Painting & the market in early modern Antwerp /

For readers in an age when art can be purchased as well as admired online, Honig makes a strong case that Flemish painting from the mid-16th to the early 17th centuries already showed how entwined were social and aesthetic values with market practice. The study rests on the firm premise that the emergence of market scenes in the works of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer in the 1550s and '60s reflects not just an interest in that aspect of everyday life or the rise of capitalism in itself but nothing less than an organizing principle of society. Like merchants, the author argues, these paintings function as go-betweens and result in what she calls an aesthetic of exchange: "The allure of representation is the allure of the commodity." And like the merchant, the beholder must determine value on his own. Although the market scene remains prominent in painting from the Rubens generation, there are new terms of engagement between painting and viewer, terms that address not the merchant but the connoisseur. For serious students of Netherlandish painting, this is a topical and provocative study not to be missed. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. C. W. Talbot; Trinity University