Department of Art History

This seminar aims to investigate the remarkable emergence in early modern Europe of paintings that purport to show not stories from the Bible or mythology but scenes of the everyday. We will trace the origins of this phenomenon back to fifteenth-century Northern Europe, but the real focus of our sessions will be on how genre painting as this is problematically called developed in parallel in various parts of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Italy, Spain, France, and, especially, the Netherlands.