Martial arts: Military themes and images in Dutch art of the Golden Age.

Abstract

Martial matters were crucial for the seventeenth-century Dutch. Faced with a war for independence and only limited resources with which to wage it, the United Provinces enacted a series of dramatic, spectacularly effective military reforms. At the local level, these reforms reorganized the old, medieval militia guilds into modern civic militias, to which nearly all able-bodied Dutch men belonged. At the national level, the Dutch effected what historians have termed a military revolution, making The Netherlands the training ground for Europe's military leaders. In spite of this well-known military history, our twentieth-century ideas of the seventeenth-century Dutch lean decidedly toward the domestic, in part because of the many images of domestic comfort and bourgeois pride which seem to characterize Dutch painting. Yet even a cursory survey of the imagery reveals that military themes are plentiful and assume many guises throughout the range of Dutch painting. They appear in sea-battles and militia portraits, in guard-room scenes and still-lives, in prints, in paintings, in stained glass, in tapestry. Why is it that martial themes have escaped art-historical attention, and what can these images tell us about Dutch art and society? This dissertation pursues these questions on two fronts. First, it considers the significance of generic categories in the art historical study of Dutch painting and their role in masking the pervasive presence of military subjects and themes in Dutch art. Second, it investigates a selection of martial images to discover in what ways their martial elements have been naturalized, as well as some of the social and political ends to which these images could be deployed. To this end, it considers how popular images of the revolt, presented in topographical form and promulgated as truthful accounts of important events, became powerful purveyors of historical identities. Next, it examines pictures of men in different martial roles, investigating low different pictorial formats served to identify and delineate the parameters of masculine civic behavior. Finally, it explores the resonance of martial tropes in the studio for artists striving to represent the aims and value of art. Attending to both the historical and historiographic questions raised by these pictures, this study argues that the varied guises of Dutch martial imagery bear out the power and versatility of the Netherlandish construction of pictorial genre in Dutch society of the golden age.