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Envisioning the Threshold: Pictorial Disjunction in Maarten de Vos

Rosenblatt, Ivana M
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3769-9460
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1440085327

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History of Art.
Maarten de Vos was the preeminent painter in Antwerp from 1560 to 1600. At a time when debate raged over the function of religious images and many advocated their destruction, he produced hundreds of paintings for both Protestant and Catholic patrons and designed over a thousand prints that were disseminated throughout Europe. This body of work includes numerous prestigious altarpieces, as well as the only Protestant chapel from the sixteenth century whose complete pictorial program has survived. Despite this popularity, the serious and innovative character of de Vos's work has gone unrecognized by modern scholars, who have judged his art eclectic and derivative. My dissertation aims to redress this failure by focusing precisely on de Vos's idiosyncrasies, above all, his unprecedented deployment of pictorially devices that disrupt the illusionism and coherence of his compositions, creating a pictorially disjunctive image. Exploring these devices---from his depiction of architectural ruins with marginal figures to the proliferation of globes, doorways, oculi, and arches in his works---I show that de Vos conceived of the sacred image as a liminal object. In other words, he produced religious art, used in prayer and church ritual, that emphasized the role images played in mediating between the physical world of the viewer and the spiritual divine. I also demonstrate that de Vos actively sought to convey this liminality through his art, encouraging his viewers to become consciously aware of the image's mediating function. Connecting the artist's work to the written debates on religious imagery that proliferated in Antwerp following the Protestant Reformation and the mass destruction and removal of religious art in the 1566 and 1581 Antwerp iconoclasms, I argue that de Vos's work participated in an innovative rethinking of the ways that images structured the viewer's spiritual encounter with an unseen and inherently invisible divine. My project demonstrates that, far from being meaningless personal quirks, the visual disjunctions in de Vos's art reveal a self-conscious and highly sophisticated, if wholly pictorial, theorization of religious images that coincided with the articulation of similar ideas in written art theory and anticipated the critical self-awareness of seventeenth-century artistic practices.
Barbara Haeger (Advisor)
Christian Kleinbub (Committee Member)
Karl Whittington (Committee Member)
464 p.
Art History
Maarten de Vos; Netherlandish Art; Sixteenth Century; Baroque; Prints and Drawings; Pictorial Disjunction; Visuality

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Rosenblatt, I. M. (2015). Envisioning the Threshold: Pictorial Disjunction in Maarten de Vos [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1440085327

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Rosenblatt, Ivana. Envisioning the Threshold: Pictorial Disjunction in Maarten de Vos. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1440085327.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Rosenblatt, Ivana. "Envisioning the Threshold: Pictorial Disjunction in Maarten de Vos." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1440085327

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1440085327
118
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.