After iconography and iconoclasm: current research in Netherlandish art, 1566-1700

Like so many fields of art history, the study of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art was energized two decades ago by a new awareness that business as usual--Berensonian connoisseurship, Wolfflinian history of style, Panofskian iconography--would no longer do. With hindsight, it is obvious that these three founding investigative modes of our discipline were bound to lose some efficacy in the historical moment when all structures of analysis that mask their Western, middle-class origins with essentialist claims about their objects of study and with universalizing assumptions about their methods had become suspect. It was inevitable that the explicit identity politics of the 1970s would affect the study of human artifacts in the broadest sense. Consciousness of the constructed nature of class, race, nationality, and gender eventually reshaped Netherlandish art history, but the field has been retooled more slowly and less fully than, say, studies of nineteenth-century painting or modern photography.

That this delay has had little to do with the greater historical distance of early modern art from the analytic disciplines that conditioned the new art history (literary criticism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism, cultural anthropology) is clear from the thoroughgoing introduction of those modes of thinking and writing into medieval art history and other areas at a farther temporal remove. (1) In good measure, the belatedness of serious engagement in Netherlandish art studies with social "context" in its various senses or with the close reading of works pioneered in literary criticism resulted from institutional constraints, particularly in the Netherlands and Belgium, where the major collections and archives are preserved and where almost any study of Netherlandish art must have its starting point. An assessment of the current state of the history of early modern Netherlandish art necessitates a prefatory look at the institutional and scholarly situation of the 1970s and 1980s, whose outlines Egbert HaverkampBegemann charted lucidly in an essay for this journal in 1987. (2)

Authority and Meaning in Dutch Art: The 1970s and 1980s

In the 1980s the Rembrandt Research Project, founded during the Rembrandt tricentennial celebrations of 1969, became the most public of art historical endeavors. Its stated goal was to determine once and for all what the master painted and which pictures should be relegated to students, followers, and modern pasticheurs. The publication of its first three volumes (in 1982, 1984, and 1989) occasioned heated discussions about its methods and, in the press, about its power to make or break the value of paintings confirmed or rejected as Rembrandts. (3) Almost immediately, the methodological discussion in professional journals and conferences became narrowly focused on the project's system. Could its five Dutch members be trusted to come up with a more compelling consensus than connoisseurs working singly? Why did they initially not publish any, and later only few, color photographs? How could X radiography, autoradiography, pigment investigation, and handwriting analysis contribute to such a subjective practice as connoisseurship? Were the Rembrandt Research Project's soporific descriptions of what the team members saw (in different combinations for individual paintings) necessary to the presentation of the evidence of technical and provenance studies? And, most controversially, why did the Rembrandt team insist on classifying paintings as A (by Rembrandt), B (the team cannot tell if it is by Rembrandt or not), or C (not by Rembrandt), without ever considering a category D (by Rembrandt with the assistance of others), which would have been expected for virtually all other seventeenth-century artists? (4) These debates begged the more fundamental question of why such a protracted and resource-draining project, which limited the possibilities for other advanced art historical research in the Netherlands, should have been funded at all. (5)

In Netherlandish art history of the 1970s and 1980s, methodologically diverse attacks on the old art historical regime were levied at two primary targets: a connoisseurship narrowly concerned with the establishment of verifiable catalogues raisonnes for individual artists and an iconography that located the contextual meaning of paintings underneath or beyond their realist surfaces, often imputing moralizing intention to the works. These issues were debated around or against two landmark enterprises: the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings being defined by the Rembrandt Research Project and the interpretation of schijnrealisme (apparent realism) in genre and still-life painting by Eddy de Jongh and numerous scholars indebted to his work. Although the historiography of early modern art in the southern Netherlands did not experience such heated challenges, it, too, underwent critical revisions in this period, discussed in the next section.

There are several ways of considering this problem. One could argue disciplinary need as the immediate justification. In 1969 Rembrandt's production stood as an obfuscating mass of more than six hundred works by him and by his pupils, followers, and forgers, reproduced in grainy black and white illustrations and gathered in the standard catalogues of Rembrandt works by Wilhelm von Bode and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1896--1907), Abraham Bredius (1935), and Horst Gerson (revised edition of Bredius, 1969). Without greater clarity, the interpretation of Rembrandt's historical significance could hardly proceed. Even if the consensual opinions of the Rembrandt team might be challenged, at least the evidence needed for contestation would be gathered in one place. So far, the project's energetic consultation of X radiographs and other technological evidence has tested those new investigative tools on a consistent body of work and unearthed much new information about seventeenth-century studio practices and Rembran dt's adoption of or resistance to them. Ernst van de Wetering and Josua Bruyn, in particular, were able to advance new models of workshop structure and insights into Rembrandt's working methods, and these benefits could only have resulted from the sustained research made possible by the project. (6)