A Violent Imagination Printed Images Of Violence In The Dutch Republic 16501700 Michel Van Duijnen by Michel Van Duijnen instant download after payment.

The late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic is famed for its production of printed images. In the course of the second half of the seventeenth-century, a number of Dutch publishers and printmakers started to invest themselves in the production of lavishly illustrated ‘coffee table’ books. For this purpose, they turned unillustrated French, German, and English works into extensively illustrated Dutch translations filled with large and newly designed etchings. They revisited successful works produced earlier in the seventeenth-century, such as martyr books and histories on the Eighty Years’ War, producing new images for old texts. Effectively, the Dutch Republic, and Amsterdam in particular, was one of the most important European production centres of printed images, spewing out an enormous amount of high quality etchings and engravings dealing with all manner of subjects: from biblical histories to world-spanning chronicles, and from medical atlases to fantastical travel journals.
In this wide variety of printed images produced in the Dutch Republic, explicit violence was a prominent and recurring theme. As has been noted by many historians and art historians, violence was central to the work of the two most productive and influential printmakers from the late seventeenth-century: Romeyn de Hooghe and Jan Luyken. At the same time, many of these violent prints remain unstudied. Historians have mostly treated violent images as subsidiaries to religious or political conflict, reading them in the light of contemporary troubles. In the case of Romeyn de Hooghe, most attention has been paid to his works on the Disaster Year of 1672, which focus on the violent behaviour of the invading French troops as well as the gruesome lynching of the brothers De Witt by an Orangist mob. Jan Luyken’s many violent images have been almost completely reduced to a narrow Mennonite religious reading of his 104 prints for the 1685 edition of the Mennonite martyrology Het bloedig tooneel,…