Peasant Scenes and Landscapes - by Larry Silver (Paperback)

About the Book

Larry Silver investigates the origins of new pictorial types and their media as a phenomenon of sixteenth-century Antwerp and interprets several pictorial genres as he charts their evolution and their role in the development and marketing of individual artistic styles.

Book Synopsis

Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits of the elite. New genres and new media arose simultaneously in this volatile commercial and financial capital of Europe, home to the first open art market near the city Bourse. The new pictorial subjects emerged first as hybrid images, dominated by religious themes but also including elements that later became pictorial categories in their own right: landscapes, food markets, peasants at work and play, and still-life compositions. In addition to being the place of the origin and evolution of these genres, the Antwerp art market gave rise to the concept of artistic identity, in which favorite forms and favorite themes by an individual artist gained consumer recognition.

In Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, Larry Silver examines the emergence of pictorial kinds--scenes of taverns and markets, landscapes and peasants--and charts their evolution as genres from initial hybrids to more conventionalized artistic formulas. The relationship of these new genres and their favorite themes reflect a burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in Antwerp, and Silver analyzes how pictorial genres and the Antwerp marketplace fostered the development of what has come to be known as "signature" artistic style. By examining Bosch and Bruegel, together with their imitators, he focuses on pictorial innovation as well as the marketing of individual styles, attending particularly to the growing practice of artists signing their works. In addition, he argues that consumer interest in the style of individual artists reinforced another phenomenon of the later sixteenth century: art collecting. While today we take such typical artistic formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a Rothko, a Pollock), Peasant Scenes and Landscapes shows how these developed simultaneously in the commercial world of early modern Antwerp.

Review Quotes

"A rich and stimulating essay on the symbiotic relationship between artistic development and the market at the beginning of the modern era. . . . A valuable and supremely well informed contribution to our knowledge of both the formation of taste and the evolution of pictorial genres in early modern Europe."-- "Sixteenth Century Journal"

"Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. Larry Silver's entrée into the field not only builds on his own earlier explorations but also significantly reorients the kinds of questions asked and, by extension, the nature of the answers derived from the study of markets."-- "CAA Reviews"

"Grandly conceived and richly rewarding. . . . By integrating current critical methodologies-semiotics, rhetoric, economic theory-into the examination of sixteenth-century painting in Antwerp, Silver's study has significant and far-reaching application and relevance to other disciplines, notably history and literary criticism."-- "Choice"

About the Author

Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including Rembrandt and Art in History, and coeditor (with Jeffrey Chipps Smith) of The Essential Durer, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.