Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference (HNA Boston, MA, July 14-17, 2027)
Session chairs: Dr. Eelco Nagelsmit, Dr. Esther van der Hoorn, Dr. Anna C. Knaap

Artists and viewers in the early modern Low Countries inhabited a world where natural observation and the marvelous often coexisted without contradiction. As new empirical and optical sciences promised clarity and objectivity, painters, printmakers, and theorists simultaneously cultivated modes of making and viewing art that invited wonder, enchantment, fantasy, and reverie.

This panel seeks to explore how Netherlandish art and visual culture negotiated the tensions between evidentia – the power of making present, certain, and true – and the imaginative, dreamlike, or even magical qualities that animated depictions of the (natural) world. Artists experimented with new techniques and visual vocabularies to evoke nature’s vitality and strangeness, oscillating between meticulous observation and visionary excess. They conjured spaces where seeing became a kind of enchantment – where the act of looking blurred the threshold between empirical truth and visionary experience. Others incorporated newly discovered species from colonial territories into landscapes and still lifes, both in an effort to satisfy a curiosity for the wondrous and to make sense of expanded realities.

Contemporaneous scientific discourses reframed what it meant to see. Instruments (i.e., telescope, microscope) expanded human perception and revealed realities previously unknown. Yet these discoveries also unsettled confidence in the senses, revealing vision’s fallibility and prompting renewed fascination with illusions and dreams. At stake is the dual sense of evidentia in the early modern imagination: both as a rhetorical technique of vivid demonstration and as a claim to visual proof or trustworthy witness. This panel proposes to reconsider Netherlandish art as a terrain where evidentia and enchantment were intertwined, producing not a progressive march toward naturalism but rather an ongoing negotiation between visibility and vision. We invite proposals that examine case studies of a single artist or work, reconsider theoretical texts on evidentia and visual persuasion, or situate these issues within broader philosophical, devotional, historical or scientific contexts. Equally welcome are interdisciplinary approaches connecting art history with the histories of rhetoric, magic, science, religion, and literature.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short CV (1-2 pages) by 15 September to e.d.nagelsmit@vu.nl ; evdhoorn@delft.nl ; and AKnaap@mfa.org with the subject line “HNA Conference 2027 Proposal”.