Genre painters produced tavern scenes, market scenes, and kitchens. Some painters of still lives specialized in flowers and others in “Vanitas” paintings in which objects such as hourglasses, clocks, and newspapers showing their date of publication all emphasized the brevity of human life. Seascapes and townscapes appeared alongside landscapes. As the division of labor increased, these genres came to be subdivided. In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, for instance, many artists responded to it by what economists call “product differentiation.” Different artists specialized in different subject matter-landscapes, portraits, still lives, and various “genre” paintings. 15 The Rise of the Art MarketĬompetition is an essential element in the market system. Others employ modern theories of propaganda to analyze the function of the images produced by or for the Jesuit order. Some studies tackle the controversial question of the distinctiveness of their contribution to the art of the Counter-Reformation. Particular attention has been paid to the role of Jesuits both as patrons and occasionally as artists. Gruzinski, a historian of Latin America, wrote several books about the history of images, primarily in colonial Mexico, and what he calls the “image war” waged by Catholic missionaries, who destroyed what they called the “idols” of indigenous gods (iconoclasm was not confined to Protestants) and replaced them with images of Catholic saints. De Maio, for instance, produced two case studies of Counter-Reformation art, one on Michelangelo and the other on Naples. Later scholars took up the mantle of Mâle’s pioneering work. On the Catholic side, Emile Mâle’s L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932) had already identified changes in religious iconography and placed them in the context of the Counter-Reformation. Despite the reference to “popular imagery” in his title, Moxey was hostile to descriptions of these woodcuts as “folk art” or as a “mass medium.” Like Scribner, he viewed these images as part of a campaign by elites to persuade ordinary people to support what we call the Reformation. A few years later, the art historian Keith Moxey produced a complementary study also focused on cheap German woodcuts of the early sixteenth century. Scribner studied cheap prints that vividly contrasted the poverty and humility of Christ with the greed and arrogance of the pope, and (ironically enough) presented Luther as a saint with a halo at a time when Luther and other Protestant leaders were trying to do away with the cult of saints. For example, the historian Scribner turned to the study of images as a means to discover popular attitudes regarding the Lutheran Reformation, which occurred at a time when most Germans-the “simple folk,” as Luther called them- could not read. The study of sixteenth-century art as a means of religious persuasion or propaganda also came to prominence during the 1980s. Scholars from other disciplines or outside the academic world altogether have sometimes joined in the conversation-for instance, Barrell (English literature), Montias (economics), Alsop (journalism), Kempers (sociology), Gell (anthropology), and Matless (geography). More often, essays by historians and art historians appear side by side in collective volumes such as the special issue of the JIH entitled “Art and History” (1986), published in book form two years later, or the special issue of the journal Art History (2018) devoted to “Art and Religious Reform.” The latter volume revealed, according to one of its editors, “how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become.” Conferences have encouraged the dialogue between the two disciplines. For example, Brown, a historian of Spanish painting, and Elliott, a historian of early modern Spain, collaborated on a book about the seventeenth-century Spanish palace of the Buen Retiro, viewing it as a case study in “the complex relationship of art and politics” and aiming at a “total” history of both the construction and the “first occupation” of the palace in the 1630s. On occasion, individuals from the two disciplines have worked together, reducing the risks that are often involved in frontier crossings.
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