Old Plates, New Impressions: Local Landscape Prints in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

Abstract

In about 1640, the Antwerp print publisher Johannes Galle reissued a sixteenth-century print series known as the Small Landscapes. He made several additions and changes to the original plates that fundamentally realigned the representational status of the original prints, reflecting and responding to contemporary perceptions of the countryside around Antwerp toward the end of the Eighty Years’ War. The changing functions and meanings of the prints when they appeared in this new historical context suggest the importance of a diachronic approach to the study of print publishing and print culture in the early modern period.