3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

How did artists define their identity in the era before fixed “nationalities” and set geographies? This course investigates the art and personalities of the many Netherlandish painters, sculptors, printmakers, and craftsmen who moved and migrated across early modern Europe, finding work and fortune in cities from Rome to London, and Madrid to Stockholm. Their mobility, as the Florentine merchant Lodovico Guicciardini remarked in 1567, was “something no less wonderful than honorable.” But the reasons behind the unprecedented migrations of Dutch and Flemish artists from the Low Countries from c.1550 to 1700 were complex and varied. Many artists were driven by the political and religious turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, while others sought economic and professional opportunities abroad. While some artists undertook short-term migrations, others left their native soil permanently. How did artists adjust to new cultures, languages, and religious traditions? What strategies did they use to succeed in their new homes? And how did their mobility ultimately affect their artistic practice? Taking a wide and critical view, the course provides a framework for examining the full range of motivations, how artists navigated new artistic, cultural, social, and religious contexts, and how artistic identity itself emerges from a relationship to place beyond one’s own.