Parution : Marije Osnabrugge (dir.), « Questioning Pictorial Genres in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art. Definitions, Artistic Practices, Market & Society », Turnhout, Brepols, 2021

This volume embraces the complex and often messy reality of pictorial genres in seventeenth-century Dutch art, by examining how they were defined by artists, theorists, audiences and art historians, how they were part of artistic practices and developed within a specific societal and economic context.

Church interiors, cortegaerdjes, scenes of everyday life, tronies, landscapes, spoockerijen, group portraits, bambocciate, hunting scenes, history paintings, sottoboschi, still lives and many other subjects: the wide variety of pictorial genres and sub-genres in which Dutch artists specialized is a key component in our perception of Dutch seventeenth-century art. Yet the epistemological framework constituted by genre definitions, conventions and hierarchies is far from self-evident, nor does it necessarily reflect how people in the seventeenth-century thought about artworks. In fact, art literature of the period is largely silent on these matters and artists do not appear to have followed an established set of principles.

This volume examines the way pictorial genres can be, and have been, defined by artists, theorists, audiences and art historians; how individual artists conceived the subject matter of their artworks; and how society and the art market contributed to the development of certain subjects. As such, it embraces the complex and often messy reality of pictorial genres in seventeenth-century Dutch art.

Marije Osnabrugge is researcher at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on mobility and exchange, art theory, and artistic practices of the early modern period in the Netherlands and Italy. She studied at Utrecht University (BA, ReMA) and the University of Amsterdam (PhD, 2015) and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Montpellier. Her latest publication is Roma 1629: una microstoria dell’arte (2021), edited together with Jan Blanc.

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