Amsterdam broadsheets as sources for a painted screen in Mexico City, c. 1700

Amsterdam broadsheets as sources for a painted screen in Mexico City, c. 170

“Rubens only whispers”: the reception of the Cambridge bozzetti for the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series

Recent research on the neuroscience of responses to works of art, particularly that on contextual bias and the impact of expertise on aesthetic preference, has raised important questions about the practice of connoisseurship. This work has placed factors such as emotion and empathy, subjects long exiled from art-historical discourse, at the very nexus of factors that affect the individual viewer’s response. This paper examines three instances of connoisseurial judgment exercised on the same set of complex objects—the seven bozzetti by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series—in different historical contexts. I consider the role played by factors other than intellectual assessment in the formation of these aesthetic judgments and the degree to which psycho-social circumstances affected decisions concerning attribution. Documentary evidence provides surprising insights into each of these examples and, taken together, they shed light on the particular challenges to the ‘expert viewer’ commonly associated with Rubens’s oil sketches. These case studies pose larger questions about the formation and formulation of aesthetic judgment

The production of history: Famiano Strada’s De Bello Belgico

This essay examines De Bello Belgico, one of the most popular contemporary accounts of the Dutch revolt from Spain. This three-volume history of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) between Spain and the United Provinces, was commissioned by Ranuccio I Farnese in 1595 from the Jesuit historian Famiano Strada and, due to its complex production history, it took forty-one years to publish. This study addresses issues related to authorship and studio production, authenticity in historical narrative, and the nature of commemoration

Hollands hollende koe: the political satirist and moral conviction

This essay considers the role of the political satirist over time, specifically its relationship to the problem of moral conviction. A brief look at several key moments in the genre’s history reveals the degree to which the satirist is elided with his/her subject and political satires are divorced from other aspects of market-driven print production. The framing of the political satirist as defender of western democratic values depends fundamentally upon the assumption that he or she believes in the positions and ideologies espoused in his or her satires—that maker and message are united. At first glance, this elevation of the political satirist to the role of cultural crusader may seem to be a Romantic anachronism, a politicised extension of the ‘artist as lone genius’ trope. Upon closer inspection, however, the conflation of satirist and satire has far deeper roots, which extend to the earliest days of the genre

The Speelman Fellowship and Netherlandish art in Cambridge

This essay provides an overview of scholarship on Netherlandish art in Cambridge and the outstanding collections of Dutch and Flemish art in the University's Colleges and The Fitzwilliam Museum. Professor Jean Michel Massing considers the historiography of the discipline within the university and charts the outstanding range of early Netherlandish works, from altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts to coins, in Cambridge collections. Dr Hale discusses later Netherlandish works in Cambridge, charting the web of relationships between the Low Countries and the Fens through early collectors such as Lord Fitzwilliam, founder of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Reverend Thomas Kerrich to recent donations such as the controversial gift of a late Rubens altarpiece to King’s College Chapel