Art History & Archaeology
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Item Nature and Power: The Game Sill Lifes of Jan Weenix (1641-1719)(2023) Altizer, Kathleen Joanna; Wheelock, Arthur K; Colontuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Dutch artist Jan Weenix (1641-1719) was the most successful game painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Specializing in large-scale still lifes that foregrounded naturalistically depicted game arranged before ornate garden views, these innovative images were highly sought after by wealthy merchants, Dutch nobles, and German princes alike. Despite the renown of Weenix’s art in his own time and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these paintings have never been the focus of in-depth critical analysis. Scholarship on Weenix has mostly concentrated on his early Italianate landscapes and his wall panels, while interpretations of his game paintings have almost exclusively focused on their place within the long tradition of dead animal painting in Northern art, beginning with sixteenth-century Flemish market scenes. This dissertation departs from this approach by arguing that Weenix’s game paintings are best understood within the dramatic cultural shifts and political upheavals of William III’s stadholderate (1672-1702). It was during this period that Weenix first specialized in game paintings. At this time, estate ownership, hunting, and garden design were becoming newly significant performances of authority, wealth, and power, both among members of the wealthy merchant patriciate and at William III’s court. Tracing Weenix’s evolution as a game painter alongside the cultural-political history of Dutch hunting practices and gardens, I explore the nuanced ways in which Weenix’s art drew from a myriad of contemporary visual sources to stylistically and conceptually promote his patrons’ belonging to a community of pan-European elites. I show how merchant collectors sought out Weenix’s game paintings as representations of estate ownership, which had become an increasingly significant marker of inherited wealth and dynastic privilege among the merchant class. In the same period, hunting and garden art became invested with new political meanings as Stadtholder William III made hunting a centerpiece of Dutch court life for the first time, while his courtiers developed magnificent gardens to celebrate his military achievements. I prove that Weenix’s art directly refers to these activities and spaces, enabling those inside and outside the court to adopt the imagery of political power to promote their own status. Combining a sustained visual analysis of Weenix’s game paintings with an in-depth study of his patronage, I demonstrate how Weenix’s art reflected and furthered the aspirations of his patrons, and consequently participated in the construction of elite social identities. I conclude that, through Weenix’s art, collectors claimed the right to to exercise control over nature, identifying themselves with pan-European nobility and ultimately illustrating their participation in the establishment of cultural and political hegemony over their domains.Item Adapting to the Market: Gabriel Metsu in Amsterdam(2018) Lee, Sophia; Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the impact that the vicissitudes of the political and economic environment of the mid-seventeenth century Dutch Republic had on the stylistic and thematic character of paintings that Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) executed after he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam in 1654. In the early 1650s the Dutch Republic faced a multitude of difficulties. Shortly after its independence from Spain in 1648, the sudden death of Stadholder Willem II of Orange in 1650, the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654), and a plague outbreak in the mid-1650s, the country was in a perilous state. The political and economic uncertainties facing the country had a direct impact on art markets. This study examines how Metsu adapted his paintings to succeed in this changing environment. After he moved to Amsterdam, which was a much larger market than Leiden, he adopted Gerrit Dou’s (1613-1675) subject matter and Jan Baptist Weenix’s (1621-1659) fluid brushwork to create a new genre style. He also looked carefully at other contemporary genre painters, including Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681), Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), and Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684), to broaden his thematic and compositional ideas. Metsu also applied his unique sense of humour, evident in expressive facial expressions and body language, to enliven his paintings and invite his viewers’ engagement. By utilizing personal connections to expand his clientele to include wealthy patrons, as well as by diversifying the sizes and subjects of his paintings, Metsu succeeded in broadening his reach to include both wealthy patrons and a broad base in the Amsterdam art market.Item The Altarpieces of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494): Between Heaven and Earth, Faith and Art(2017) Cadagin, Sarah Mellott; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the altarpiece paintings of the late fifteenth-century Italian artist Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94). While Ghirlandaio’s frescoes have often been studied as paradigms of portraiture and visual narrative, the artist’s 12 surviving altarpiece paintings have received little attention, despite Ghirlandaio’s status as one of the major figures in the history of Renaissance painting. This study is the first comprehensive and contextual investigation of Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, and one of the first to consider his works on panel outside questions of attribution. My analysis utilizes archival discoveries, alongside focused examinations into the identities of patrons, the commission histories of these works, the original locations of the altarpieces, and the paintings’ diverse sacred iconography. Organized around a range of case studies that include altarpieces for religious orders, cathedrals, civic hospitals, and private patrons, this dissertation also demonstrates the purposes and uses of altarpieces, revealing how this persistent type functioned as a form of visual and sacred power. Altarpieces visualize and index the divine presence contained and invoked at the altar, while also drawing the beholder fully into that presence. As a vehicle between the visible and the invisible, the altarpiece was the perfect means by which artists could explore the challenges of naturalism and mimesis, illusion and the imagination. Rather than seeing artists and their altarpieces as simply reflecting cultural and religious mores, this study argues for the active role that altarpieces played – and the artists who created them – in articulating the ontologies of the altar and its liturgies. Through an examination of Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, this study proposes a new definition of the fifteenth-century altarpiece as a dynamic object that mediated between the realm of art, as an aesthetic artifact, and the realm of the sacred, as an image that participated in the liturgies of the altar. As the first study to explore Ghirlandaio’s altarpieces, this dissertation produces a new body of knowledge about the artist, his workshop, and his painting practices. More broadly, it reassesses the materiality, functions, and ontologies of altarpieces, leading not only to a greater understanding of Renaissance religious art, but also of sacred art more generally.Item The Bruegelians: Formation and Canonization of Peasant Imagery in the Tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder(2017) Payne, Brighton Kelley; Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE BRUEGELIANS: FORMATION AND CANONIZATION OF PEASANT IMAGERY IN THE TRADITION OF PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER Brighton Kelley Payne, Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Dissertation directed by: Professor Arthur K. Wheelock, Department of Art History and Archaeology Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s peasant imagery has come to be the picture of mid-sixteenth-century Flemish art and a reflection of the native countryside before the ravages of the Dutch Revolt. A hundred years later, its impact on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish low-life genre scenes by Adriaen Brouwer, Adriaen van Ostade, David Teniers the Younger, and Jan Steen is undeniable. This dissertation examines the longevity of Bruegel the Elder’s subjects, manner, and motifs, identifying how and why this imagery retained its appeal through years of drastic social and political change. The acquisition of Bruegel the Elder’s paintings by the highest pinnacle of society, Emperor Rudolf II and his Austrian Habsburg kin, fueled an existing market of emulative paintings and prints. Identification of the artists who supplied these works and their relationship to Bruegel the Elder and his imagery reveals that many artists, particularly Marten van Cleve and Karel van Mander, contributed subjects and manner to a period style later associated with Breugel the Elder. Foremost in the process of appropriating peasant imagery under the name Bruegel were Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s two painter sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, and Karel van Mander, whose Het Schilderboeck (1604) canonized Bruegel the Elder as the archetypal landscape and peasant painter. Three case studies trace the trajectory of Bruegelian imagery from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century. A contrast with emulative works by Bruegelian artists reveals the singularity of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s artistry.