This article focuses on Het Pelsken, a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens depicting his second wife Helena Fourment in a state of undress. It takes its cue from the fact that, for eighteen years of her life, Helena was the undisputed owner of Het Pelsken. The central aim is to give an historically grounded yet nuanced account of Helena's spectatorship in relation to an erotically charged and thus, in the early modern period, potentially troubling image. This, in turn, may function as a starting point for more profound inquiries into how women use their eyes when looking at erotically charged imagery. Margit Thøfner is a lecturer in art history in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. She has published articles in the Oxford Art Journal, in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and in Emblematica. She has received an AHRB grant to investigate courtly and civic festivals in the Habsburg Netherlands in the early modern period.
This article is about how one approaches images that are both disjunctive and disjointed. It studies a set of nineteen images by the Flemish printmaker Gaspard Bouttats, focusing on four specific examples. The nineteen prints are now in the Whitworth Gallery but come without any provenance beyond the signature of their maker. Hitherto, they have not been studied in detail, but were in fact made for a book, Prudencio de Sandoval’s Historia de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V, published in Antwerp in 1681 by Hieronymus Verdussen III. However, the prints now take the form of a set of loose sheets. Accordingly, the core argument rests on the fact that it is not helpful to study Bouttats’s prints in the context of de Sandoval’s book because this fails to account properly for their composite nature, their current state and their virtually limitless potential for circulation. The main contention is that such prints are best understood as collages. Therefore, they are viewed here through the lens of emerging scholarly literature on medieval and early modern texts and images that also fall into this category.
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