Volume 56 (2005) of the NKJ will address the absorption, interpretation, transformation, and rejection of antique form and thought in Netherlandish art and architecture from 1400-1700. The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2004.

Over the past three decades, art historians have relinquished a straightforward view of the Renaissance as an era defined primarily by the rebirth of classical antiquity, or, in Panofsky’s more specific formulation, as the moment in which artists at last reintegrated the themes and forms of classical antiquity. If these conceptualizations have proved to be inadequate to the variety and complexity of early modern visual culture in Italy, they have been even less successful as analytic tools for a historicized understanding of the contemporaneous art and architecture of the Netherlands. And yet, even if Netherlandish art of the Renaissance rarely looked "classical" in the Athenian sense, many Netherlandish artists, patrons, and viewers after 1400 were fundamentally engaged with the visual and literary heritage of what we now think of as classical antiquity. Volume 56 of the NKJ will investigate the many ways in which that preoccupation played out in Netherlandish art between 1400 and 1700, and how it produced something of a proto-Winckelmannian aesthetic toward the end of that period.

Essay topics might include the Netherlandish reception of antique sculptural and architectural prototypes, the mediating role of Italian renderings, the impact of travel and patronage, the translation of literary knowledge and literary genres into visual form, the stimulation of the rhetorical and ekphrastic traditions, the catholicity of understandings of the "antique" in the Netherlands, artistic self-identification with antique models, the political uses and charges of different interpretations of antiquity, explicit and latent resistance to antique form, and the deliberate formation of a "classical" aesthetic.

The NKJ is dedicated to a particular theme each year and publishes essays that reflect the increasing diversity of approaches to the study of Netherlandish art as well as contributions based on more traditional methods such as style history and iconology. Contributions to the NKJ (in Dutch, English, German, or French) are limited to a maximum length of 7,500 words, excluding the notes.

The deadline for submission of proposals is September 1, 2004, and the deadline for the completed articles is May 15, 2005. Final decisions on the acceptance of any paper will be made by the editorial board following receipt of the complete text.

Proposals for papers, in the form of a 200-word abstract, should be sent before September 1, 2004, to Dr. Jan L. de Jong, secretary of the Editorial Board: j.l.de.jong@let.rug.nl