Book description
Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in
easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or
peasants. These generic subjects and their representational
conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In
sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of
engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had
been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits
of the elite. New genres and new media arose simultaneously in this
volatile commercial and financial capital of Europe, home to the first
open art market near the city Bourse. The new pictorial subjects
emerged first as hybrid images, dominated by religious themes but also
including elements that later became pictorial categories in their own
right: landscapes, food markets, peasants at work and play, and
still-life compositions. In addition to being the place of the origin
and evolution of these genres, the Antwerp art market gave rise to the
concept of artistic identity, in which favorite forms and favorite
themes by an individual artist gained consumer recognition.
In Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, Larry Silver examines
the emergence of pictorial kinds-scenes of taverns and markets,
landscapes and peasants-and charts their evolution as genres from
initial hybrids to more conventionalized artistic formulas. The
relationship of these new genres and their favorite themes reflect a
burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in Antwerp, and Silver analyzes how
pictorial genres and the Antwerp marketplace fostered the development
of what has come to be known as "signature" artistic style.
By examining Bosch and Bruegel, together with their imitators, he
focuses on pictorial innovation as well as the marketing of individual
styles, attending particularly to the growing practice of artists
signing their works. In addition, he argues that consumer interest in
the style of individual artists reinforced another phenomenon of the
later sixteenth century: art collecting. While today we take such
typical artistic formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent
use of identifying signatures (a Rothko, a Pollock), Peasant Scenes
and Landscapes shows how these developed simultaneously in the
commercial world of early modern Antwerp.
"A rich and stimulating essay on the symbiotic relationship
between artistic development and the market at the beginning of the
modern era. . . . A valuable and supremely well informed contribution
to our knowledge of both the formation of taste and the evolution of
pictorial genres in early modern Europe."-Sixteenth Century Journal
Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the
University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including
Rembrandt and Art in History, and coeditor (with Jeffrey Chipps Smith)
of The Essential Durer, also available from the University of
Pennsylvania Press.
