Arts and Minds: Scholarship on Early Modern Art History (Northern Europe)^*

Abstract

Arts and Minds: Scholarship on Early Modern Art History (Northern Europe) * by LARRY SILVER W ith the exception of a few notable artists-chiefly van Eyck, Dürer, Bosch, and Bruegel-early modern art outside Italy received little attention as recently as a generation ago. To use a Dutch proverb, it "fell between stools": neither Italian Renaissance, the dominant paradigm and intellectual center of the entire discipline of art history since Burckhardt, nor the more celebrated Golden Age of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Moreover, scholarly focus lay exclusively on painting-not sculpture or architecture, let alone other media, usually lumped together and dismissed as "decorative arts" or, worse, "minor arts." These views conditioned canonical scholarship, led by Erwin Panofsky. His major monographs-Early Netherlandish Painting and Albrecht Dürer-defined the role of Northern art, chiefly in relation to Italy and as the foundations of nascent artistic identity. 1 For Panofsky, van Eyck in the Netherlands and Dürer in Germany pioneered artistic naturalism and also initiated progress from medieval icons toward modern, aesthetic artwork. Panofsky built his account around Jan van Eyck, the first great, named founder of Flemish Primitives, whose very rubric was taken as establishing and defining the tradition of paintings that followed in Flanders and Holland. Yet in coining his influential interpretive framework of hidden symbolism, Panofsky also acutely saw van Eyck's art through the culturally sensitive prior reading by Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle