The Germanic origins of art: Dutch and English antiquity according to Verstegan, Junius and Van Hoogstraten

Abstract

Seventeenth-century writers about Dutch art and language, wishing to promote a vernacular culture as a counterweight to the dominant ideals of Southern Europe, developed a view of Germanic antiquity. Exporting their visual art, the Dutch brought linguistic attitudes suggestive of a common Germanic history to Britain, as three authors exemplify: Richard Verstegan, Franciscus Junius and Samuel van Hoogstraten. Their writings presented simplicity as a distinctly Germanic quality. Imaginative etymologies, providing equivalents for the artistic vocabulary of humanism, proved that Germanic civilization was the purest continuation of classical antiquity since ‘bastard Latin languages’ had been corrupted by the Dark Ages. The pre-eminence of Netherlandish painting thus reflected the courage and integrity of the tribes praised by Tacitus. The aims formulated in Dutch art theory to ‘follow the simplicity of nature’ became interrelated to cultural ideals of masculinity and imperturbability.