Three book reviews in the March 2024 issue of Print Quarterly may be of interest to CODART members for their material relating to Dutch and Flemish artists and the wider activities of the region.
Peter Parshall has reviewed The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe, which examines the dissemination and adaptation of ideas communicated through religious imagery in the context of Jesuit missions. The primary case study concerns Maerten de Vos’s 1581 painting St Michael the Archangel, which was installed in 1585 in an altarpiece in the Cathedral of Cuautitlán, Greater Mexico City. The review provides an overview of the image’s many local and international variants. Particularly poignant is Parshall’s ending paragraph commenting on the double entendre of the term ‘viral’, noting the harmful and invasive power of influential images that can potentially replace native cultural practices.
Meanwhile, Emanuele Lugli’s review of The Mokken Collection: Manuscripts on Fencing before 1800 discusses the Amsterdam-based collection of fencing treatises amassed by Wiebe Mokken. In addition to highlighting the book’s excellent production quality and layout, Lugli makes a few observations about the content’s historiography.
Finally, Nadine Orenstein’s review of Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic offers an overview of this rare category of prints which is also seldom addressed outside of the Netherlands. Due to their temporally specific nature, it is often a challenge to contextualise them properly. There is a small discussion on Crispijn de Passe the Younger’s little-known broadsides, specifically the influence of The Departure of the Castilians and the Flemish Milk Cow on later compositions by other artists. A concluding comment speculates on catalogue’s potential added value had it opted to include catalogue entries as well as essays.
Contents
Wenzel von Olmütz in Ulm? Discoveries and New Hypotheses Regarding his Architectural Prints by Femke Speelberg
Marcantonio Raimondi’s Naked Youth and its Sources by Alexis Culotta
Jacques Rigaud’s Drawings in Warsaw of the Residences of Louis XIV by Przemysław Wątroba
Shorter Notice
The Coronation of Ferdinand IV after Johann Hauer (1586–1660) from the George Grote Collection by Peter Crack
Notes
Prints as Agents of Global Exchange, 1500–1800 by Marzia Faietti
Architecture in Sixteenth-Century Italian Engravings (Architettura e incisione negli anni di Giulio Romano) by Daniel Godfrey
Giacomo Ceruti (1698 – 1767), Inspired by Jacques Callot (Immaginario Ceruti. Le stampe nel laboratorio del pittore) by Sheila McTighe
Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body by Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
Pietro Giacomo Palmieri (1737–1804) by Antony Griffiths
French Literature Served on a Plate (Literatur auf französischen Steingut-Tellern des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts) by Patricia F. Ferguson
Berlin’s Woodcuts (and Woodblocks) from 1400 to Today (Holzschnitt: 1400 bis Heute) by Elizabeth Savage
Max Liebermann (1847–1935) (Schwarz–Weiss. Max Liebermanns Druckgrafik) by Gunda Luyken
Emilio Mantelli (1884–1918) (Una bizzarra bellezza: Emilio Mantelli e la grafica europea) by Martin Hopkinson
The Grid in Print and Photography (On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print) by Rachel Vogel
Into the New: The Städel’s Collection of Works on Paper from the USA by Susan Tallman
Paul Nash: Designer and Illustrator by James Finch
The Indian Printmakers Guild in Delhi, 1900–2000 by Namrita Sharma
Positive Fragmentation. Twentieth-Century Female Printmakers by Alexander Adams
Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print by Susan Tallman
The Chto Delat Newspaper: Twenty Years of Do-It-Yourself Publishing by Yulia Tikhomirova
Printmaking in Oaxaca by Mark McDonald
Catalogue and Book Reviews
Italian Renaissance Nielli (I nielli Trivulzio. Storia, tecnica, collezionismo) by Naoko Takahatake
Maerten de Vos Going Viral (The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe) by Peter Parshall
Fencing Manuels in the Mokken Collection by Emanuele Lugli
Dutch Political Prints (Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic) by Nadine Orenstein
Dresden’s Collection of Chinese Prints by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
Curt Glaser and his Art Collection by Andreas Strobl