The 'Small Landscape' Prints in Early Modern Netherlands

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources - including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs - Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

Alexandra Onuf is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Hartford, USA.

Table of Contents Cover Image List of Color Plates List of Figures List of Abbreviations List of Permissions Acknowledgments Introduction: Reading the Small Landscapes 1. Publication Drawings into Prints The Small Landscape Prints "Gheconterfeyt naer dleven": Pictorial Truth and the Small Landscapes The Cartographic Connection The Landscapes of Hieronymus Cock Ruined Landscapes World Landscapes in Print Landscapes after Pieter Bruegel and Hans Bol Hieronymus Cock and Varietas in Landscape Innovation in the Small Landscapes 2. Reception Cock's Elite Patrons and Supporters Audiences for the Small Landscapes at Home and Abroad Antwerp's Hinterlands Urban Ties to Rural Property The Speelhuis Phenomenon Praise of the Country House and the Country Life The Landjuweel of 1561: Propaganda and the Popular Perception of Country Life Rural Countryside as Cultural Ideal 3. Repetition Antwerp, Crisis and Recovery Philips Galle's 1601 edition of the Small Landscapes Theodoor Galle's Third Edition of the Small Landscapes "In Pictorum Gratiam": The Small Landscapes as Models for Painters in Antwerp Prints and Painters I: Abel Grimmer Prints and Painters II: Pieter Brueghel the Younger The Small Landscapes Renewed and The Local Landscape Recast 4. Migration Claes Visscher at the Sign of the Fisher Visscher's Copies of the Small Landscapes Picturing Brabant in Amsterdam Brabant and Holland: Visscher's Visual Analogy 5. Transformation Johannes Galle and the Business of Reproductive Print Publishing Old Landscapes in a New Style Importing Narrative into Landscape Landscapes of their Time: The End of the Twelve Years' Truce The Small Landscapes Redux Appendix I: Grouping of the 1559 and 1561 Small Landscapes series Appendix II: Concordance of editions of the Small Landscapes Bibliography Index