The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century

Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986. Hardcover. VG-/VG- (light foxing to upper block, light shelfwear to boards and corners, light foxing to interior of dust jacket. Text and illustrations are clean and clear). Red cloth boards with gilt spine lettering, duotone illustrated dust jacket with mylar cover; white lettering on spine. xii, 339 pp. 123 works pictured in bw with a few color plates. Corrigenda sheet laid in at p. 165. Includes 3 scholarly essays on the 16th century, Jan Gossaert and the New Aesthetic, and drawing in the Netherlands in the 16th Century. The catalogue features 123 illustrated and extensively annotated works. These are followed by a lengthy and substantial bibliography. From the exhibition held in Washington from November 1986 to January 1987. "The complexity and variety of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art endow it with a particular dynamism. It was in the sixteenth century that drawing attained an independent status as an art in itself, distinct from painting; landscape increasingly became a separate genre; and artists consciously referred to the great masters of the past, showing the tremendous influence of Italian art in their own works. This volume documents the unique qualities of the art of drawing during the age of Bruegel. Designed to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and The Pierpont Morgan Library, the book is also an invaluable scholarly record. In addition to 123 catalogue entries and more than 350 reproductions of rarely-seen drawings, three in-depth essays contain discussions of the art of the period. Its development is traced from a late medieval style at the end of the fifteenth century to the influence of the Italian Renaissance and mannerism in the 1500s, and ultimately to the beginning of the baroque period in the early 1600s. The detailed entries encompass works by sixty-two artists, including Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Gossaert, Lucas van Leyden, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Karel van Mander, and others. The book will interest specialists and also general readers attracted by the warmth of Netherlandish art"--Publisher description. (Inventory #: 178233)