In her book Art on Paper, art historian Tamar Cholcman (Tel Aviv University) focuses on one of the most fascinating joyous entries of the late seventeenth century: the entry of Albert and (more particularly) Isabella into Antwerp in December 1599. Albert had already made his entry into the city some years before, but now his wife also had to be welcomed and inaugurated in a series of ceremonies in which the city government publicly expressed its wish that the Spanish monarch would grant sufficient power to her, and her husband, to govern the Netherlands in a quasi-autonomous fashion and restore peace after far too many years of war.

The book is a beautiful and interesting addition to the research into joyous entries, not least because the existing published studies are almost all in Dutch, and because the festival book that originally committed the entry to memory was written in Latin. These factors do much to account for the fact that this entry has not yet had the international attention it deserves. Cholcman’s stringent reading and analysis of the Antwerp festivities of December 1599 is a most welcome step toward rectifying this neglect. Moreover, in her analysis of the entry, Cholcman gives us a clear view of the cultural and historical potency of this event. With an unerring sense of detail, she points her reader to the role of the humanist city secretary, Johannes Bochius, as the chief organizer of the entry and author of the festival book (chapter 2), as well as to the importance of the entry in terms of civic politics (chapter 3) and the politic role that the city attributes to Isabella (chapter 4). Finally, the author looks at the influence of and on other entries, particularly that of the Lisbon entry of Philip III (chapter 5). As interesting as these analyses are, I miss a comparison with other entries in the Netherlands, and more particularly the entries of Albert and Isabella in Brussels, Ghent, and Valencienne, which Bochius discusses, together with the Antwerp entry, in one festival book. I also feel that a dialogue with the existing Dutch studies of scholars such as Hugo Soly, Edmond Geudens, and Irmengard von Roeder-Baumbach, among others, is lacking.

Cholcman links her discussion of the Antwerp entry of Albert and Isabella with an inquiry into the relations between actual entries and festival books (mostly in the introduction, chapter 2, and the epilogue). Thus the author’s interest can be related to the recent research programs of other scholars, including Ronnie Mulryne, Maarten Delbeke, and Ralph Deconinck. To deal with these relations, Cholcman falls back on art- and literary-historical methods. At the very start of the book, she relates the ephemeral character of joyous entries to the lost painting of Medusa by Leonardo (not so illuminating for me) and refers to the rich tradition of ekphrasis as a framework for understanding the machination to eternalize the entries.

These art- and literary-historical methods are fruitful, and develop possibilities for further research; however, they could be reinforced by other research methods, as there are memory studies that might prove illuminating to a reader of the festival book, bringing the entry back to life in his or her mind (in the early modern period humanists discussed this in terms of loci et imagines, phantasia, and enargeia). Additionally, the rich field of bibliology could relate Cholcman’s research to the fascinating late seventeenth-century developments in the printing of books. Finally, performance studies could be involved. This discipline has released thinking about art from its fixed frame of longing for eternity, and connected art, theater, and diverse forms of religious and political spectacle to anthropological analyses of non-Western rituals and their remembrance.

More than enough possibilities to go further on the path that Cholcman has followed thus present themselves. She has made some important steps toward a better understanding of late seventeenth-century entries in the Netherlands, and it is to be hoped that researchers from other disciplines will use her study to give us even more insight into a fascinating subject for further cultural-historical analysis.