Overview

This volume examines failure as a productive category in early modern Netherlandish art, demonstrating how error, risk, and defeat shaped artistic practice and cultural imagination. Rather than treating failure as a marginal or negative phenomenon, the contributions reveal its capacity to generate innovation, provoke reflection, and question narratives of success. The book challenges triumphalist models of art history. It offers instead a recursive historiography that highlights the creative and cultural potential of failure. Contributors include Koen Bulckens, Stijn Bussels, Marianne Eekhout, Nicole Ganbold, Hanneke Grootenboer, Joost Keizer, Marte Sophie Meessen, Braden Lee Scott, Natasha Seaman, Laura Valterio, Minke Walda, and Clim Wijnands.

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9789004758339

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Author Information

Stijn Bussels is Professor of Art History at the Leiden University. His research concentrates on visual culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Low Countries, a recent publication is The Sublime in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic with Bram Van Oostveldt (2023). Hanneke Grootenboer is Professor of Early Modern Art and Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a specialist in 17th century Dutch art. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of art, philosophy and literature. Recent publications include The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago University Press, 2021) and the co-authored Conchophilia: Shells, Art and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021). Joost Keizer is Professor of Art History at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published on the relationship between art, nature, and history in Italian and Netherlandish culture, including Leonardo’s Paradox: Word and Image In the Making of Renaissance Culture and the co-edited Wetland. Shaping Environments in Netherlandish Art. Natasha Seaman is Professor of Art History at Rhode Island College. She has published on Gerrit van Honthorst, Jacob Backer, and the semiotics of money. Her next book, Hendrick ter Brugghen: Utrecht’s Subtle Artist, is forthcoming with Lund Humphries Press in 2026.

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