DiFuria ArthurJ. - Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre's place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated "slices of life," describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre's deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre's multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Arthur J. DiFuria is Professor of Early Modern Northern European Drawings, Prints, and Paintings at Savannah College of Art and Design, USA.

Series Editor: Allison Levy

A forum for the critical inquiry of the visual arts in the early modern world, Visual Culture in Early Modernity promotes new models of inquiry and new narratives of early modern art and its history. We welcome proposals for both monographs and essay collections which consider the cultural production and reception of images and objects. The range of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to, painting, sculpture and architecture as well as material objects, such as domestic furnishings, religious and/or ritual accessories, costume, scientific/medical apparata, erotica, ephemera and printed matter. We seek innovative investigations of western and non-western visual culture produced between 1400 and 1800.

New Perspectives

Edited by
Arthur J. DiFuria
Savannah College of Art and Design, USA

First published 2016
by Routledge
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2016 selection and editorial matter, Arthur J. DiFuria; individual chapters, the contributors

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: DiFuria, Arthur J., editor.
Title: Genre imagery in early modern Northern Europe: new perspectives/Edited
by Arthur J. DiFuria
Description: Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016. | Series: Visual culture in early
smodernity | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039203 | ISBN 9781472449146 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Genre painting, EuropeanEurope, Northern. | Symbolism
in artEurope, Northern. | Art and societyEurope, Northern.
Classification: LCC ND1452.E853 G46 2016 | DDC 701/.03dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039203

ISBN: 9781472449146 (hbk)

Typeset in Palatino Linotype
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Nancy, Luc, Anna Celeste, and Jackie

ARTHUR J. DIFURIA is Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design, specializing in early modern northern European prints and drawings. From 2003 to 2008, he was assistant professor of art history and curatorial studies at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he also served as chair of Liberal Arts (2008-2010). Since completing his dissertation on Maerten van Heemskerck's ruin drawings (2008), he has published essays in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Intellectual History Review, Brill's Intersections series, and elsewhere. He is currently overseeing the completion of a book revising his dissertation, entitled Maerten van Heemskerck's Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Netherlandish Cult of Ruins. Other forthcoming book projects include a volume focusing on religious themes in Heemskerck's prints. The Kress Foundation has funded Art's research. He was also Savannah College of Art and Design's 2011 Presidential Fellow.

JESSEN KELLY is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. She is currently completing a book project on constructions of time and futurity in Renaissance games of chance.

ANNETTE LEZOTTE is Director of the Kauffman Museum at Bethel College. Her areas of research interest include the iconographical and technical study of Early Netherlandish paintings, the analysis of audience and perception issues relating to late Medieval and Early Renaissance devotional art, and the sociological history of the decorative arts. Her recent publications include the essays "Mary Magdalene and the Iconography of Domesticity," in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, and "Cradling Power: Female Devotions and Early Netherlandish Jsueau," in Push Me, Pull You: Interaction, Physicality and Devotional Practice in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art. She is the author of the book The Home Setting in Early Netherlandish Paintings: A Statistical and Iconographical Analysis of Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth-Century Domestic Imagery, and is currently working on her next book, Constructing and Promoting Catholic Devotional Imagery: The Post-Reformation Paintings of Joos van Cleve.

IRENE SCHAUDIES received her PhD in 2007. She conducted research under the auspices of the Belgian federal government's Inter-University Attraction Pole program from 2008 until 2013, and served as co-curator of the exhibition Jordaens and the Antique (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, 2012-2013).