Women and Artistic Production in the Long Seventeenth Century in the Low Countries

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

Reviewed by: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ed. by Tanja L. Jones Catherine Powell-Warren Tanja L. Jones, ed., Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 213 pp., 33 ills. This is an exciting time to be a scholar of women artists and patrons of the early modern period. Long hindered by the lack of available archival material and surviving artworks (to say nothing of uneven institutional interest and ungenerous funding), art historians have determined that if women are to become part of an inclusive history of art, they must seize upon the "open pathways … to do art history differently," whether this means broadening the definition of art and/or employing updated or new methodologies (Elizabeth Sutton, Introduction to Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, ed. Elizabeth Sutton [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019], 23). With the collected essays in Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700), editor Tanja L. Jones has shown how rewarding doing so can be. In much of early modern Europe, the production of art was intimately linked to the courts. From Ferrara to London and Madrid to Dresden, rulers and assorted nobility commissioned and acquired art as a way to express their Aristotelian magnificence (a concept that imports philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions into spending, particularly relevant to the commission of art by the nobility and the ruling classes during the early modern period), their erudition and worldliness, and their wealth and power. To satisfy the needs of these courts, a large number of artists were called upon. The standard text in the study of court artists remains Martin Warnke's The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (1985; translated into English in 1993). Warnke's book reflects the richness of artistic production at court, as well as the limits that have hindered the study of women as artistic and cultural producers. In the first place, (subject to a few exceptions) women were rarely formally named as painters or sculptors of the court and thus would not appear as such in the archives. In the second place, many of the works produced at the court (for example portraits, often executed in multiples) were unsigned. Importantly, Warnke focused his research on the production of the so-called fine arts, whereas women were often more active in other forms of artistic production. Thus, Warnke only refers to two women artists: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) and Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807). Considering how Warnke frames the court structure, it is hardly surprising that so few women should have warranted inclusion in his discussion: "The court was a structure with many internal tensions, where princes, favourites, ministers, middle-class councillors, aristocratic courtiers, women, upstarts, dwarfs, fools and artisans all interacted" (Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], xvi; emphasis added). The result (not only of Warnke's work but of the scholarship that has followed in its tracks) has been a severe underestimation of the importance of early modern women in European courts with respect to the creation and production, but also the patronage, of art. The seven essays in this volume have turned these limitations into pathways for research, with interesting results. The book is intended as a companion to a large-scale digital humanities project entitled "Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts." The project, still in its [End Page 258] infancy, is hosted by the University of Alabama, where Tanja L. Jones, the editor of the volume, is coprincipal investigator together with Doris Sung. The stated objective of the project is to "encourage and support sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400–1750)" (https://adhc.lib.ua.edu/makers/s/makers/page/makers). In her introduction to the volume, Jones presents the project as a new direction in research and sets out the objectives of the project, the first phase of which is...

Students should be introducced to art history in the primary schools, and, after that, art history should constitute part of the core curriculum of secondary schools. Indeed, art history is already offered by a number of high schools in this country and in some cases has been offered by them for a number of years because of its continued success and relevance as a subject for instruction. Why is this true? First, art history is a discipline worthy of instruction in its own right, regardless of whether art production, art criticism, and aesthetics are included in the curriculum. Art history, the practice of art, art criticism, and aesthetics are distinct subjects that stand on their own pedagogically and that contribute significantly to education in different ways. Art history constitutes an integral part of the humanistic training of children; art production, an integral part of their creative and imaginative training and development; art criticism, an integral part of the training of their critical faculties in dealing with the arts; and aesthetics, an integral part of the development of their philosophic outlook about the arts. Because of the mutuality and interdependence of art history, art production, art criticism, and aesthetics, all four disciplines ought to be included in the core curricula of our public schools. Why art history? Human beings and human values lie at the heart of all subject areas currently required in our core curricula. The sciences in-

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Modern Chinese “new historiography” has both maintained close ties with the fine arts and exerted a significant influence on their development. Currently, there is a lack of specific case studies on the relationship between modern Chinese history and art. Additionally, research and reflection on the ideas and problems arising from the interaction between modern history and art still have room for improvement. This paper focuses on modern historian Deng Shi. Through an analysis of his activities in the field of fine arts, the paper expounds on his views on history and fine arts and discusses how his ideas on fine arts were formed in the context of the new historiography movement. It reflects on the relationship between modern history and fine arts and analyzes the logic behind the formation of modern Chinese art history. In this regard, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary research methodology to examine the evolution of modern art history and artistic production through the lens of modern historiography, while also incorporating the perspectives and conceptual contributions of art scholars. Concurrently, employing a dual approach of historical text interpretation and close reading methods, this paper offers an interpretation of the historical texts of modern scholars, thereby restoring the historical context and examining Deng Shi's academic views on art and their underlying internal causes. This paper argues that: the combination of modern history and fine arts has not only deepened the connotation of fine arts and promoted the updating of the research methodology of fine arts history, but has also led to a certain extent to the deviation of the value orientation of fine arts research, but on the whole, the combination of history and fine arts has far-reaching significance for the development of modern Chinese fine arts history.

Sodobnemu bralcu se Plinijeva »poglavja o umetnosti« lahko zdijo presenetljivo domača. S svojim seznamom umetnikov in del, ki so urejena kot niz slogovnih iznajdb in izboljšav, Plinijev opis grške umetnosti ... v marsikaterem pogledu ustreza zdaj splošno uveljavljenemu modelu zgodovine umetnosti. Vzrok za to je seveda v dejstvu, da je Plinijevo besedilo igralo osrednjo vlogo pri razvoju tega modela (Carey, 2003, 13).

This study explores Honoré de Balzac’s iconic representation of artistic creativity in The Unknown Masterpiece by focusing on an unexamined aspect of his text, namely the seminal role played by critical reception and consumption in artistic production. This influential tale is examined in terms of its artistic and philosophical contributions to reenvisioning creativity by modern and postmodern critics and thinkers. Challenging the ideology of the artist as creative genius, this analysis targets the processes, labor and materials of artistic production and its relations to critical consumption. At issue is the expressive potential of the art work in its creative capacities to bring about the new, to happen and make things happen.

Editorial Commentary

Early Modern:"By Any Other Name . . ."? Ryan Prendergast (bio) I am specialist in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. By defining the field by centuries, I am already trying to sidestep the frequently thorny and sometimes fraught issue of periodization and naming. My area of study has been called, both formally and informally, by many a name, including: Golden Age, Siglo de Oro, los Siglos de Oro, Renaissance and Baroque, and finally, Early Modern or its equivalent in Spain de la primera modernidad. As we know, the very validity of periodization has been questioned by postmodern theory. At the same time, these categories, while marked both by history and by ideology, are useful on some level in research and teaching. It certainly seems to be in vogue these days, at least among US Hispanists both in literature and in history, to use the early modern designation, but not to the complete exclusion of what some might consider the more traditional label, Golden Age. The use of early modern may well respond to a critique of the charged term "Golden Age." People question how one can refer to a period as "golden" when it is associated with the expulsion of Jews and Moriscos from Spain, and when it coincides with the colonization and resultant decimation of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The most common answer, though perhaps not entirely satisfying, is that the term "golden" refers to literary and artistic production. Categories like Renaissance and Baroque can be imprecise as well, since they are used to describe often distinct literary or artistic or cultural manifestations across different cultures that occur at unique stages over a varying amount of time and in particular socio-historic contexts. As a result, these terms may be problematic when looking to analyze the artistic or intellectual production of a number of cultures or from a more comparative perspective. The term early modern may just be another misleading category, if colleagues in English departments are using it to speak solely of the English Renaissance. [End Page 76] What can be gained from the use of the term early modern in its broader or even broadest sense speaks to a larger, and perhaps more challenging, issue: comparative studies across national and linguistic traditions. As we know, Renaissance may mean something different, both in temporal and aesthetic terms, for Italy than it does for England or Spain. Associating the term early modern solely with the word Renaissance can result in a limited understanding of the ongoing—if often uneven—development of new directions in intellectual, artistic, and scientific discovery and experimentation. Rarely is anything so neatly or clearly definable. I am taking it as a given that we accept that the developments or shifts that make one period of study apparently different from another (e.g., Medieval vs. Renaissance) are gradual, far from clearly defined in all cases, and ought not be linked to a specific event. The death of author Pedro Calderón de la Barca in 1681 is often used to mark the end of Spain's Golden Age, but it is not the only terminus that is used. Furthermore, just as manuscript culture still existed alongside print culture after the advent of the printing press, it is clear that the transition from one period to another occurs slowly, at times in a kind of tug-of-war, but with significant overlap. My sense of early modern is that it more readily allows for the idea of a continuum that surely reaches back into the fifteenth century and forward into the eighteenth, as opposed to a more arbitrary division that marks the fifteenth century as Medieval and the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth as the Enlightenment. However, to better understand the intricate negotiations and complex growing pains associated with any sort of definable epistemological shift, this transition from one period to the next must always be conceived as a unique process determined by a number of factors that are in flux. Without a doubt, the concept of early modern takes into account the present-day resonances inherent in the use of modern, if even in some embryonic form. The early modern...

The neural underpinning of art creation can be gleaned following brain injury in professional artists. Any alteration to their artistic productivity, creativity, skills, talent, and genre can help understand the neural underpinning of art expression. Here, two world-renown and influential artists who sustained brain injury in World War I are the focus, namely the French artist Georges Braque and the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. Braque is particularly associated with Cubism, and Kokoschka with Expressionism. Before enlisting, they were already well-known and highly regarded. Both were wounded in the battlefield where they lost consciousness and treated in European hospitals. Braque’s injury was in the left hemisphere while Kokoschka’s was in the right hemisphere. After the injury, Braque did not paint again for nearly a whole year while Kokoschka commenced his artistic works when still undergoing hospital treatment. Their post-injury art retained the same genre as their pre-injury period, and their artistic skills, talent, creativity, and productivity remained unchanged. The quality of their post-injury artworks remained highly regarded and influential. These neurological cases suggest widely distributed and diffuse neural control by the brain in the creation of art.

At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women's roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block's achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women’s roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block’s achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

Andrew Ballantyne is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). He is the editor of What is Architecture? (Routledge, 2002) and Architectures, in the Blackwell/AAH series New Interventions in Art History.When Richard Payne Knight wrote his commentaries on ancient sculpture, his analysis was characteristically wide–ranging. The observations are informative about the sculptures themselves, but scholarship has advanced, and the writings have been superseded. The remarks with which Knight positioned the works in their various cultural and political contexts are of continuing interest, particularly because they show him making connections between the organization of society and the qualities of its art. The great evil of Knight’s own day was, as he saw it, Napoleon’s imperialism; and he projected this current concern back into the analysis of ancient sculpture, so that the unmatched beauty of the works from ancient Greece began its decline from the moment when Alexander the Great started his empire–building campaigns. For Knight, as for Winckelmann, the artistic and architectural productions of the ancient Greeks were ideal because they were the productions of an ideal society. This analysis is complicated by the fact that attributions have changed, and the relative merits of individuals’ works have shifted. The engraved plates that illustrate the commentaries remain impressive, however, and they are themselves artistic productions, the aim of which was to give a clear impression of the sculpture. Knight’s commentary includes critical remarks when their effects were too picturesque, despite his fondness for such effects in their proper place.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has significantly transformed contemporary artistic practices, raising critical questions about creativity, authorship, and aesthetic value. This paper examines how generative AI systems challenge traditional human-centered models of artistic creation that have long shaped art theory and aesthetics. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from art history, philosophy of art, and digital humanities, the study explores the shifting boundaries between human agency and machine participation in the creative process. It argues that artificial intelligence should not be understood merely as a technical instrument but as a co-creative agent that reconfigures established notions of originality, intentionality, and artistic labor. Through a critical analysis of selected AI-generated artworks, digital exhibitions, and contemporary theoretical debates, the paper investigates how meaning and value are negotiated in works produced through human–machine collaboration. Particular attention is given to emerging questions of authorship, intellectual ownership, and the evolving role of the artist in an era of algorithmic creativity. The discussion further situates AI-driven art within broader cultural and ethical frameworks, addressing concerns related to transparency, algorithmic bias, and the commodification of creativity in digital economies. By proposing a revised conceptual framework for understanding creativity in the age of artificial intelligence, this study contributes to ongoing debates in contemporary aesthetics and digital art studies. The findings suggest that rather than diminishing human creativity, AI expands the creative field by enabling new aesthetic practices, critical interpretations, and modes of artistic engagement. This research offers valuable insights for scholars in the arts and humanities and provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary inquiry into the cultural implications of artificial intelligence in artistic production.

This article follows from the previously published paper and pertains to a distinctive phenomenological analysis of the structure/form and the production of the modality of miniature/illumination/pictorial representation, namely the productive-reflective orientation of homo islamicus with a separate analysis of his profanely-aestheticized discourse of action/arrangement/design.
 A particular attention is paid to the paradigm of reduction, i.e. to a possible transformation of the cognitive and productive-reflective orientation by means of denaturalization/ stylization, as well as to the analysis of the status of homo islamicus's paradigmatic and predefined position within both the profane-cognitive and recognitive-sacral production. The characterization of his work and his fulfillment of religious life within the aesteticized discourse of qadar/ṣināʿat was also used to discuss the opposition to the occidental academic approach/understanding, imposed by the inappropriate need to reduce any form of creative action to common Western denominators. Substance of the emergence of creative action is theoretically elaborated by means of the cognitive discourse of qadar/ṣināʿat, together with activating figurality on the idea of the closed concept of the collaborative-cognitive practice. The expansion of theoretical discourse allowed the presence of a new view on the religious-aesthetic philosophy and associated terms, respecting the specifics deriving from the basic traditional interpretations of the Islamic forms of aestheticized orientation. This brief analysis is intended to initiate a discussion on the issues of theoretical and historical other part of the „history of arts“ and „artistic production“ in the critical framework of both occidental and Islamic attitudes/views. This brief analysis is intended to initiate a discussion on the issues of theoretical and historical other part of the „history of arts“ and „artistic production“ in the critical framework of both occidental and Islamic attitudes/views. At the same time, it will contribute to a possible fundamental discourse for defining the expression homo islamicus's Islamic creative action' as an academic field within a broader discipline entitled as the „history of arts“.