Review of: 'Antwerp in the Renaissance' (2020)
June 2023
TINE LUK MEGANCK
Review of: Bruno Blondé and Jeroen Puttevils (eds.), Antwerp in the Renaissance. Studies in European urban history, volume 49, Brepols [Turnhout] 2020
Antwerp in the Renaissance brings together 11 substantive essays on the different aspects of sixteenth-century Antwerp: economy, law, guilds, confraternities, urban militia, rhetoricians, literature, architecture, cartography, material culture and the arts. Intended or not, it’s in line with the two-decade interval of two important earlier published survey studies: Antwerp, the golden age. The rise and glory of the metropolis in the sixteenth century (1973), by Leon Voet, former curator at the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and that by Jan Van der Stock: Antwerp. Story of a metropolis: 16th-17 century – a catalogue for an exhibition produced to accompany the occasion of Antwerp, being the European cultural capital for the year of 1993.1 Whereas these two earlier works are lavish catalogues focused on objects and works of art, Antwerp in the Renaissance is an academic collection of essays. It is dedicated to the eminent economic and social historian Hugo Soly, and most of its contributors are historians. Images and artifacts are part of this cultural history but are not subjected to close readings. The book offers a florilegium of the leading Flemish scholars on the early modern Low Countries: except for the Dutch literature expert Herman Pleij, all the authors have degrees from, and/or are affiliated with, the universities of Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels.
The publication considers various aspects of life in Antwerp during the long sixteenth century, though it is not, and does not claim to be, comprehensive. Its editors recommend that the book under review be read in conjunction with Netherlandish culture of the sixteenth century: Urban perspectives, edited by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, which was published in 2017, by the same publisher. The volume reviewed here has a narrower geographical scope, as its title indicates, and considers Antwerp as the motor of the Netherlandish Renaissance. Even with its complementary volume, not all areas of the period are covered, as the editors acknowledge. No separate essay is dedicated to the flourishing of Antwerp’s print culture, nor to the Northern humanism it circulated, even though both feature within various essays. Politics hovers over several essays, though the turbulent events are not systematically reiterated for the reader. It makes the book much less accessible for a wider audience – which is not its aim – but even to the specialist, the historical framework is more relevant than often provided. To give one example: in the introduction Blondé and Puttevils point toward the impact of the ornamental style of Fontainebleau on Antwerp, though they do not refer to the Habsburg-French rivalry that defined this cultural exchange. War and art do not necessarily follow the same logic. In 1542/3 Maerten van Rossem (c. 1490-1555), a mercenary from Guelre in service of François I (1494-1547), sacked Antwerp and its hinterland. They damaged, among others, the suburban villa of the rich merchant Joris Vezeleer (c. 1493-1570), who at that very moment, was selling tapestries and goldsmithing works to the French king himself. Such microhistories illustrate the contradictions of the time, oscillating between wonder and war. For what the book lacks sometimes in width, however, it gains in its depth. A treasure chest of new findings, the book also offers a synthesis of the recent scholarship on the respective fields of its authors. As such, it is a very valuable instrument for further interdisciplinary research on the – indeed – very interdisciplinary culture of Antwerp during the Renaissance.
Cover of: Antwerp in the Renaissance
Left: fig. 1 Jan Massys, Flora (with Antwerp in the background), 1559, oil on panel, 113.2 x 112.9 cm. Kunsthalle Hamburg, inv. HK-755
Middle left: fig. 2 Pieter Coecke, De triumphe van Antwerpen/Le triumphe d’Anvers faict en la susception du Prince d’Espaign, Antwerp: Gillis van Diest, inv. 1550
Middle right: fig. 3 Pieter Aertsen, The vegetable seller, 1567, oil on panel, 111.2 x. 43.9 cm., Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, inv. 61.3
Right: fig. 4 Joris Hoefnagel, Antwerp, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, volume V (1598).
Despite its declarative title, Antwerp in the Renaissance questions rather than confirms the appropriateness of the term Renaissance to sixteenth-century Antwerp. Blondé and Puttevils announce in the introduction a “de-centered view of the Renaissance” and consider Antwerp to be a “unique non-Italian laboratory”, even though the “Italian Renaissance played a key role in sixteenth-century Antwerp”.2 The readjustment of an Italo-centric view is welcome, but the editors claim that, “it can be argued that decisive social, political and cultural developments in Antwerp were firmly rooted in endogenous forces rather than resulting from cultural encounters with the Italian peninsula”,3 may be somewhat ill phrased – as one does not want to revert to the Georges Marlier’s search for “our own Renaissance”.4 Within his contribution to Antwerp’s Renaissance Art, Koenraad Jonckheere qualifies the term Renaissance more fittingly as both “revealing and inadequate”,5 noting that art is not only shaped by stylistic and cultural exchange with Italy and antiquity but also a response to political, economic, religious debates, especially images debates, iconoclasm and revolt. Echoing his own book Experiments in decorum, he concludes that, “…if Antwerp was anything, it was experimental.”6 In a similar vein, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene argues that rederijkers’ plays literally offered society its own podium to negotiate the cultural diversity of this once towering port city. During the city’s good times, immigrants flocked to Antwerp and contributed to its own ‘Golden Age’, as it is celebrated in plays and other arts (such as the painting of Flora before Antwerp by Jan Massys (1509-1575) on the book cover, which, by the way, is not discussed in the entire book (fig. 1). When the tide turned and religious fanatism and inequity polarised the city, leading to the 1566 iconoclasm and then the subsequent Spanish repression, the arts continued to proclaim the possibility (not heeded) of unity in diversity.7
A second red thread brought forth in the introduction and elaborated in several essays is the impact of the economy on Antwerp in the Renaissance. Facts and figures speak here: the glory of Antwerp can be measured by its estimated pro capita income: in 1569 (Alba’s Tenth Penny), it was three times that of s’Hertogenbosch. The city’s richness is reflected by the high consumption of wine and beer; a consumption that falls with 58% in 1585, when the city succumbed to the Spanish army. From my perspective as art historian, these numbers immediately recall the drinking and feasting feature frequently in the visual culture of Antwerp in the Renaissance, with the art of Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569) as the most iconic example. Artists and artisans such as Bruegel, who probably arrived from near Breda, and the a Vezeleer, who was trained as a goldsmith in s’Hertogenbosch, flocked to the port city. One of the most prosperous ‘local’ merchant families, the Schetzs’, migrated to Antwerp in the first decades of the sixteenth century, from Kelmis.8 Antwerp attracted high value-added industries, sometimes at expense of nearby urban economies. Wage laborers hardly profited, while housing rents rose. This was especially the case for the unskilled laborers; Herman Van der Wee has shown that the income position of middling groups improved.9 Precisely this middle class of artisans played a crucial role on cultural life. Antwerp was also home to the first art market, moving from art on order, to art on spec. While some craftsmen fell victim to polarization in service of commercial capitalists, many benefitted and even joined ranks, as the case of Vezeleer shows. It raises Blonde’s and Puttevil’s question: “Was the autonomous individual indeed co-emerging with the free market, as common sense would have it?”, and resonates with the modern-day assertation that innovation is needed to avoid economic stagnation.10
Editor and economic historian Jeroen Puttevils delves deeper in the volume's first essay, suggestively entitled ‘Sixteenth-century Antwerp, a hyper-market for all?’. Because of the international statue of sixteenth-century Antwerp, historians of the city have mostly studied foreign merchants, ignoring the growing importance of Antwerp traders – many of whom were themselves new citizens. Puttevils distinguishes three growth phases. From 1490-1520 the city granted privileges to foreign merchants during annual markets and developed as a transit market, especially in the triangle trade of English textiles, Portugal spices and German metals. From 1530-1566, the export of Netherlandish products increased, especially that of luxury products such as tapestries, cloth, jewellery and paintings – and Antwerp developed as a capitalist market. From 1566-1585, the decline sets in due to iconoclasm, war taxation and the destruction and fiscal barriers to trade using the Scheldt. It is during the second period – Antwerp’s glory days – that local traders formed a sizable community, as can be observed from the certification (written certificates by the Antwerp magistracy concerning commercial issues) and poorter books (registers of citizens, or poorters). Puttevils also explains that the ascent of this local mercantile class happened despite, rather than thanks, to urban policies.
Antwerp merchants mostly lacked direct political power; the political elite consisted of owners of urban land and rural estates far from the city’s centre and were not interested in commerce. As such, the latter had never been in competition with foreign traders, whom to the contrary, they had attracted with privileges. This pro-foreign policy disadvantaged locals as shown, for instance, by the 1564/5 and unsuccessful attempt of merchant Gillis Hooftman to organise a company for trade to England. The Antwerp city government however feared this would undermine the ‘merchant adventurers’ at the risk of them abandoning the city and therefore did not give them permission. The case illustrates the ambivalence of open access (already known as connexiteyt): newly established economic institutions such as the beurs made trade accessible to all; though, any prosperity also depended on privileges to foreign merchants, at times at the expense of locals, especially in times of international conflicts.
The rise of financial markets and international trade called for an adapted regulation, which is the subject of the book’s second contribution. Legal humanism is usually not considered for its contribution to commercial law, but legal historian Dave De Ruysscher argues that the development of Antwerp commercial law was an interplay of practice and theory, that is, of the new mercantile practices with academic legal culture, both the late medieval legal humanism or mos italicus – mainly the revival of Roman law (Justianians Corpus Iuris Civilis) purporting that law is the product of reasoning – and contemporary French humanist interpretations, or mos gallicus. The latter owes its name largely to two sixteenth-century French legal thinkers, Guillaume Budé (1467-1540) and Jean Bodin (1530-1596), who advocated a retour aux sourcesand the importance of local medieval jurisdiction. Observing diversity of legal practice, they argued Roman law as no better than local rules (‘costuymen’).
In Antwerp, civil servants as the secretary Cornelis De Schrijver (1482-1558) (known as Grapheus) started searching and cataloguing texts of Antwerp municipal laws from previous periods, which culminated in a new law compilation in 1578, which was then printed in 1582. Interestingly, De Ruyschers’ observations resonate with the antiquarian interests of Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) whom at that same time was actively in search of local medieval documents and artifacts. In fact, Bodin traveled to Antwerp in the entourage of the Duke of Anjou (1555-1584) in 1582/3, and on the occasion left his signature Ortelius album amicorum. Bodin, as well as another member of this French royal mission, Nicolas Clément de Trèles or Trelaeus, who corresponded with Ortelius on his study Merovingian kings, also left his signature in the album of jurist Johannes Gevartius, father of the more famous Gaspar.11
The friendship that bound together these international networks of humanists as preserved in these alba stands in stark contrast with the disappearance of confraternal friendship that Bert De Munck detects in Antwerp during the long sixteenth century. He argues that what he calls a “brotherhood of artisans” declined among Antwerp guild members as guilds evolved from an organisation of mutual assistance to that of one of mutual insurance, exemplified by the establishment of common funds and poor boxes (armbussen), benefits that were limited to masters who had regularly paid their fees and not accessible to journeymen and apprentices. He sees this transformation as part of the bureaucratisation and standardisation of informal guild practices – such as the introduction of standardised masterpiece and fixed time to serve – a protective measurement to guard master status in context of demographic expansion. De Munck’s assertion that guilds stopped being “fictive families”,12 raises the question of how this decline of guild brotherhood relates to the growing importance of merchant families and the larger question of if these families too became rational rather than affective communities.
Hadewijch Masure notes the same processes of inequality in social life in the participation of Antwerp confraternities. Between 1350-1600 at least 62 religious confraternities were active in Antwerp. Masure’s long-term study of the ordinances (regulations) and accounts of nine major Antwerp confraternities shows that this elitarisation – often explained as the result of the Catholic Reformation and political centralisation – may also be related to the demographic explosion of the port city. Seven of these nine confraternities had a chapel in the Church of Our Lady. Of these, the Laud of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe-Lof) was the most elite one: it asked for the highest entrance fee, was exclusively male and a significant majority were merchants. Members joined the confraternity in part out of devotion, yet clearly also for networking purposes. This can be corroborated by the recent findings of Jan Muylle that the member lists mention several known art lovers, including the aforementioned Joris Vezeleer and his son-in-law Jacques Hoefnagel (1575-1630), as well as the Bruegel collectors Nicolas Jonghelink (1517-1570), Jan Vleminck (c. 1527-1568) and Hans Frankaert (c. 1520-after 1584).13 The Schetz brothers were also members. This social function may also explain another observation, namely that confraternity meal expenses (in the form of a rice pudding feast, we learn, bringing to mind, again, Bruegel’s rice pudding eaters) continued to rise until 1570 when reformers were fulminating against devotional practices such as processions. In the end, the guild was abolished in 1579, and revived, even more exclusive and ostentatious, in 1585.
One of the prerogatives of the exclusive Guild of the Laud of our Lady was their exemption of urban militia guilds, the subject of the following essay. Surveying the period c. 1566-1621, Erik Swart argues that the defense of the city, traditionally by the civic guard (burgerwacht) and six elite militia guilds (schuttersgilden) gradually gave place to a professionalisation of the military, which entailed a decline of urban independence and rise of foreign hired troops and mercenaries. As he analyses the development of Antwerp’s urban militias in relation to princely authority, Swart asks if this change was impacted by the so-called ‘military Renaissance’, which is the humanist revival of antique military principles. Being part of an urban militia brought prestige from the Revolt until the Calvinist Republic, but from the reconciliation in 1585 onwards, this status declined as bearing arms as defending the city was no longer an aspiration. Some members of the militia guilds, the so-called wepelaers, even paid money to be exempt from militia service, funds used for display and ostentation.
Swart gives the example of the guild of the arquebusiers, who, in 1614, spent more than 11.000 florins on a new altarpiece.14 This was, of course, Rubens’s Descent from the cross, a fact left rather curiously unmentioned. Noting the complaints of the central government in 1617 that several members of ‘du salve de notre dame en l’église cathédrale’ refused to do guard duty, the author foregoes to refer to the preceding essay that extensively discussed the confraternity of the Laud of Our Lady. He mentions “a source written in Antwerp in 1582”, which reasserted the old privileges of self-defense, but only gives the full title of La Joyeuse & magnifique entrée, within a footnote.15 As such, he somewhat understates the importance of this event, not only for military humanism, but equally for legal humanism discussed by his co-author De Ruysscher, for local antiquarianism, as stated above, and for the festive culture in print discussed in the following essay Ann-Laure Van Bruaene.
The focus of Van Bruaene’s contribution is on rederijkers culture, especially the landjuweel of 1561, which as stated above, the author positions as a counterfeit community to overcome the city’s religious diversity and political instability. Challenging the older thesis of Hugo Soly that considers early modern festival culture in the Low Countries as illustrative of the widening gap between the majority of the population and the well-educated elite, she suggests festivals instead offered a bridge between the local and international communities in Antwerp, especially in the 1550s and 1560s, when the very concept of community was highly problematic. A creative group of middle-class men, rederijkers reinvented their cultural traditions by developing innovative discourses and media, printed memorials of the performances being an essential part of this strategy. Rederijkers’ culture functioned as an integrator: many immigrants became rederijkersbefore they became Antwerpenaars. Out-of-towner Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550), for instance, drafted and edited the festival book for the 1549 entry of Charles V (1500-1558) into Antwerp, together with town secretary Cornelis Grapheus (1482-1558) (fig. 2). Grand festivals such as the landjuweel reinvented Antwerp as a city of commerce built on peace, knowledge and morality – operating as city branding.
This view of rederijkers as innovators reforming local traditions is shared by Herman Pleij in his essay on the literary Renaissance of sixteenth-century Antwerp. As Jonckheere, he considers Antwerp, be less burdened by tradition than Ghent or Bruges, particularly prone to innovation. A notable innovator was the Antwerp schoolmistress and poetess Anna Bijns (1493-1575), to whom Pleij already devoted an entire book. As a woman, she was not allowed the be a member of the rhetorician’s chambers though, Pleij notes, she was active within their midst. While many rhetoricians had Erasmian and even Protestant sympathies, Bijns was instead a staunch Catholic. Even so, several of her refreinen in Dutch – in and of itself a literary innovation, though not exclusive to Antwerp – are emancipated satires on marriage as the backbone of family life. Casting herself as an “ingenious maiden”, she maintained that rhetoric could not be learned, but only practiced, and that inspiration was divinely gifted by the Holy Ghost.16 Another innovation that Pleij identifies in sixteenth-century Antwerp literary culture is what he calls contemporaneity. Given the city dwellers’ involvement in daily life, good and bad are no longer in the perspective of eternity, but necessitates a worldly ethics as exemplified by the everyman (Elckerlijc), a most famous morality play, with an international and intermedial following.
Antwerp’s city branding was perhaps most visibly borne out by its extensive architectural campaigns, as discussed in the joined essay by Krista DeJonge, Piet Lombaerde and Petra Maclot, as well as the representations of them in maps and city views discussed in the essay by Jelle De Rock.17 From 1542-1555 the city was literally given a new face by its new Italianate bastioned fortifications designed by Italian military engineer Donato de’Boni Pellizuolo. Originally built as a defensive structure (in response of the invasion of Maarten van Rossum), it became such point of pride of the city that the dominant city view from the east to show the river Scheldt, was reoriented to show this enceinte, as Pieter Martens has demonstrated in an article that (maybe due to the long editing process) is not referenced.18 Other major public architectural realisations were the beurs, or stock exchange built in the ‘manner of Brabant’, which really functioned as a semi-public rectangular open space with arcades four passages; the new city hall and the Oostershuis both designed by Cornelis Floris in the ‘antique manner’.
These period terms nuance Antwerp’s lack of local tradition supposed by Pleij and Jonckheere and point at the cultural continuity asserted in the antiquarian and legal studies cited above. This is suggested, among others, by the rejected proposal for the city hall of Lambert Van Noord (c. 1520-1571) that invoked the magnificence of medieval belfry tower, the combination of red brick masonry with white stone bands adopted in the Hanseatic House, and the Huys van Aken, which was built in 1539 for Schetz family in the Renaissance gothic. These prestigious designs were not perceived as particularly Italian though instead as universal in origin and value, and an integral part of a “national” past.19 Affirming local and artistic self-consciousness, Cornelis Floris (1514-1575) and Guillelmus Paludanus (1530-1580), who collaborated in the design of the city hall, as well as Frans Floris (1517-1570) and the gentleman painter Cornelis Van Dalem (1530-1573), all designed their own houses in the years 1563-1567. In retrospect, they were swansongs before the ruinous revolt.
In his essay ‘Antwerp Renaissance art’, Koenraad Jonckheere, as stated, regards the lack of local art historical tradition as being a fertile ground for the experimental nature of Antwerp art. He presents the artistic change in sixteenth-century Antwerp in response to the changing circumstances in three caesurae. From 1500 until the late 1530s, he sees works by the Antwerp mannerists as mainly characterised by exquisite material qualities, imitating international models such as prints of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), but less concerned with inventio. Two stand out, however, as exceptionally inventive: Quinten Massys and Joachim Patinir (1483-1524) and are soon recognised as founders of the city’s painting school. They laid the foundation for the second generation (1540-1566) of true innovators, among others Pieter Coecke (1502-1550) as well as his unlikely pupil Pieter Bruegel, the Floris brothers and the printer Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570), who circulated their designs widely. After the iconoclasm of 1566, artists searched for new opportunities, genres, and perspectives. Some, as Jacob De Backer (c. 1555-1591), Bartolomeus Spranger (1546-1611) and Joris Hoefnagel emigrated, contributing to an international courtly style gravitating around Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) in Prague. Others, such as the painter Adriaen Thomasz Key (c. 1544-after 1589), remained and ‘experimented’ with decorum to address the image debates between Catholics and Protestants. After the ‘Fall of Antwerp’, painters such as Maarten De Vos (1532-1603), a Lutheran who reconverts to Catholicism, and the Francken family, once again became major actors in the reconversion of the city to a bulwark of the Counter Reformation.
Jonckheere mainly discusses painting. As such, the other luxury arts such as tapestries, cloth, and jewelry – announced as being key to the Antwerp economy by Blonde and Puttevils – remain somewhat underrepresented in this essay, and generally in art historical studies of on the period. ‘Silks and the “Golden Age” of Antwerp’ by editors Blondé and Puttevils, together with Isis Sturtewagen comes therefore as a welcome closing essay beaconing to future avenues of investigation. Segments of Antwerp's “material Renaissance”, have recently been studied by, among others, Ulinka Rublack, who investigated the making of shoes in Antwerp of Spanish leather, and traded to German princes by the Fugger company.20 While Rublack does not discuss local consumption, Blondé, Puttevils and Sturtewagen found that of the four million guilders in silk products (raw silk and silk threads) imported on an annual basis from Italy to the Low Countries by the middle of the century, only a half a million was re-exported to England, the Baltic and France, leaving 3.5 million to be consumed in locally. By 1584, about 4.000 workers were active in Antwerp silk weaving; increased demand triggered cheaper locally produced silks that were both exported and consumed locally. For instance, the inventory of Margriete Boge, wife of the above-mentioned Joris Vezeleer, lists a kirtle with a locally produced mock velvet trim. Silk became such a ‘mass’ consumer product that sumptuary laws on wearing silk were issued, though rarely observed. It would be interesting to test these findings against Antwerp’s visual culture, such as the vendor and kitchen women wearing red silk sleeves depicted by Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575) (fig. 3) and Joachim Beuckelaer (1533-c. 1574).21 With these observations on the import of Italian h silk triggering local product innovation – an ‘appropriation’ also exemplified by development façon de Venise Antwerp glass – the authors return to their opening remarks on Antwerp in the Renaissance as a locus of extraordinary innovation by means of imperfection imitation.
Taken together, these essays shed much new light on Antwerp as a major financial, artistic, and humanistic center during the sixteenth century. If anything, the editors could have been further interconnected the rich findings. Besides the instances already mentioned, one may point, for instance, to the map of Antwerp of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, volume I (1572) that appears twice (in the book: figures 9.2 and 10.16), while the map of Antwerp designed by Joris Hoefnagel appearing in volume V of the same chorography and refers to the older view from the east (as mentioned), is left unillustrated (fig. 4).22 No cross-references are made between the role of Secretary Cornelis Grapheus (1484-1558) in legal practices and is his facilitation of publishing Pieter Coecke’s (unauthorised) translation of Serlio’s, Die Inventie de colommen (1539), or his contribution to the ‘Joyous Entry’ of Philip II (1527-1598) in 1549. However, it is precisely the porous, cross-craft and the, quite strong interdisciplinary nature of mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp’s cultural production that constituted its innovative appeal and that, following troubles from 1568 onwards, would be exported and soon recognised internationally as, the ‘Antwerp’ style. As late as 1591/3, Joris Hoefnagel depicted Antwerp — with the new city hall at the centre — as being a ‘fons irrigans omnia’, a fountain irrigating everything, in the Schrifmusterbuch for Rudolf II (1552-1612). Antwerp’s Renaissance, fabricated from diverse imitations, became a model, to be imitated unto itself.
Tine Meganck
Vrije Universiteit, Brussels
NOTES:
1 L. Voet, De gouden eeuw van Antwerpen. Bloei en uitstraling van de Metropool in de zestiende eeuw, Brussel 1973; J. Van der Stock (ed.), Antwerp. Story of a metropolis, 16th-17th Century, Ghent 1993. Concurrent with this exhibition catalogue, a short essay was published by Peter Burke: Antwerp. A metropolis in comparative perspective, Ghent 1993.
2 B. Blondé and J. Puttevils (eds.), Antwerp in the Renaissance. Studies in European urban history, volume 49, Turnhout 2020.
3 Blondé and Puttevils 2020 (note 2), p. 14.
4 G. Marlier, La Renaissance flamande: Pierre Coeck d’Alost, Brussels 1966.
5 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 296.
6 K. Jonckheere, Experiments in decorum: Antwerp art after Iconoclasm (1566-1585), London 2013.
7 That diversity that defines both the arts and the culture has also been argued by: T. L. Meganck, Erudite eyes: Friendship, art and erudition in the network of Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), Leiden 2017, pp. 174-177 and E. H. Wouk, Frans Floris (1519/20-1570): Imagining a Northern Renaissance, Leiden 2018, pp. 375-379.
8 See most recently on the Schetz merchant family: H. Soly, Capital at work in Antwerp’s golden age. Studies in European urban history, no. 55, Turnhout 2021. It since has appeared in the same series.
9 See among others: H. Van der Wee, ‘De economie als factor bij het begin van de opstand in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 83, 1969, pp. 15-32, esp. p. 17, cited by: Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 18 (note 46, in the English translation of 1971).
10 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 23.
11 T. L. Meganck, Erudite eyes. Friendship, art and erudition in the network of Abraham Ortelius, Leiden 2017, p. 57, on Trelaeus. The Album Amicorum of Johannes Gevartius contains the signatures of both Bodin and Trelaeus and is kept at the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp.
12 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 97.
13 J. Muylle, ‘Het aangename buitenleven in speelhoven rondom Antwerpen, bijzonder in het Leikwartier (ca. 1550-1585). Een netwerk rond Pieter Bruegel (1526/27-1569)’, Historiant. Jaarboek voor Antwerpse geschiedenis 8 (2020), pp. 29-48.
14 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 146.
15 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 152.
16 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 179.
17 A more detailed version appeared in the same Studies in European urban history 1100-1800 (no. 44), which is titled: J. De Rock, The Image of the city in Early Netherlandish painting (1400-1550), Turnhout 2019.
18 P. Martens, ‘Hieronymus Cock’s view of Antwerp (1557). Its genesis and offspring, from Antwerp to Italy’, Simiolus 39, no. 3 (2017), pp. 171-196.
19 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, pp. 219-220.
20 U. Rublack, ‘Matter in the material renaissance’, Past & present, no. 219 (May 2013), pp. 41-85.
21 On these market scenes, the very valid work by E. A Honig: Painting and the market in early modern Antwerp, New Haven 1998.
22 Blondé and Puttevils 2020, p. 257.
CITE AS:
Tina Meganck, 'Review of: Antwerp in the Renaissance ', Oud Holland Reviews, June 2023.