Description
Book SynopsisExamines the small-scale works of the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, and the aesthetic and cognitive operation of smallness in art of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Trade Review“Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale presents a long-awaited and much-needed analysis of a critical yet neglected painter. What Elizabeth Honig offers in this study fills a crucial lacuna, as no one else has redressed the relative absence of Jan Brueghel in period accounts, even in the standard surveys of Flemish painting. This is thoughtful, critical, and revisionist art history that challenges assumptions about the importance of period style and pictorial categories.”
—Larry Silver,author of Pieter Bruegel
“A refined, multivalenced study of how Jan Brueghel’s work can be interpreted for size, subject, and patronage. . . . Highly recommended.”
—A. Golahny Choice
“[Honig] has made the most historically cogent and pictorially compelling argument that can be made for Brueghel’s work. To read the book is to see his strikingly different kind of ambitious painting with new eyes and to consider that historic painting can differ from the unique iconic masterpieces one looks for made by masters both old and new.”
—Svetlana Alpers Key Reporter
“A masterful treatment of the artist that also manages to make an important contribution to the study of the philosophy, taste and collecting habits of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century collectors.”
—Louisa Wood Ruby The Historians of Netherlandish Art
“Honig’s text is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, and articulate presentation of a relatively unfamiliar aesthetic, that of miniaturization.”
—Nina E. Serebrennikov Renaissance Quarterly
“A significant re-evaluation of the paintings of Jan Brueghel.”
—Iain Buchanan Burlington Magazine
“Honig's core claim, that Jan Brueghel's art must be understood in relation to an aesthetic of smallness that elicits close viewing, is beautifully supported by the book's outstanding production values; high-quality illustrations, including carefully selected details, enable the reader to look with Honig and be guided by her practiced eye.”
—Lisa Rosenthal Art Bulletin
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Forging Connections
2 Hands-On Art: Brueghel, Francken, and Habits of Collecting in Rome and Antwerp
3 Small Stories: Brueghel and the Painting of Classical History
4 Genealogy: The Burden of Descent and the Individuality of Style
5 Paradise Regained: Collaboration as the Sociability of Visual Thought
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
