This important monographic survey posits that early modern Scandinavia from the mid-sixteenth through the turn of the eighteenth century was an integral and essential part of Central and greater Europe. The book, which is furnished with extensive bibliography and index, sixty-five black-and-white illustrations, fifteen color plates, and two historical maps, offers a valuable contribution from an art historical perspective to the recent upswing of publications across fields in historical studies that undertake to de-Westernize and further connect isolated regional histories of Europe and the wider premodern world.
The monograph's imperative is located at the intersection of dynamic tensions that persist in the state of the question. On the one hand, burgeoning scholarship on the period productively problematizes lingering questions of cultural transformations and conventional paradigms such as center-periphery among scholars specializing in the history of Central and Northern Europe. On the other, a growing body of scholarship explores the crucial historical role of the pre-Soviet Nordic-Baltic region as one of the world's most integrated maritime spaces that functioned as a vital borderland and facilitated the migration and mingling of artists, styles, techniques, and materials from the region and beyond. Nevertheless, in the anglophone scholarship, the art and architecture in boreal borderlands during the period before the Soviet Eastern Bloc represents a veritable terra incognita. For most, the Renaissance ends just north of the forty-eighth parallel. This book persuasively argues that we should be looking further north if we are to gain an accurate understanding of the early modern world; in so doing, it also goes a long way to developing adaptable methodological models and inflecting broader questions across fields of how the study of historical borderland territories is vital to interpreting and theorizing trans- and cross-cultural exchange.
Neville's ambitious yet accessible study deftly maps the visual arts across media, covering the period from the advent of the Reformation to Sweden's decline as a major power, and sites both within the historical territories associated with the Danish and Swedish kingdoms, which constitute the book's primary geographic purview, and further outward, casting an ever-widening net over interconnecting patrons, monuments, and artworks across present-day Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Sweden. The approach, undergirded by an impressive, unostentatious combination of multilingualism, extensive field research (no less than twenty-five illustrations of various monuments are the author's own photographs), and wide-ranging command of historiographies and bibliographies hitherto largely isolated by nationalist paradigms, does much to provide new insights into the vibrant cosmopolitan and polycentric nature of the early modern boreal courtly milieu. That this combination of capacious synthesis and original perception resonates throughout individual chapters speaks to the book's utility and significance for a broad readership, including art historians and scholars from other historical disciplines with an interest in early modern history and culture (particularly court studies). Importantly, and much to its credit, this survey should become an essential addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate curriculum in history, architecture, and the arts.
Chapters proceed according to a subtly effective topical-chronological schema. A historiographic and methodological introduction is followed by seven chapters taking up antiquarian culture and Gothicism in the far north, Lutheran reforms and religio-political built and visual culture (especially princely chapels and tombs), and court commissions in a range of media under Danish King Frederik II, his successor Christian IV, aristocrats in neighboring rival Sweden, Swedish queens Christina and Hedwig Eleonora, and King Carl XI (including a Viennese interlude), all followed by an epilogue on nineteenth-century Romanticism. Neville presents a panorama of the northern kingdoms and their leading roles in the larger region that is decentralized and non- (even anti-) canonical in the broadest productive sense. In addition to the geographic expansiveness mentioned above, while chapters focus predominantly on palatial architecture, drawing on Neville's expertise in architectural history, overall the volume reveals a largely undiscovered diversity of peripatetic artists, artworks, and media, including ample treatment of painting and sculpture together with the less canonical, such as terra-cotta and tapestries, hydraulics and gardens, and prints and drawings (though the latter serve largely to illustrate architectural designs), as well as topics such as the history of collecting and antiquarianism.
Chapters covering better-known works and artists, ostensibly familiar and even well-trodden material, approach them from a new perspective, resituating them within new contexts. The case studies collectively not only emphasize the fundamentally decentered nature and staccato rhythm of most early modern artistic production (contributing to ongoing discourse about questions of canonicity) but also contribute to recent, much-needed recalibrations gauging “the demarcation between substantive cultural exchange and the sorts of movements and negotiations that were routine within any society,” thereby underscoring a central thesis of the book: that a survey such as this “is not a cross-cultural study because the regions under discussion were all part of a larger, substantially coherent culture” (12).
