The five articles in this first issue of 2016 are distributed across the range of fields, media, and approaches which JHNA has defined as its purview.
Kathryn Rudy provides a captivating new approach to late medieval prayer books in her study of the Christocentric metallic objects that late medieval Christians sewed into their books of hours. These Eucharist badges, as she identifies them here, turned books into shrines for storing the body of Christ.
John Decker investigates the Amsterdam Holy Kinship, bringing a new perspective to this well-known late 15th-century panel, specifically in the context of the Johanniter order in Haarlem.
Christine Seidel and Sophie Scully examine the materials and technique of Justus van Ghent’s Adoration of the Magi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They use technical research to situate this rare tüchlein – a canvas painted in distemper — within the group of works directly associated with the artist.
Denis Ribouillault’s essay on Karel van Mander’s famous anecdote about Pieter Bruegel the Elder regurgitating the Alps increases our understanding of the ways that artist thematized vomiting and defecation in relation to the imitation of nature. In engaging the links between art and humanist literary sources, it sheds light on the approaches taken by 16th-century Flemish artists toward vulgar subject matter and nature.
Linda Stone-Ferrier focuses on how Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch cleverly traded on the viewer’s experience as an inquisitive, neighborhood passerby in front of a household window where goldfinches frequently appeared. The essay provides a new approach to understanding this celebrated trompe l’oeil panel as well asdiscussing what “neighborhood” meant to seventeenth-century Dutch viewers.
Looking ahead, the next issue of JHNA will be guest-edited by Stijn Bussels, Leiden University, and Bram van Oostveldt, University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. On the sublime in seventeenth-century Netherlandish art, the anthology will include studies by ten senior and emerging scholars on how the Longian sublime translated to the visual arts as early as the Netherlandish Golden Age. Another special issue comprising numerous essays will be published in late 2016 or early 2017 dedicated to the late Walter Liedtke (1945 – 2015), Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Walter was a renowned scholar of Dutch and Flemish art and a founding member of HNA. As noted in several of our recent Editors Greetings, we hope in future to attract more research that makes central use of digital technology as a mode of inquiry. We urge scholars to submit articles that realize the full potential of the online platform. Already in this issue, JHNA is able to take advantage of the digital medium by including in an article such as Rudy’s no fewer than 84 high quality color images. This leads us to congratulate the editors of the newest and most ambitious refereed, open source, online journal, British Art Studies (http://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/), which published its first issue in December 2015. With the support of the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale Center for British Art, British Art Studies is positioned to raise the profile of web-based publishing in art history. JHNA will be one of the beneficiaries.
We want to acknowledge again the excellent work of our copy editor, Cindy Edwards, as well as that of our managing editor Heidi Eyestone, Visual Resources Librarian of Carleton College. Heidi’s generous aid with images, uploading, and much else connected with this issue, and her long-range planning, technical expertise, and commitment have made her an indispensable colleague. Additional technical assistance by Qimeng Wu, Florence Wong, and Megan Gleason is also gratefully acknowledged. Carleton librarians Kristin Partlo and Matt Bailey have provided helpful counsel. We wish to thank our webmaster Russ Coon for his numerous and significant efforts on behalf of JHNA. For financial support, we thank Carleton College.
We encourage you to consider JHNA as a venue for your own publications. With your help, JHNA is becoming one of the premier journals of the early modern art of the Netherlands and its region. The next formal deadline for submission of articles is March 1, 2016 (for publication in 2017 or 2018), although we welcome submissions at any time.
Alison M. Kettering, Carleton College, Editor-in-Chief
Dagmar Eichberger, Universität Trier and Universität Heidelberg, Associate Editor
Mark Trowbridge, Marymount University, Associate Editor