After iconography and iconoclasm: current research in Netherlandish art, 1566-1700

Like in like manner many fields of art history, the application of mind of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art was energized sum of two units decades ago by a novel awareness that business as usual--Berensonian connoisseurship, Wolfflinian history of mode of speech Panofskian iconography--would no longer do. With hindsight, it is obvious that these three founding investigative fashions of our discipline were confine to lose some efficacy in the historical second when all structures of analysis that mask their Western, middle-class origins with essentialist claims about their existences of study and with universalizing assumptions about their rules had become suspect. It was inevitable that the explicit identity politics of the 1970 would affect the close attention of human artifacts in the broadest faculty of perception Consciousness of the constructed nature of class, race, nationality, and sex eventually reshaped Netherlandish art history, on the other hand the field has been retooled more slowly and les full than, say, studies of nineteenth-century painting or late photography.

That this delay has had little to do with the greater historical distance of early novel art from the analytic disciplines that conditioned the novel art history (literary criticism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism, cultural anthropology) is clear from the thoroughgoing introduction of those fashions of thinking and writing into medieval art history and other areas at a farther temporal displace (1) In good measure, the belatedness of serious engagement in Netherlandish art studies with social "context" in its various faculty of perceptions or with the close reading of works pioneered in literary criticism accrueed from institutional constraints, particularly in the Netherlands and Belgium, where the major collections and archives are preserv and where almost any research of Netherlandish art must have its starting point. An assessment of the in every one's mouth state of the history of early late Netherlandish art necessitates a prefatory gaze at the institutional and scholarly situation of the 1970 and 1980 whose outlines Egbert HaverkampBegemann charted lucidly in an essay for this journal in 1987 (2)

Authority and Meaning in Dutch Art: The 1970 and 1980s

In the 1980 the Rembrandt Research cast founded during the Rembrandt tricentennial celebrations of 1969 became the greatest in quantity public of art historical endeavors. Its stated goal was to determine one time and for all what the master painted and which pictures should be relegated to scholars followers, and modern pasticheurs. The publication of its first three convolutions (in 1982, 1984, and 1989) occasioned heated discussions about its way s and, in the press, about its power to make or break the value of paintings confirmed or discarded as Rembrandts. (3) Almost immediately, the methodological discussion in professional journals and talks became narrowly focused on the project's a whole Could its five Dutch members be trusted to draw near up with a more compelling consensus than connoisseurs working singly? on what account did they initially not publish any, and later sole few, color photographs? How could X radiography, autoradiography, pigment investigation, and handwriting analysis contribute to of the like kind a subjective practice as connoisseurship? Were the Rembrandt Research Project's soporific descriptions of what the team members saw (in different combinations for individual paintings) necessary to the presentation of the evidence of technical and provenance studies? And, greatest in quantity controversially, why did the Rembrandt team insist upon classifying paintings as A (by Rembrandt), B (the team cannot run over if it is by Rembrandt or not), or C (not by the agency of Rembrandt), without ever considering a category D (by Rembrandt with the assistance of others), which would have been awaited for virtually all other seventeenth-century artists? (4) These debates begged the more fundamental question of on what account such a protracted and resource-draining throw which limited the possibilities for other advanced art historical research in the Netherlands, should have been stocked at all. (5)

In Netherlandish art history of the 1970 and 1980 methodologically diverse attacks upon the old art historical regime were levied at sum of two units primary targets: a connoisseurship narrowly regarded with the establishment of verifiable catalogues raisonnes for individual artists and an iconography that located the contextual meaning of paintings underneath or beyond their realist surfaces, many times imputing moralizing intention to the works. These issues were debated around or against sum of two units landmark enterprises: the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings being defined through the Rembrandt Research Project and the interpretation of schijnrealisme (apparent realism) in genre and still-life painting by means of Eddy de Jongh and numerous scholars indebted to his work. Although the historiography of early late art in the southern Netherlands did not experience of that kind heated challenges, it, too, underwent critical revisions in this period, discussed in the nearest section.

There are several ways of considering this moot point One could argue disciplinary ne as the immediate justification. In 1969 Rembrandt's production stood as an obfuscating mass of more than six hundr works by dint of him and by his pupils, followers, and forgers, reproduc in grainy black and white illustrations and gathered in the standard catalogues of Rembrandt works by the agency of Wilhelm von Bode and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1896--1907) Abraham Bredius (1935) and Horst Gerson (revised edition of Bredius, 1969) Without greater clarity, the interpretation of Rembrandt's historical significance could hardly proce plane if the consensual opinions of the Rembrandt team might be challenged, at least the evidence extremityed for contestation would be gathered in individual place. So far, the project's energetic consultation of X radiographs and other technological evidence has proofed those new investigative tools upon a consistent body of work and unearthed a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of new information about seventeenth-century studio practices and Rembran dt's adoption of or resistance to them. Ernst van de Wetering and Josua Bruyn in particular, were able to advance fresh models of workshop structure and insights into Rembrandt's working meanss and these benefits could sole have resulted from the sustained research made possible by the agency of the project. (6)