This book analyses the sources, editions, and reception of Franciscus Junius’s 'The Painting of the Ancients' and charts how ideas about Northern European painting, from Van Dyck to Rembrandt, developed as a counterweight to the Italian tradition. Thus Junius’s language of art appears to be related to his seminal work in the field of Germanic linguistics and his discovery of the shared pre-Christian civilization of Holland and England. Junius’s innovative pairing of scholarship to the painter’s practice illuminates the reception of antiquity and the creation of an Anglo-Dutch artistic Arcadia.
Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain. The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591-1677).

Thijs Weststeijn

• Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015
• ISBN: 978 90 042 8361 9