Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art

aw_product_id: 
40641109316
merchant_image_url: 
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
23.99
book_author_name: 
Caroline Fowler
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
Duke University Press
published_date: 
07/01/2025
isbn: 
9781478031321
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Art, Fashion & Photography > Art & design > Art & design styles / history of art > Art: 1600 to 1800
specifications: 
Caroline Fowler|Paperback|Duke University Press|07/01/2025
Merchant Product Id: 
9781478031321
Book Description: 
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.

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