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Description
This module considers painting produced in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It tracks the invention and proliferation of scenes of every-day life without clearly identifiable narratives. These include the largely unpeopled categories of still life and landscape as well as so-called genre scenes, which depict common activities of work and pleasure. The quotidian subjects and curious naturalistic aesthetic of these paintings have presented art historians with an interpretive conundrum. Are they message-less mirrors of the early modern world? Or didactic and moralizing scenes that should be read symbolically? Moreover, can their realisms be taken at face value, or are artistic liberties (and contemporary visual clich茅s) identifiable in the representation of everything from frogs and tulips to scenes of agricultural harvest and popular festivities? To what extent might we understand the subjects of our investigations with the seeming contradiction once formulated by the poet Marianne Moore: 鈥渋maginary gardens with real toads in them鈥�? 听听
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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