An alternative history of Renaissance art from a Netherlandish perspective and focusing on printed images.

Through his treatises, letters, and support of printmaking projects, Bruges-born humanist Dominicus Lampsonius (1532–1599) tested the limits of what it meant to be an artist in the early modern period. This book—the first monographic study of Lampsonius to appear in the English language—investigates the convergence of art history, aesthetics, cultural politics, and theology in Lampsonius’s writings, with a particular focus on his novel theory of the printed image as a work of art.

In Lampsonius’s art history, painting recedes and engraving comes to the fore. This inversion of traditional hierarchies entailed a remaking of the Renaissance image as a graphic and replicable phenomenon. Here was a new way of looking at the image: not as a painted likeness of the sacred or the world, but rather as a graphic representation formed from the attenuated patterns of the engraved surface. In both meaning and making, printed images deflected the threats of iconoclasm precisely because, as manufactured objects, they could never be confused for what they represented—the sacred “prototype” they explicitly did not resemble. Tracing Lampsonius’s evolving views against the religious, political, and cultural upheaval of the Dutch Revolt, Edward H. Wouk considers the lasting implications of his efforts to change the course of art history.