The Sides of the North is dedicated to Yona Pinson’s extensive scholarly work on Northern Renaissance art, from Hieronymus Bosch’s and Peter Breughel’s oeuvre, through lessons of morality, the Fool’s imagery, gender problems in the representation of the “femme fatale” bourgeois seductress, to emblem studies, and up to her most recent project on “Mirror, Moralization and Irony” in Bosch’s painting. In tribute to her research, this volume offers new insights into her fields of interest from a number of leading scholars in these disciplines. Larry Silver reconstructs a recently found Adoration of the Magi Triptych by Bosch, while Mara R. Wade, Michael J. Giordano and Kathryn M. Rudy discuss aspects of self-fashioning through portraiture, emblem books, and manuscripts and their spiritual and performative qualities. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Liad Rinot delve into problems of marginality in Gothic sculpture, as well as in Robert Campain’s and Jan van Eyck’s paintings. Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes, Ruth Strauss and Juliette Roding explore the topic of artistic identities and intentionalism, and political ideologies in various media, such as in small-scale sculptures and paintings. Just as Yona Pinson’s research diversified from iconographical studies to post-modern reflections on such issues as marginality and folly, this anthology presents a broad spectrum not only of the diverse topics, genres, and media of Northern Renaissance art, but also, and particularly, an overview of the methodological range of art scholarship of recent decades, thus offering readers insights into the intricate sides of contemporary Netherlandish visual culture.
