This volume is dedicated to the consequences of the invention of the printed image for the early modern Netherlands. Relatively affordable and easily accessible, prints in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not only aesthetic objects: they were used for purposes of political, moral, religious, and intellectual communication. The essays collected in this volume study printed images with a wide range of functions, including devotional scenes, religious allegories, (military) maps, portraits, political propaganda, and broadsheet entertainments. While some of these types of prints have beenrecognized as canonical works of art, most of them have been relegated to art-historically marginal categories such as popular culture, scientific illustration, sensationalist propaganda, ore ´mere´ information. Althoug art, popular amusement, science, and politics might seem to belong to different cultural spheres, they cannot be understood as autonomous of one another. Collectively, the authors included in this yearbook demonstrate the complex ways in which individual images participate in a cohesive visual culture, in a complex web of reference and resonance.
This volume is dedicated to the consequences of the invention of the printed image for the early modern Netherlands. Relatively affordable and easily accessible, prints in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not only aesthetic objects: they were used for purposes of political, moral, religious, and intellectual communication. The essays collected in this volume study printed images with a wide range of functions, including devotional scenes, religious allegories, (military) maps, portraits, political propaganda, and broadsheet entertainments. While some of these types of prints have beenrecognized as canonical works of art, most of them have been relegated to art-historically marginal categories such as popular culture, scientific illustration, sensationalist propaganda, ore ´mere´ information. Althoug art, popular amusement, science, and politics might seem to belong to different cultural spheres, they cannot be understood as autonomous of one another. Collectively, the authors included in this yearbook demonstrate the complex ways in which individual images participate in a cohesive visual culture, in a complex web of reference and resonance.
