Painting and Politics in Northern Europe
Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries
280 pages | 96 color/98 b&w illustrations | 8 x 12 | 2008
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02955-9 | paper: $40.00 sh
"With her superb individual studies and her searching investigations into questions of historical belief-systems and their transformations over time, Caroll’s important, clearly written book makes an impressive contribution to contextual art history and the history of ideas. It is certain to stimulate scholars, and likely to engage non-specialists and students who have an interest in this volatile, fascinating extended period and region."—Dan Ewing, CAA.reviews
"The author's erudition, lucid writing, and meticulous research make these essays on the themes of marriage, politics, social harmony, and discord excellent reading for undergraduates as well as researchers."—A. Golahny, Choice
"This is an important book that deserves to be listened to, debated, and absorbed into the discourse of this field."—Elizabeth Honig, University of California, Berkeley
Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronologicalaccount of political engagement in works by the early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations of canonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artists registered their pictorial responses to the political events and debates of their day. In those debates, the imagery of gender andpower was often intertwined. Considering a range of works, includingvan Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, and Rubens’s Life of Marie de Médicis series,Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish paintersseized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materialsof art.
The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of “modern” theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.
Margaret D. Carroll is Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. Her publications include numerous articles on van Eyck, Rembrandt, and Rubens, as well as the essay “Accidents Will Happen: A New Look at the Nightwatch” in Rethinking Rembrandt (2002).