Tales of the city: drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel

Abstract

Featuring works by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), Jan Gossaert (c. 1478-1532), Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), and others, this book positions drawing in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century as a dynamic, multifaceted practice. Drawings played roles as varied as the artists who made them: they were designs for prints, paintings, stained glass windows, decorative objects, and tapestries, as well as tools for presentation, translation, and the display of knowledge and virtuosity. The artists' diversified urban communities shaped their drawing practices, as did shifting cultural and political circumstances surrounding Protestant Reform and the Eighty Years' War. In addition to the book's four essays, many of the more than eighty catalogue entries--selected from the holdings of The Albertina Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art--present new research.

Contents

Director's foreword / William M. Griswold -- Director's foreword / Klaus Albrecht Schröder -- Introduction : tales of the city : drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel / Emily J. Peters -- Thinking inside the box : the art of drawing and the image debates in the sixteenth-century low countries / Koenraad Jonckheere -- City as stage : drawing as communication in the urban context / Emily J. Peters -- Paper capital : drawings on colored grounds in Antwerp workshops around 1520 / Stephanie Porras -- The saints and the others : civic identity in Netherlandish drawings and prints after Jheronimus Bosch / Laura M. Ritter.