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Larry Silver, Art and Dis-illusion in the Long Sixteenth Century (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 66), Leiden, Brill, 2023, 395 p., ISBN 978-90-04-50429-5

Oliver Kik

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/kikirpa/3619

DOI: 10.4000/127wi

ISSN: 2983-855X

**Publisher**

Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique - Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium

**Electronic reference**

Oliver Kik, "Larry Silver, Art and Dis-illusion in the Long Sixteenth Century (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 66), Leiden, Brill, 2023, 395 p., ISBN 978-90-04-50429-5", Bulletin de l'Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique / Bulletin van het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium [Online], 39 | 2024, Online since 01 September 2024, connection on 05 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/kikirpa/3619; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/127wi

This text was automatically generated on February 5, 2026.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
Larry Silver, Art and Dis-illusion in the
Long Sixteenth Century (Brill's Studies
on Art, Art History, and Intellectual
History, 66), Leiden, Brill, 2023, 395
p., ISBN 978-90-04-50429-5

Oliver Kik

REFERENCES

Larry Silver, Art and Dis-illusion in the Long Sixteenth Century (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 66), Leiden, Brill, 2023, 395 p., ISBN 978-90-04-50429-5
Testament iconography in Netherlandish art, such as Lucas Van Leyden, or Maarten van Heemskerck.

3

A dominant theme in Silver's book is the combined appeal and fear of the strange and foreign. Within European society the growing fascination for witchcraft, physical deformations and the devil (chapter 4), is a novel subject matter introduced in German (e.g. Dürer, Hans Baldung) and Netherlandish (e.g. Bosch, Van Oostsanen, Bruegel) art which also represents the loss of order. Silver finds the play with illusion key to understanding and contextualizing these images. The close northern European attention to human folly marks a turning point in the interest in the self and the oddness within oneself as explored in chapter 8. Fear and fascination for the foreign and strange is also a recurrent theme in northern European art when artists looked beyond the familiar borders, such as the developing imagery of the Ottoman Turks (chapter 6) in a time span ranging from the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet to Melchior Lorck, holding a tension between propagandistic, stereotypical imagery (e.g. Dürer) and an almost anthropological recording of exotic costumes and behaviours (e.g. Coecke van Aelst or Lorck). The same ambiguity, between assertion of European superiority and a fascination for the 'strangeness' is noticed in imagery emerging on the New World (chapter 7). The book ends with an insightful chapter (9) on Bruegel's art where the concept of vision and the balance between seeing and hiding is thus conveyed through a viewing process as a kind of scepticism and enforced humility (p. 287).

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In order convey his message one could argue that Silver perhaps constructs up too large a contrast between 'a formerly united European Christendom' and a period of turmoil and religious reform in the sixteenth century, too easily downplaying the cultural impact of previous major schisms and instability. Although the Great Chism of 1054 is briefly mentioned, the Western Schism with the papacy of Avignon, which had only ended in 1418, goes unmentioned. Nevertheless, the range of turmoil and changes occurring during the long sixteenth century had a profound impact on the developments of genres and iconography which can rightly be considered as a crucial paradigm shift. Silver's writing is a pleasure to read as he easily meanders between well-chosen Netherlandish and German examples, and allows for a dialogue with contemporary literary examples. Many of argument and point can be found in previous literature on genre painting, art and Reformation, Erasmian ideas on human folly, or the encounters between Western and 'foreign' cultures, not in the least in the author's own experienced scholarship, yet the book's strength lies in how these elements are combined and synthesized to render a new story. Seamlessly sowing all these research threads together, Silver created a fascinating new narrative, offering a fresh reading of northern European art from Dürer to Callot, which can inform both the well-informed scholar as well as the student unfamiliar to the period.
AUTHORS

OLIVER KIK