"Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) was a Flemish Baroque painter whose work has largely been overshadowed by his contemporaries Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Providing new insight on the artist as well as art historical context for his works, Jacob Jordaens and Antiquity emphasizes his strategic intelligence with respect to imagery and the art market and challenges the common characterization of Jordaens as a bourgeois artist of genre scenes. Jordaens's work is examined as an example of classical culture being introduced into the commercial and intellectual life of Antwerp. He was an artist with an unusual talent for conveying imagery from classical literature, ranging from Satyr and Peasant to Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man. Focusing on the theme of antiquity, this volume features eighty paintings, drawings, tapestries, and sculptures from private collections and major museums, including the Museo Nacional del Prado in Spain and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Denmark."--Publisher's website.

"This book is divided into two parts, the first comprises two chapters dealing with Karol Lanchkoronski and the fate of his collection, as well as wedding rituals in Renaissance Italy and the history of domestic painting. The second part, consisting of eight chapters, discusses the cassone panels and paintings derving from day beds--lettucci--and panelling of the walls--spalliere."--Back cover.

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre's place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated 'slices of life,' describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre's deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre's multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1859.