Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt

Description

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked h

Marisa Anne Bass is associate professor of the history of art at Yale University. She is the author of Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton). She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

"Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Art and Music History, Sixteenth Century Society and Conference" "[Bass'] study beds the manuscripts in early-modern empiricism, and beautifully complements the plates-a jewel box of exquisitely rendered sunfish, chameleons, bees, an Indian elephant and more."---Barb Kiser, Nature "****" * De Volkskrant * "[Insect Artifice] brilliantly brings [the] various facets of the depiction of insects together, in a study of the polymath and artist Joris Hoefnagel."---Kathryn Murphy, Apollo "Bass brings vast learning, remarkable facility with classical texts and meticulous first-hand analysis of the volumes in Washington to bear on her interpretation of Hoefnagel's artifice. . . . This is a nuanced study, hovering between critical biography and wider intellectual and artistic history, of an easily overlooked sixteenth-century master. Bass has eloquently channelled Hoefnagel's message - relevant to our own time - that small things do matter."---Albert Godycki, Burlington Magazine "This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely printed book offers a poetic reading of the Four Elements manuscripts."---Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Nuncius "Bass provides an ideal, humanist reading of Hoefnagel's oeuvre, positing the painter in opposition to the world of sixteenth-century court culture. . . . Insect Artifice is a magnificently illustrated, erudite, and profoundly insightful book. It offers an original and provocative interpretation of how Hoefnagel relied on art to remedy the wounds that the Dutch Revolt had inflicted upon him."---Daniel Margocsy, CAA Reviews