The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art

From the slyly suggestive to the overtly erotic, many early modern Dutch and Flemish artworks were designed to attract the eye, and yet the messages they convey are often equivocal. The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays by leading scholars of art that delve into ways that material and pictorial qualities of descriptive artworks appeal to beholders to become involved with them. Exploring complex interrelations between making, displaying, and engaging with paintings and prints, the volume brings forward mechanisms through which visual imagery fostered new forms of association in early modern Europe. An introductory chapter lays out the innovative theoretical framework, arguing that descriptive pictures operated as social things, encouraging people to engage with them through the pleasures they offered the senses, prompting debate and potentially opening up ethical and political considerations about the interconnectedness of pictures and the material world. Challenging familiar interpretive models of iconography, verisimilitude, and social art history, the essays shift the focus away from a picture’s meaning toward why art matters, toward how artworks solicit beholders and stimulate deliberation. The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art not only offers illuminating insights into ways to look at art – it redefines the concept of art itself.

6 Notes on Contributors 8 Chapter 1 The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation and Netherlandish Visual Culture Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson 20 Chapter 2 Beer and Loafing in Antwerp Bret Rothstein 42 Chapter 3 Perspectives in Flux: Viewing Dutch Pictures in Real Time Celeste Brusati 68 Chapter 4 Entropic Segers Christopher P. Heuer 92 Chapter 5 The Turn of the Skull: Andreas Vesalius and the Early Modern Memento Mori Rose Marie San Juan 110 Chapter 6 Laying the Table: The Procedures of Still Life Joanna Woodall 138 Chapter 7 Boredom’s Threshold: Dutch Realism Angela Vanhaelen 158 Chapter 8 Response: Art/Matter(s) Larry Silver 170 Chapter 9 Response: On the Impulse of Mapping, or How a Flat Earth Theory of Dutch Maps Distorts the Thickness and Pictorial Proclivities of Early Modern Dutch Cartography (and Misses Its Picturing Impulse) Benjamin Schmidt 184 Chapter 10 Response: Reflections on Temporality in Netherlandish Art Lyle Massey 192 Chapter 11 Response: The Work of Realism Bronwen Wilson 209 Index

Angela Vanhaelen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her publications include The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (2012). Bronwen Wilson is Professor and Head of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (2005).

“I highly recommend the ground breaking and landmark book The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art edited by Angela Vanhaelen, Ph.D., and Bronwen Wilson, Ph.D., to any students of art and art history, academics in the field, art gallery owners and managers, art collectors and dealers, and to anyone interested in the power of the senses and sensuality found in the interaction between artist and viewer. This book will transform the way the artists of the early modern Dutch period approached their vision, their works, and their engagement with the viewer of the paintings.”  ( Blog Business World , 16 August 2013)