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Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and Their Contemporaries
Painting and Politics in Northern Europe Van Eyck Bruegel Rubens and Their Contemporaries Author:Margaret D. Carroll Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronologicalaccount of political engagement in works by early modern NorthernEuropean painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, PeterPaul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations ofcanonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artistsregistered thei... more »r pictorial responses to the political events anddebates of their day. In those debates, the imagery of gender andpower was often intertwined. Considering a range of works, includingvan Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel’s NetherlandishProverbs, and Rubens’s Life of Marie de Médicis series,Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish paintersseized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materialsof art. The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of “modern” theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.« less