-ranging catalogue by Borchert forms an essential reference. (65) Spanish art is no longer dominated only by El Greco; and its essential relationships to other regions in Europe, especially Spanish Flanders, though long neglected by specialists, can begin to emerge, particularly for the period before Rubens. (66) While Spanish religious art has always been regarded as traditional and conventional, its conventions have now been well examined: retablos, visionary devotional images in painting and sculpture, and liturgical manuscripts in Toledo, as well as general art production. (67) Royal luxury objects of armor and tapestry for the Habsburgs now provide major links to Northern Europe, Germany, and Flanders, respectively, and their other patronage investments have also received studies: Madrid's Plaza Mayor, the Escorial, and the wider royal patronage of Philip II. (68) Beginning with royal surveillance, Richard Kagan analyzes Spanish city views as well as colonial urban images. (69) Indeed, one great new frontier of art history is Spanish (and Portuguese Brazilian) colonial material, increasingly revisited as a site of tensions from both the side of the indigenous populations as well as the European settlers. (70)

For England, connections to royal interests and imagery have always been central. The recent exhibition on Elizabeth I complements wider studies of art and politics--as well as Karen Hearn's volume on portraiture--building in turn upon foundational work by Roy Strong. (71) Earlier English art in all its diversity was encompassed by the important recent exhibition of English Gothic; religious visual culture in Britain received a sympathetic reading in Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars. (72) Not to be overlooked is an important interdisciplinary anthology by Erickson and Hulse, whose studies also use literary sources and postcolonial theory to address such encompassing cultural issues in early modern English visual culture as national identity, racialism, and empire. (73)

Today the arts of Bohemia and Poland no longer lie beyond a Cold War Iron Curtain, though they still carry a Slavic language barrier for most scholars. (74) Modern geographical boundaries have been expanded broadly for scholars, especially Kaufmann, to encompass all of Central Europe, following earlier, more regional apologetics of Jan Bialostocki of Poland. Indeed, we are increasingly likely now to look at contacts between different regions of Europe--Denmark, for example. (75)

Scholars have recently begun to examine the contact between Europe's art and other regions of the world after 1492, whether we look between Spain and the New World, or else the Portuguese and then the Dutch in Africa and Asia. (76) Such a broader vision already underlay one important anthology, appropriately entitled Reframing the Renaissance, and it can be supplemented with groundbreaking exhibition catalogues on America, the "Bride of the Sun," and Australia. (77) International collaborations by Jesuits abroad have recently been examined. (78) We begin now to study the reciprocal importance of foreign ventures on Dutch visual culture, particularly in the form of maps and atlases, as in the volume on Dutch outlook on America, Innocence Abroad by Benjamin Schmidt, and on Asia by Kees Zandvliet. (79) A new exhibition, Encounters, examines the broader interactions of Europe with Asia from both points of view. (80)

Increasing interest in what is termed cultural geography has begun to prompt some art history, such as Farago's Reframing anthology and Kaufmann's Geography of Art. In addition, although visual specialists have ignored the profoundly visual world of cartographers, the achievements of map scholars remind us of the continuity between later sixteenth-century mapmaking and the Dutch Golden Age. (81) The forthcoming volume on early modern maps organized by the late, lamented David Woodward, will consolidate this important field across Europe for art historians as well as other scholars. (82)

Such studies of geography point to the importance of visual images in the recording of new knowledge. One area where art history has contributed greatly to this same kind of interdisciplinary understanding of a major early modern phenomenon is the foundational contribution of visual imagery to taxonomic representation of the natural world at the advent of the scientific era. Peter Parshall examines "counterfeit" images, especially replicable printed images, whose verisimilitude made them major contributors to sixteenth-century taxonomic classification of the natural world; Durer's animal images and their legacy have also been closely studied. (83) In a special issue of Word & Image Christopher Wood underscores the general importance of the concept of curiosity to the era of collecting and learning, and Claudia Swan discusses de Gheyn's vivid naturalistic drawings within the learned culture of Leiden University, especially Carolus Clusius. (84) Of course, the study of Dutch flower pieces, largely beyond our chronological limits, has richly bloomed in scholarship. (85) More general scientific wonder persisted in the Low Countries. (86)

Like the multidisciplinary interests of early modern collectors of natural wonders, modern scholars have also collaborated with art historians to consider this crucial period of knowledge expansion. (87) For astronomical observation, particularly comets, Roberta Olson has used art to pursue knowledge and its associated values. (88) Related contributions to art history have also come from science historians. (89) But in return, art historians have also made major contributions to the understanding of knowledge through its visual codification, such as Filipczak on humors and Sherman on memory and knowledge in early modern Europe. (90)

Social interpretations of artworks, particularly prints, have made them primary documents, albeit sometimes of values rather than contemporary appearances. This is particularly true for German graphic images, subject of a cluster of studies by Moxey that interrogate the relationship between broadsheet images and their accompanying texts by the likes of Hans Sachs. (91) Representations of soldiers in particular have received focused attention by both historians of warfare and art historians; (92) images of punishment form the background even for images of saintly martyrdom in German art. (93) For Netherlandish art, Paul Vandenbroeck offers a more anthropological and cultural reading of outcast figures such as fools, peasants, and beggars; he has also considered the role of dance in art and culture. (94) Artistic representations of various genre subjects in Dutch prints are analyzed by de Jongh and Luijten. (95) The topical issue of family history, both in respect to the relations between the sexes and the rearing of children, enables art historians to build upon historians' recent findings: they reveal that art asserted positive images of children, at least in Holland. (96)

Feminist considerations of sex and gender have inflected many another study of our period. A fine catalogue of prints is complemented by an anthology on gender issues. (97) Witchcraft issues--well-explored for both Germany and the Low Countries (including artworks) by historians (98)--are also addressed by art historians, including a study of the wider pictorial cycle of the "Power of Women." (99) Images of rape and of male domination, often taken from illuminated manuscripts and military prints, have also been sensitively analyzed. (100) However, there is still too little attention paid to the erotic in a more positive sense during a period in which the erotic became thematized for mythological figures as well as more ordinary humans. While this material has been closely analyzed for Italy by Bette Talvacchia, an essay by Janey Levy on the Behams' erotic engravings remains isolated, except for some studies of erotically-charged female nudes by Durer and Baldung. (101)

Feminist interests also prompted recent cultural studies, such as the study of the period significance of clothing by English literary historians Jones and Stallybrass. (102) Interest in the actual social role of female patrons is enjoying a major revival, particularly for female rulers: Margaret of Austria, Catherine de' Medici, and Elizabeth I of England, as well as the first Stuart queen in England, Anna of Denmark. (103)

A final social issue that has been garnering increased attention in recent decades is the economics of art history. Research has chiefly focused on the Netherlands, revealing both the market institutions and personal side of art sales through dealer networks. (104) The work of Montias and of De Marchi and Van Miegroet has also extended well into the seventeenth century. Considering the implications of the art market for objects, other scholars have analyzed the effects of the money economy, whether in the choice of monetary themes for images or else new production processes to satisfy a growing consumer culture. (105) One intriguing, wide-ranging recent anthology, Merchants and Marvels, even brings together art collecting, science, and commerce. (106)

These considerations of cultural and social issues suggest that the quality and quantity of interdisciplinary conversations over the past generation have expanded even beyond Baxandall, let alone the pioneering formulations of Panofsky. As its very name declares, art history as a discipline is inherently interdisciplinary--between the internal history of art itself and the role of art as history--as the visual culture within any culture under study, however defined: late medieval-early modern-Renaissance-Reformation, or any emerging national or princely culture. Conversations across disciplines readily engage other historians of literature, science, religion, society, economics, and politics. One result has been the dissolving of those invisible but persistent conceptual boundaries between regions and centuries, which once seemed so sacrosanct--discreetly organized into North versus South, Renaissance versus Reformation, fifteenth versus sixteenth versus seventeenth century. Continuities now abound where once we defined differences or breaks. Even the hardiest boundary of all, between modern Belgium and Holland, has lately become fluid, as evidenced by keen current interest in Pieter Bruegel by scholars from both parts of Brabant, reminding us of the shared language behind the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek or of the historical term, Netherlandish, for art in this period, rather than Flemish or Dutch art for the seventeenth century. (107)

Indeed, current Bruegel scholarship offers a useful index of what has been happening of late in our field more generally. Rhetorical interpretations range from literal associations with ancient Roman satirical texts or contemporary literature, as well as issues of imitation and emulation of earlier visual models. (108) Kavaler Bruegel images of peasant labor and leisure in relation to larger issues of social and economic order, while Silver considers Bruegel's output within art market pressures to be a second Bosch or an identifiable "brand name" landscape or peasant artist, while also responding to challenges posed by Antwerp's rapid urban changes and incipient capitalism. (109) Joseph Gregory revisits ambitious Bruegel religious pictures in order to analyze their content and to consider their spirituality in terms of contemporary religious redefinition. (110)

In similar fashion, a recent volume, Durer and His Culture, features a varied, interdisciplinary mixture of authors and includes the following topics: images of nature and early collections; Germanic patriotism as a precondition for representations of local landscape and contemporary soldiers; images of witchcraft and of love; "ways of seeing"; problems of censorship and allegories of virtue; and the historiography of Durer's canonical status and collecting. (111) To read this entire book is to discover how much and how variously Durer participated in his contemporary culture, and how it can now be supplemented with a thoughtful cultural reconsideration of Durer by a scholar of church history. (112)

The so-called "new art history," at least in its dialogue with history or historical anthropology, lies close to what, many generations ago, was called "art in context." Ironically, this attempt to forge interpretation within verbal and ethnographic analysis was much more significant for literary history, where it has come to be called "the new historicism." But current art-historical research does move into a more inclusive vision of what constitutes visual culture in its historical period, permitting attention to objects, often anonymous, that were not previously considered artworks at all, such as the full range of all printed images in sixteenth-century Antwerp or the entire roster of prints--religious images, broadsheets, town plans, and maps, as well as what we would now call "scientific illustrations" (such as herbals)--in standard histories of prints. (113)

Emerging at present, then, is a more truly collaborative art history, making use of the best questions and scholarship from adjacent disciplines. While we still have much to learn from reexamination of basic data--archives, underdrawings, and of the objects themselves--we surely see and learn many new things about our objects of study when we reflect about methods and questions, or when we are challenged to use visual culture in order to contribute to general knowledge about other aspects of culture: family and gender, values and knowledge, status and power. Active, cross-disciplinary collaborations--such as De Marchi and Van Miegroet on the art market, or Eichberger and Zika on the culture of Albrecht Durer (114)--enrich the enlarged conversation and keep the focus on the purposes and audiences for which artworks of all kinds were made. For a discipline named art history, built on the dialogue between art and history, between objects and culture, between past and present, our early modern period in Northern Europe remains complex and tumultuous--a period unsteadily situated between the Flemish ars nova and the Dutch Golden Age, between late medieval and early modern history, between regionalism and international exploration. As scholars, we should strive to be at least as flexible and receptive to culture as the artists and media we seek to study (think Durer), and to be critical and conscious of both our modern biases and our scholarly methods while we engage in the ultimate dialogue--at once to analyze differences between ourselves and the media and culture of a lost age, while continually making those connections that necessarily link those very remnants to our present.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 

*This essay should be seen as a complement and update to an earlier effort by the author with a similar charge: Larry Silver, "The State of Research: Northern European Art of the Renaissance Era," Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 518-35. The change in period designation from Renaissance to early modern is just one index of the changes to be surveyed below. Interested readers who want to see the material of the "Golden Age" of Dutch and Flemish art can also now consult a recent essay on this "sequel" period by Mariet Westermann, "After Iconography and Iconoclasm: Current Research in Netherlandish Art, 1566-1700," Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 351-72. I am deeply grateful to Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Articles Editor of Renaissance Quarterly, for his invitation to take on this challenging assignment.

(1) See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, MA, 1953); The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (1943; Princeton, 2005, with introduction by Jeffrey Chipps Smith).

(2) Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). Originally published 1919; first translated, incompletely, into English by Fritz Hopman as The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, NY, 1954).

(3) See Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Jeffrey Chipps Smith, "The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979), and "The Practical Logistics of Art: Thoughts on the Commissioning, Displaying, and Storage of Art at the Burgundian Court" (in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda Dixon, 27-47 [Turnhout, 1998]); Thomas Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, New York, 2002); and Guy Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry (New York, 2000).

(4) For Flanders, see Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2003); Maurits Smeyers, Flemish Miniatures from the 8th to the mid-16th Century (Louvain, 1999); for France, see Francois Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les Manuscrits a peintures en France, 1440-1520 (exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1993); and for Bavaria, see Ulrich Merkl, Buchmalerei in Bayern in der ersten Halfte des 16. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1999).

(5) Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1980).

(6) Jeffrey Chipps Smith, German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance c. 1520-1580 (Princeton, 1994).

(7) Lynn Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge, 1998).

(8) Jill Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Durer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (New Haven, 1991).

(9) Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, 2004).

(10) Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, eds., Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547 (exhibition catalogue, London, 2003).

(11) Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1990; reprint, Chicago, 1994).

(12) Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (1983; reprint, Chicago, 1987); Hans Belting and Christiane Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemaldes. Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlandischen Malerei (Munich, 1994). See, most recently, Belting's Art History after Modernism (1995; reprint, Chicago, 2003); see also Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel. Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich, 2002), which discusses icons of Christ in relation to a new Renaissance concept of the image.

(13) Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (1993; reprint, Cambridge, 1997).

(14) Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550-1700 (Princeton, 1987).

(15) For Italian self-portraits, see Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture (New Haven, 1998); the seventeenth-century Dutch phenomenon has been well analyzed by Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Kunstlerbildnis und Kunstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1984). On Rembrandt's self-portraits, see H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits (Princeton, 1990); Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 2000); for Rembrandt's self-fashioning in "the studio and the market," see Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1988). Gallery pictures also form a major topic for Filipczak (see n. 14 above).

(16) See Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993).

(17) See Christopher Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago, 1993).

(18) David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989).

(19) See Freedberg's "The Problem of Images in Northern Europe and its Repercussions in the Netherlands," Hafnia, Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art (1976): 229-45; Iconoclasts and their Motives (Maarsen, 1985); and "Art and Iconoclasm, 1525-1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands," in Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse Kunst 1525-1580, ed. J. P. Filedt Kok, W. Halsema Kubes, and W. T. Kloek, 39-84 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1986).

(20) Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986); Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1995); Sergiusz Michalski, "Das Phanomenon Bildersturm," in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spatmittelalter und in der fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Robert Scribner (exhibition catalogue, Wiesbaden, 1990), and Reformation and the Visual Arts (London, 1993).

(21) Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981); see also Scribner's Religion and Culture in Germany (1400-1800) (London, 2001).

(22) Peter and Linda Parshall, Art and the Reformation: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1986).

(23) Bridget Heal, "A Woman Like Any Other? Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian Devotion in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne, c. 1500-1600" (PhD diss., University of London, 2001); Andrew Morrall, Jorg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture, and Belief in Reformation Augsburg (Aldershot, 2001).

(24) Freedberg, 1976, 1985, and 1986 (see n. 19 above); also exhibitions: Norbert Schnitzler, Ikonoklasmus-Bilderstum (Munich, 2002), ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconclash (Karlsruhe, 2002).

(25) Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2004); Bonnie Noble, "'A Work in Which the Angels are Wont to Rejoice': Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece," Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 1011-38; Werner Hoffmann, ed., Luther und die Folgen fur die Kunst (exhibition catalogue, Hamburg, 1983).

(26) Paul Corby Finney, Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, 1999).

(27) John O'Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto, 1999); Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, "East and West: Jesuit Art and Artists in Central Europe and Central European Art in the Americas" (in O'Malley et al., The Jesuits, 274-304) and Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, 2004); Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley, 2004).

(28) For architecture, see Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, 2002). For prints, see Walter Melion, "Artifice, Memory, and Reformatio in Hieronymus Natalis's Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia," Renaissance and Reformation 23 (1998): 5-34; Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof, "Reputation and Wage: The Case of Engravers Who Worked for the Plantin-Moretus Press," Simiolus 30 (2003): 160-95.

(29) Peter Parshall, "Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance," Art History 16 (1993): 554-79.

(30) Reindert Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam, 1988); The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550 (Amsterdam, 1994); "Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Painting," in Herri met de Bles, ed. Norman Muller, Betsy Rosasco, and James Marrow, 153-69 (Princeton, 1998); and "The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych," in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads, ed. Maryane Ainsworth, 2-17 (New York, 2001).

(31) For the mimetic turn, see Linda Seidel, "The Value of Verisimilitude in the Art of Jan van Eyck," in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. Daniel Poiron and Nancy Freeman Regalado, 23-43 (New Haven, 1991). For visuality, see Robert Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000).

(32) See Craig Harbison, "Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting," Simiolus 15 (1985): 87-118; James Marrow, "Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance," Simiolus 16 (1986): 150-69; and Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary (Cambridge, MA, 1998). For Spain, see Victor Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995).

(33) Nicole Dacos, Fiamminghi a Roma 1508-1608 (exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1995).

(34) Ethan Matt Kavaler, "The Jube of Mons and the Renaissance in the Netherlands," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 45 (1994): 348-81; "Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament," Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 226-51.

(35) Larry Silver, "The 'Gothic' Gossaert," Pantheon 45 (1987): 58-69; Ariane Mensger, Jan Gossaert. Die niederlandische Kunst zu Beginn der Neuzeit (Berlin, 2002).

(36) See Kaufmann's Toward a Geography of Art in n. 27 above.

(37) Eric Jan Sluijter, "De 'heydensche fabulen' in de Noordnederlandse schilderkunst, circa 1590-1670" (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1986); "Emulating Sensual Beauty: Representations of Danae from Gossaert to Rembrandt," Simiolus 27 (1999): 4-45; Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle, 2000).

(38) The catalogue is Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten, eds., Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) (Amsterdam, 2003). Melion's articles include "Karel van Mander's Life of Goltzius: Defining the Paradigm of Protean Virtuosity in Haarlem around 1600," Studies in the History of Art 27 (1989): 113-33; "Hendrick Goltzius's Project of Reproductive Engraving," Art History 13 (1990): 458-87; "Love and Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius's Venus, Bacchus and Ceres of 1606," Art History 16 (1993): 60-94; "Self-Imaging and the Engraver's virtu: Hendrick Goltzius's Roman Heroes," Modern Language Notes 110 (1995): 1090-1134; and "Vivae dixisses virginis ora: The Discourse of Color in Hendrick Goltzius's Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue," Word and Image 17 (2001): 153-76.

(39) See Maximiliaan Martens, ed., Bruges and the Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, Bruges, 1998); Albert Blankert et al., eds., Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting (exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, 2000).

(40) Bernard Aikema and Beverly Brown, Renaissance Venice and the North (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999).

(41) For Holbein the Elder, see Katharina Kruse, Hans Holbein der Altere (Berlin, 2002); for Breu, see Morrall, 2001 (n. 23 above).

(42) Mark Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle, 2002); and "Bruegel's Procession to Calvary, AEmulatio and the Space of Vernacular Style," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1997): 181-205. See also Catherine Scallen, "Rembrandt, Emulation, and the Northern Print Tradition," in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda Dixon, 135-49 (Turnhout, 1998); and Arthur Wheelock, Jr., "The Influence of Lucas van Leyden on Rembrandt's Narrative Etchings," in Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Anne-Marie Logan, 291-96 (Doornspijk, 1983).

(43) Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (Chicago, 1991); Jurgen Muller, Concordia Pragensis. Karel van Manders Kunsttheorie im Schilder-Boeck (Munich, 1993); Doris Krystof, Werben fur die Kunst. Bildliche Kunsttheorie und das Rhetorische in den Kupferstichen von Hendrick Goltzius (Hildesheim, 1997). Miedema's works include the edited volume Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der Edel Vry Schilder-Const, Uitgegeven en van Vertaling en Commentaar Vorzien door H. Miedema (Utrecht, 1973); "Kunst, kunstenaar, kunstschilder: een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de begrippen," Oud Holland 102 (1988): 71-77; and Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, Edited and with Commentary by Hessel Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Doornspijk, 1994).

(44) Reindert Falkenburg, "Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer," in Rhetoric-Rhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers, ed. Jelle Koopmans, Mark Meadow, Kees Meerhoff, and Marijke Spies (Amsterdam, 1995), 197-217; Nina Serebrennikov, "'Dwelck den Mensche, aldermeest tot Consten verwect': The Artist's Perspective," in ibid., 219-46.

(45) See Herman Plej, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit (Amsterdam, 1983); De Sneeuwpoppen van 1511 (Amsterdam, 1988); and Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb (1997; reprint, New York, 2001).

(46) Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika, Durer and His Culture (Cambridge, 1998).

(47) Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca, 1994); The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca, 2001).

(48) David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (New Haven, 1994).

(49) For the fifteenth century, see Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and their Public (exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC, 2005); for later printmakers, see Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver, Graven Images: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540-1640 (exhibition catalogue, Evanston, 1993).

(50) The catalogue for the upcoming exhibition is Michael Cole and Madeleine Viljoen, The Early Modern Painter-Etcher (Philadelphia, forthcoming); Susan Dackerman, Painted Prints (exhibition catalogue, Baltimore, 2002).

(51) Jan van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking to a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam, 1998).

(52) Stephen Scher, The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1994); for Smith, 1994, see n. 6 above.

(53) For palaces, see Krista De Jonge, "Der herzogliche und kaiserliche Palast zu Brussel und die Entwicklung des hofische Zeremoniells im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert," Jahrbuch des Zentralinstituts fur Kunstgeschichte 5-6 (1989-90): 253-82; "Het paleis op de Coudenberg te Brussel in de vijftiende eeuw," Revue Belge d' Archeologie et d'Histoire de l'Art 59 (1990): 5-38; and "The Architectural Enterprises of the Emperor and his Court in the Low Countries: The European Context," in Belen Bartolome Francia, ed., Carolus, 35-53 (exhibition catalogue, Toledo, 2000). For churches, see Jeremy Bangs, Church Art and Architecture in the Low Countries before 1566 (Kirksville, 1997). For stained glass, see Ellen Konowitz, Images in Light and Line: The Stained Glass Designs and Prints of Dirk Vellert (Turnhout, 2005); and Timothy Husband, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands, 1480-1560 (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1995).

(54) Hugo van der Velden, The Donor's Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000).

(55) See Susan Caroselli, The Painted Enamels of Limoges (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 1993); Leonard Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (Paris, 1996).

(56) See Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower, eds., "All the World's a Stage....": Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque (University Park, 1990); Reindert Falkenburg et al., eds. Hof-, staats- en stadsceremonies. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998).

(57) Maryane Ainsworth, Gerard David: Purity and Vision in an Age of Transition (New York, 1998); Molly Faries, "Technical Studies of Early Netherlandish Painting: A Critical Overview of Recent Developments," in Recent Developments in the Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting: Methodology, Limitations & Perspectives, ed. Molly Faries and Ron Spronk, 1-37 (Turnhout, 2003); David Bomford, ed., Art in the Making: Underdrawing in Renaissance Paintings (London, 2002).

(58) Smith, 1994 (see n. 6 above); Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Court, Cloister & City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450-1800 (Chicago, 1995); Pia Francesca Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jorg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identity ca. 1475-1536 (Leiden, 1998); Brigitte Corley, Painting and Patronage in Cologne 1300-1500 (Turnhout, 2000); Rainer Budde and Roland Krischel, eds., Genie ohne Namen. Der Meister des Bartholomaus-Altars (exhibition catalogue, Cologne, 2001); Dietmar Ludke, ed., Spatmittelalter am Oberrhein. Maler und Werkstatten 1450-1525 (exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, 2002); and Julien Chapuis, Stefan Lochner: Image Making in Fifteenth-Century Cologne (Turnhout, 2004).

(59) Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Durer and Holbein (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2000).

(60) The catalogue for the exhibition is Wenzel Jamnitzer und die Nurnberger Goldschmiedekunst 1500-1700 (Nuremberg, 1985). For the German metalworkers, see Eliska Fucikova et al., eds., Rudolf II and Prague (exhibition catalogue, Prague, 1997).

(61) See Norbert Nussbaum, German Gothic Church Architecture, trans. Scott Kleager (1994; reprint, New Haven and London, 2000). For Smith, 2002, see n. 28 above

(62) Martin Warnke, The Court Artist, trans. David McLintock (1985; reprint, Cambridge, 1993); Edgar Bierende, Lucas Cranach d. A. und der deutsche Humanismus (Munich, 2002); Susan Maxwell, "Friedrich Sustris and the Rise of the Court Artist: Bavarian Court Patronage in the Age of the Counter-Reformation" (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2002); Thomas Schauerte, Albrecht Durer. Das grosse Gluck. Kunst im Zeichen des geistigen Aufbruchs (exhibition catalogue, Osnabruck, 2003).

(63) Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism (1996; reprint, Paris, 2002). For French prints, see The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 1994); for ecclesiastical tapestries, see Laura Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Ithaca, 2004).

(64) Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, 2005).

(65) Till-Holger Borchert, The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting 1430-1530 (exhibition catalogue, Bruges, 2002).

(66) Ibid.; Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Ignace Vandevivere, Luister van Spanje en de Belgische Steden 1500-1700 (exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1985). For the pre-Rubens era, see Alexander Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons (Cambridge, 1999).

(67) For retablos, see Judith Berg Sobre, Behind the Altar Table: The Development of the Painted Retable in Spain, 1350-1500 (Columbia, MO, 1989); Chiyo Ishikawa, The Retablo de Isabel la Catolica by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow (Turnhout, 2004). For painted devotional images, see Stoichita, 1995 (n. 32 above); for sculpted ones, see Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain (Princeton, 1998). For the Toledo manuscripts, see Lynette Bosch, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo (University Park, 2000); general art production is examined in The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and Architecture in Spain and Spanish America, 1500-1600, Fenway Court 28 (1998).

(68) For the Habsburgs, see Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Concha Herrero Carretero, and Jose Godoy, Resplendence of the Spanish Monarchy: Renaissance Tapestries and Armor from the Patrimonio Nacional (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991). For the Plaza Mayor, see Jesus Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge, 2003); for Philip II, see Rosemarie Mulchay, The Decoration of the Royal Basilica of El Escorial (Cambridge, 1994) and Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin, 2004).

(69) Richard Kagan, Spanish Cities of the Golden Age (Berkeley, 1989); and Urban Images of the Hispanic World 1493-1793 (New Haven, 2000).

(70) See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London, 2005).

(71) See David Starkey, Elizabeth (exhibition catalogue, London, 2003); David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485-1649 (Berkeley, 1997); John King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, 1989); Karen Hearn, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630 (exhibition catalogue, London, 1995).

(72) Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547 (exhibition catalogue, London, 2003); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven and London, 1992).

(73) Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2000).

(74) For Bohemia, see Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, The School of Prague (Chicago, 1988); Fucikova et al. (n. 60 above). For Poland, see Jan Ostrowski, Land of the Winged Horsemen: Art in Poland 1572-1764 (exhibition catalogue, Alexandria, VA, 1999).

(75) See Steffen Heiberg, ed., Christian IV and Europe (exhibition catalogue, Copenhagen, 1988); Kaufmann, 2004 (see n. 27 above).

(76) See Bailey, 2005 (n. 70 above); Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch in Asia 1600-1950 (Amsterdam, 2002).

(77) Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650 (New Haven and London, 1995); Paul Vandenbroek, America: Bride of the Sun (exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1992); William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge, 1995).

(78) Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542-1773 (Toronto, 1999).

(79) Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge, 2001); Zandvliet, 2002 (n. 76 above).

(80) Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800 (exhibition catalogue, London, 2004).

(81) Kees Zandvliet, Mapping For Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam, 1998); Kagan, 2000 (see n. 69 above).

(82) David Woodward, ed., History of Cartography, volume on Renaissance-early modern Europe (forthcoming).

(83) Parshall, 1993 (n. 29 above); Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Durer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance, trans. Pamela Marwood and Yehuda Shapiro (Boston, 1988); Colin Eisler, Durer's Animals (Washington, DC, 1991).

(84) Christopher Wood, "'Curious Pictures' and the Art of Description," Word & Image 11 (1995): 332-52; Claudia Swan, "Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation," Word & Image 11 (1995): 353-72; see now Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) (Cambridge, 2005).

(85) Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720 (New Haven, 1995); Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek, Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550-1720 (exhibition catalogue, Cleveland, 1999).

(86) Ellinnor Bergvelt and Renee Kistemaker, De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst en rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585-1735 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1992); Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004).

(87) Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002).

(88) Roberta Olson, Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art (New York, 1985); Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachoff, Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science (Cambridge, 1998). See also Larry Silver, "Nature and Nature's God: Landscape and Cosmos of Albrecht Altdorfer," Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 194-214.

(89) Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

(90) Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Hot Dry Men/Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575-1700 (exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997); Claire Richter Sherman, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (exhibition catalogue, Carlisle, PA, 2000).

(91) Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago, 1989).

(92) J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1990); Pia Francesca Cuneo, Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2002); David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 (Leiden, 2002).

(93) Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1998).

(94) Paul Vandenbroeck, ed., Beeld van de andere, Vertoog over het zelf: Over Wilden en narren, Boeren en bedelaars (exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1987); De kleuren van de geest: Dans en trance in Afro-Europese Tradities (Ghent, 1997).

(95) Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: Genre Prints in the Netherlands 1550-1700 (exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1997).

(96) Jan Baptist Bedaux and Rudi Ekkart, Pride and Joy: Children's Portraits in the Netherlands 1500-1700 (exhibition catalogue, Haarlem, 2000).

(97) H. Diane Russell and Bernadine Barnes, Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC, 1990); Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart, eds., Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2003).

(98) See Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze (New Haven, 2004); Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2003).

(99) Art historians include Linda Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2005); Petty Bange et al., Tussen heks en heilige. Het vrouwbeeld op de drempel van de moderne tijd, 15del 16de eeuw (Nijmegen, 1985). For the "Power of Women" cycle, see Yvonne Blyerveld, Hoe bedriechlijck dat die vrouwen zijn. Vrouwenlisten in de beeldende kunst in de Nederlanden circa 1350-1650 (Leiden, 2000); Susan Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995).

(100) See Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge, 1999); Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001).

(101) Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, 1999); Janey Levy, "The Erotic Engravings of Sebald and Barthel Beham: A German Interpretation of a Renaissance Subject," in The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German Little Masters, ed. Stephen Goddard, 40-53 (exhibition catalogue, Lawrence, KS, 1988). For Durer's and Baldung's nudes, see Sigrid Schade, Schadenzauber und die Magie des Korpers: Hexenbilder der fruhen Neuzeit (Worms, 1983); Joseph Koerner, 1993 (n. 16 above); Charles Talbot, "Baldung and the Female Nude," in Hans Baldung Grien: Prints and Drawings, ed. James Marrow and Alan Shestack, 19-37 (exhibition catalogue, New Haven, 1981).

(102) Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000).

(103) See, respectively, Dagmar Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst. Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Osterreich, Regentin der Niederlande (Turnhout, 2002); Sheila ffolliott, "The Ideal Queenly Patron of the Renaissance: Catherine de' Medici Defining Herself or Defined by Others?" in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, & Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence, 99-110 (University Park, 1997); Starkey, 2003 (n. 71 above); Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia, 2001).

(104) See Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp's Golden Age (Turnhout, 2003); Dan Ewing, "Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460-1560: Our Lady's Pand," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 558-84; John Michael Montias, "Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art," Art History 10 (1987): 455-66, and "Socio-Economic Aspects of Netherlandish Art from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: A Survey," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 358-73; Neil De Marchi and Hans Van Miegroet, "Art, Value and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century," Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 451-63, "Exploring Markets for Netherlandish Paintings in Spain and Nueva Espana," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 81-111, and "Rules versus Play in Early Modern Markets," Recherches Economiques de Louvain 66 (2000): 145-65.

(105) See Basil Yamey, Art and Accounting (New Haven, 1989); Jacobs, 1998 (see n. 7 above); Jean Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages (University Park, 1998); Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, 1998); van der Stock (see n. 51 above); Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia, 2005).

(106) See n. 87 above.

(107) See the special issue devoted to Bruegel of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1997).

(108) For Bruegel and Roman satire, see Margaret Sullivan, Bruegel's Peasants (Cambridge, 1994); for Bruegel and contemporary literature, see Walter Gibson, "Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel," Art Bulletin 63 (1981): 426-46, and The Art of Laughter in the Age of Bosch and Bruegel (Groningen, 2003). Meadow, 1997 (see n. 42 above), looks at imitation and emulation.

(109) See Ethan Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge, 1999); Silver, 2005 (n. 105 above).

(110) Joseph Gregory, Contemporization as Polemical Device in Pieter Bruegel's Biblical Narratives, Forthcoming.

(111) See n. 46 above.

(112) David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Durer's Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, 2003).

(113) See van der Stock (n. 51 above); Landau and Parshall (n. 48 above); Parshall, 1993 (n. 29 above); Origins of European Printmaking (see n. 49 above).

(114) Nn. 104 and 46 above, respectively.