Tales of the City

Tales of the City by Emily J. Peters and Laura Ritter offers an innovative examination of sixteenth-century Netherlandish drawing against the backdrop of the urban economic boom, the Protestant Reformation, and the Eighty Years’ War.

Featuring works by renowned artists such as Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), Jan Gossaert (c. 1478–1532), Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569), Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), and others, this book positions drawing in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century as a dynamic, multifaceted practice.

Drawings served varied roles depending on the artists: they were designs for prints, paintings, stained glass windows, decorative objects, and tapestries. They also acted as tools for presentation, translation, and the display of knowledge and virtuosity. The artists' diversified urban communities and the shifting cultural and political circumstances of the Protestant Reform and the Eighty Years’ War shaped their drawing practices.

In addition to the book’s four illuminating essays, many of the more than eighty catalogue entries—selected from the holdings of The Albertina Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art—present new research.