Training a studied, focused eye on over one hundred drawings executed during the so-called Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, works on paper specialist Victoria Sancho Lobis refreshingly proffers a different breed of drawings catalogue in this recent contribution. Forgoing traditional catalogue entries, Lobis constructs a functional portrait of early modern Northern drawings practice through a series of essays highlighting key graphic intentions and specializations of the period, illustrated in and through the Art Institute of Chicago's (AIC) rich permanent collection. These sheets include exceptional drawings by Rubens and Rembrandt; biblical, mythological, anatomical, landscape, and still-life compositions by well-known draftsmen such as Abraham Bloemaert and Marten van Heemskerck; and works by lesser-known figures such as Herman Henstenburgh and Godfried Maes, some of which (like the latter's harrowing Head of Medusa [1680]; cat. no. 111) can be revelations all over again.
Lobis's focus on the intersections of graphic style, subject matter, and expressive function situates her work within a growing body of research in recent decades by curators and art historians who have increasingly sought to reevaluate early modern European drawings largely on their own terms. Each of her chapters investigates a different artistic motivation driving the look and content— and, ultimately, the independent valuing—of drawings in and around seventeenth-century Antwerp and Amsterdam. Key considerations include the preparatory and pedagogical roles that drawings played in local workshops, engagements with Italy and the classical past, and emerging concerns for drawing after the live model, especially in Rembrandt's circle. Other chapters highlight Italianate humanist approaches to drawing as indexes of artistic imagination, the relationship of drawings to the sister arts of painting and printing, and the practice of independent, naer het leven (after life) landscape drawing, especially in Northern Europe after 1600.
Lobis's final essay addresses why Northern drawings were so widely collected and valued in their own day, especially given the growing importance of Italian humanist traditions of disegno (mental and manual design), individual signature styles, and a rising class of new art collectors and connoisseurs called liefhebbers in the early modern Lowlands. In this chapter, the author deftly demonstrates how a singular confluence of Northern and Italianate elements, combined with increasing specializations of art and a contemporary recognition of drawing as a high art form related to—but also independent from—the art of painting, paved the way for Netherlandish works on paper to become expressively and functionally more variegated into the seventeenth century. Given that this discussion so successfully contextualizes the historical relevance of graphic function and why Northern drawings were—and still should be—considered objects of unique value worthy of their own sustained attention, this discussion might have more effectively served as a framing introduction instead.
In light of these strengths, the volume curiously does not address the ways that individual sheets might also be viewed through multiple functional or expressive lenses, all at once. For example, Jordaens's chalk Nude Old Man Seated (ca. 1640; cat. no. 36)—featured in the live-model chapter—might also have rightly been discussed in emulative or rhetorical terms (given its clear relationship to Rubens's work), or in terms of a loose preparatory relationship to the artist's later Mercury, Argus, and Io canvas in Brussels. Similarly, Cornelis van Poelenburch's View of Tivoli with the Bridge over the Anio Waterfall (1620; cat. no. 89)—a drawing that comfortably resides in the independent landscape chapter—might have been examined for its classical and imaginative preoccupations too.
While the singular, functional focus of Lobis's chapters may thus serve to undermine her own fine point that drawings in the age of Rubens and Rembrandt embodied a range of important intents, this catalogue offers a fine jumping-off point for reflecting on the multiplicity of ways that Northern drawings and their makers moved and worked in the early modern world, and why both were so highly valued in their own day. Furthermore, the catalogue—bookended by a glossary of drawings terminology and an informative essay on papermaking and watermarks by the AIC's senior paper conservator, Antoinette Owen—underscores the striking potential of the museum's encyclopedic collection of Dutch and Flemish drawings to raise such important questions for historians of art and material culture, and modern liefhebbers, alike.
