Description
Book SynopsisExplores early modern Scandinavia as an integral and essential part of Central Europe. Examines the visual arts in all media from the Reformation to the fall of Sweden as a great power in the earlier eighteenth century.
Trade Review“Kristoffer Neville has given early modern scholars a gift. He has presented a major, if often invisible, core of northern Central Europe, Scandinavia, as a coherent and productive cultural center. This book offers history of the richest kind: political, religious, and visual culture. Neville deftly introduces us to unfamiliar castles and palaces, churches, and tombs as well as peripatetic Northern artists. All can now take their rightful place in early modern European art and architectural history, thanks to this revelatory volume.”
—Larry Silver,author of Peasant Scenes and Landscapes
“Kristoffer Neville’s marvelous book explores the contributions of the often-battling kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden to early modern European art and court culture. Frequently overlooked as the far north, these realms were intricately tied with their Central European and Baltic neighbors through marriage, religion, trade, war, shared borders, and the movement of artists. Neville clearly charts the rich artistic heritage from Frederik II’s Kronborg Castle to Queen Christina’s collections to Nicodemus Tessin the Younger’s ideal plans for Stockholm.”
—Jeffrey Chipps Smith,author of The Art of the Goldsmith in late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop
“In his beautiful and elegant book, Kristoffer Neville presents a new history of the architecture and art of the Scandinavian countries in the Renaissance and Baroque. Anyone who has been to the vast lands ruled by the kings and queens of Denmark and Sweden knows that this art is a revelation. Neville contributes here to a rewriting of Renaissance art, weaving together historical context and a close analysis of extraordinary objects. This is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the diversity of early modern culture.”
—Christy Anderson,author of Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition
“Neville has written a useful book that not only serves as an introduction to the cultural landscape of a lesser-known region, but also demonstrates that differences between works produced in Copenhagen and Stockholm on the one hand, and the Holy Roman Empire on the other, were no more significant than those between Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. His book will be an invaluable survey of this often-overlooked corner of Europe for years to come.”
—Tomasz Grusiecki Renaissance and Reformation
“The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe, 1550-1720 is a quite readable, informative look at the history of Scandinavia’s role in Central European history and its contributions to art history in particular. There are some lovely color plates and other illustrations that are skillfully explicated. I will never look at an equestrian statue in quite the same way again.”
—Susan C. Brantly Scandinavian Studies
“[Neville’s] approach, undergirded by an impressive, unostentatious combination of multilingualism, extensive field research (no less than twenty-five illustrations of various monuments are the author’s own photographs), and wide-ranging command of historiographies and bibliographies hitherto largely isolated by nationalist paradigms, does much to provide new insights into the vibrant cosmopolitan and polycentric nature of the early modern boreal courtly milieu.”
—Ruth Sargent Noyes Renaissance Quarterly
“By focusing on both Sweden and Denmark [Neville] transcends the limits of nationalist art histories and produces an account that is reflective of the porous and polyglot nature of the period’s courts. His book will allow for a diffusion of insights synthesized from foundational texts in early modern Scandinavian art, many of which have never been translated. His accessible account of major monuments is a boon to professors seeking to widen the geographic purview of their survey courses.”
—Adam Eaker caa.reviews
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Gothicism in Germania
2. Reform and Reformation
3. Frederik II and the Arts in Denmark in the Later Sixteenth Century
4. Christian IV
5. Minerva’s World
6. Two Queens
7. Absolutism
Epilogue: The Romantic North
Notes
Bibliography
Index
