Specialized courses offered periodically on specific aspects of the art of the early modern world. Courses are normally research-led topics on an area of current academic concern.
May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

Satisfies "the Early Modern World" core course requirement for Art History majors

The course examines the visual culture of the Low Countries in the long seventeenth century, from roughly the Dutch Revolt (began 1568) to the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1678). The period is marked by major shifts in the definition and use of art along the confessional fault line splitting the region into a Catholic South and a Protestant North.  

The framework of post-Reformation Netherlandish art in the context of the religious divide between Catholic Flanders and Protestant Dutch Republic will form a particular focus for the course. Foregrounding Netherlandish art’s fraught relationship with religion, it investigates how art aided, countered, and sidestepped religious agendas, and how an iconoclastic impulse coexisted with proliferation of image-production.  

In parallel, the course also explores the emergence of stock market capitalism and the social effects of wealth; expansionist ventures into Asia, Africa, and the Americas by chartered trading companies; and the rise of what may be called observational craft. Indeed, it pits the striking artistic output of the seventeenth century against the period’s superlative synonym—the “golden age”—and investigates the complex picture behind the moniker of pride.  

The material framework includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and architecture by artists including Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Campen, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian, as well as developments in decorative arts and book publishing.  

Upon completion of this course, students are expected to:  

·       Identify key monuments of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, their subject matter and iconography  

·       Recognize the style of major artists  

·       Acquire a familiarity with key historical events and the general ideological climate to which visual arts responded 

·       Acquire a familiarity with contemporary writings on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art 

·       Understand major methodologies and subsequent scholarly responses to them 

·       Develop research questions informed by examinations of visual properties, original creative and spectatorial contexts, and interpretive discourses 

·       Hone research and writing skills, including finding pertinent sources, formulating persuasive arguments, maintaining suitable interdisciplinarity, and communicating original ideas 

Attendance in classes: 

Attendance is mandatory. Notification must be sent by email before—or, in the case of unexpected events, at your earliest convenience after—the absence. A maximum of 2 unjustified absences are permitted.

Attendance at exams: 

A major exam (midterm or final) cannot be made up without the permission of the Dean’s Office. Contact the Dean’s Office prior to the exam to be missed. Absences due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Notify me by the end of the Add/Drop period so that arrangements may be made for missed work. 

Meeting 1         Course Introduction 

Meeting 2         The Age of Observation 

Overview of the intellectual scene in the 17^th-century Low Countries; the descriptive mode of Dutch art; the notion of curiosity as intellectual avarice  

Meeting 3         Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation in Antwerp 

Overview of the Eighty Years’ War; Antwerp during the Twelve Years’ Truce; Rubens’s Italian sojourn and early works; altarpieces by Rubens  

Meeting 4         Rubens and His Milieu 

Painted Collectors’ Cabinets; Rubens’s collaboration with Jan Brueghel and Frans Snyders; Van Dyck’s portraits  

Meeting 5         Karel van Mander and the Schilder-Boeck 

Overview of the Schilder-Boeck, its structure and content; examination of passages of the “Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting” 

Meeting 6         Dutch Mannerism: Hendrick Goltzius 

Goltzius’s Protean virtuosity exemplified by his “Pen Works” and “Masterpieces”  

Meeting 7         The Dutch Caravaggisti  

The subject, style, and social & religious context of the art of Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen in early 17^th-century Catholic Utrecht 

Meeting 8         Frans Hals, Judith Leyster, and the Virtuoso Brushwork 

Hals and Leyster’s use of loose brushwork in their respective works and its appreciation among the “virtuosi-liefhebbers” 

Meeting 9         Hals’s Group Portraits 

Hals’s innovative arrangements of figures in group portraits; the portraits’ implied communication among figures and unification between painting and beholder 

Meeting 10       Rembrandt’s Paint 

Rembrandt’s sculptural handling of paint, its relation to contemporary art theory; the painterly imitation of texture and evocation of touch 

Meeting 11       Rembrandt and the World of Theater 

The theater scene in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam; how theater practice informed Rembrandt’s narrative scenes 

Meeting 12       Mid-term review 

Meeting 13       Midterm exam 

Meeting 14       Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits  

The paradox of capturing stilled likeness in an act of motion native to self-portraiture; the true self and its representation as performed roles in Rembrandt’s self-portrait 

Meeting 15       Dutch Architectural Painting 

The depictions of urban fabrics of Gerrit Berckheyde, Jan van der Heyden, Pieter Saenredam; the paradox of picturing church interiors emptied of images 

Meeting 16       The Illusionistic World of Gerrit Dou and Samuel van Hoogstraten 

The trompe l’oeil paintings of Dou and Hoogstraten; the simultaneous display and concealment of artifice; Van Hoogstraten’s theoretical writings 

Meeting 17       Dutch Landscape and Mapmaking  

The landscape paintings of Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, Albert Cuyp; maps by the Blaeu family and Jodocus Hondius; the mapping impulse in Dutch arts 

Meeting 18       The Netherlandish Flowerpiece 

The origins of Netherlandish flowerpiece; flowerpiece as studies of nature; the artificiality of the naturalistic studies  

Meeting 19       Still-Life: The World of Things 

The vanitas motif and still-life’s self-deprecating celebration of luxury and artistry 

Meeting 20       Unruly Realms: Adriaen Brouwer and Jan Steen 

The definition of the comic vis-à-vis the tragic and the humorous; Brouwer and Steen’s depictions of unruly behaviors and the moral underpinning of such imagery 

Meeting 21       The Domestic Interior: Gerard ter Borch and Peter de Hooch 

The notion of cleanliness evoked by paintings of domestic interior; such paintings as instruments for cultivating pensiveness 

Meeting 22       Amsterdam as the International Emporium   

The history of urban planning of Amsterdam; the construct of Amsterdam as “navel of the world” in early books  

Meeting 23       The VOC, the GWC, and the Visual Evidence of Exchange 

Overview of the founding of the Dutch East and West India Companies; imageries about Batavia, China, Suriname, Brazil  

Meeting 24       Vermeer’s Methods  

The blurriness of Vermeer’s paintings and Vermeer’s potential use of camera obscura 

Meeting 25       Vermeer’s Interiors 

Gendered cultural production in paintings by Vermeer, Metsu, Netscher  

Meeting 26       Essay Presentation 

Meeting 27       Essay Presentation 

Meeting 28       Final Review  

KEY BIBLIOGRAPHIC WORKS FOR THE COURSE 

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (The University of Chicago Press, 1984).  

Lorraine Daston, “Curiosity in Early Modern Science,” Word and Image 11, no. 4 (1995): 391–404. 

Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (The University of Chicago Press. 1988). 

Erik Larson, Seventeenth Century Flemish Painting (Luca Verlag Freren, 1985).  

Alexander Marr, Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius (Reaktion Books, 2021). 

Walter A. Liedtke, “Anthony van Dyck.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 42, no. 3 (1984): 4–48. 

Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder Boeck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). 

Walter S. Melion, Karel Van Mander and His Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting: First English Translation, With Introduction and Commentary (Brill, 2023). 

Anne T. Woollett and Ariane van Suchtelen, Rubens & Brueghel: A Working Friendship (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006).  

Marlise Rijks, “Defenders of the Image. Painted Collectors’ Cabinets and the Display of Display in Counter-Reformation Antwerp.” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 65 (2015): 54-83. 

Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland (Getty Research Institute, 1999). 

Ernst van de Wetering. Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (University of California Press, 2000). 

Leonore van Sloten et al., eds., Directed by Rembrandt: Rembrandt and the Theater World (WBOOKS, 2024) 

Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History (Princeton University Press, 2017). 

Perry Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton University Press, 1990). 

Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (University of California Press, 1988). 

Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic Freedom,” in Carnival! (Mouton Publishers, 1984), 1–9. 

Mariët Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Wanders Publishers, 1997). 

Siegert, Bernhard. “The Map Is the Territory.” Radical Philosophy 5 (2011): 13–16. 

Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Harvard University Press, 1990).  

Simon Schama, “The Unruly Realm: Appetite and Restraint in Seventeenth Century Holland,” Daedalus 108, no. 3 (1979): 103–123.  

Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 

Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 

Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 

Hanneke Grootenboer, The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (The University of Chicago Press, 2020). 

Claudia Swan, Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 

Larry Silver, Europe Views the World, 1500–1700 (London: Lund Humphries, 2022). 

Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (The University of Chicago Press, 2001). 

Daniel Arasse, Vermeer: Faith in Painting, translated by Terry Grabar (Princeton University Press, 1994).