The Low Countries are generally considered to be the land of painting. Consequently, sculpture, especially that of the 16th century, has been insufficiently explored. In Moving Sculptures Aleksandra Lipińska presents a little-known chapter of the history of Netherlandish sculpture: the serial production of small-scale alabaster reliefs, altarpieces and statuettes in the workshops of Mechelen and Antwerp between c. 1525 and 1650. She gives the reader an insight into the rules of this craft, the specificity of the material, and the marketing methods employed. But the innovative...

How did the classical tradition survive on the North Sea shores? This richly illustrated book explores the interplay between art and erudition in the seventeenth century. It analyses the sources, editions, and reception of Franciscus Junius's writings to chart how ideas about Northern European painting, from Van Dyck to Rembrandt, developed as a counterweight to the Italian tradition. Thus the language of art in Junius's The Painting of the Ancients appears to be related to his seminal work in the field of Germanic linguistics and his discovery of the shared pre-Christian civilization...

Wall-mounted memorials (or 'epitaphs') enjoyed great popularity across the Burgundian Netherlands. Usually installed in churches above graves, they combine images with inscriptions and take the form of sculpted reliefs, brass plaques, or panel paintings. They preserved the memory of the dead and reminded the living to pray for their souls. On occasions, renowned artists like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were closely involved in memorials' creation. In Pious Memories Douglas Brine examines the wall-mounted memorial as a distinct category of funerary monument and shows it to be...

Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is one of the most enigmatic paintings in the history of western art. Apart from a brief description by an eyewitness in 1517, there are no contemporary records that tell us anything about the original commission of the painting, its placement, function or audience. Reindert Falkenburg now offers a detailed analysis of Bosch's eye- and mind boggling play with pictorial traditions. He argues that the painting was created towards the end of the fifteenth century as a conversation piece for an audience of Burgundian nobles. He suggests that the...