Re-Forming Mary in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints

Abstract

Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch artists portrayed the Virgin Mary in an impressively diverse and iconographically complex range of themes--particularly in the easily reproducible medium of prints. Despite the widespread belief that Marian art and devotion disappeared from the Calvinist-dominated Northern Netherlands after the Reformation, prints of Mary demonstrate that the Dutch continued to venerate her, including Roman Catholics and Protestants. While some Marian prints sustained conventional Catholic modes of piety, other images reinterpreted her in a secular context to accommodate the intellectual interests and devotional needs of multiconfessional audiences. The duality between the spiritual and earthly conceptions of Mary in prints echoed not only post-Reformation debates about her devotional role, but also cultural and scientific shifts in Dutch society as the Republic progressed into the modern, secular age. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on individual prints or print series that represent the themes and theological issues of post-Reformation Dutch Marian art. The first chapter examines Hendrick Goltzius's the Life of the Virgin series of 1593-94, and the appeal that Mary may have had for the artist's local Catholic and Calvinist audiences. The second chapter considers Magdalena van de Passe's print, Winter, from a series of the four seasons after designs by her father, Crispijn, which portrays a secular family that is evocative of the Holy Family. The third chapter analyzes a pilgrimage print depicting the Chapel of Our Lady of Need in Heiloo and the image's bearing on the revival of Catholicism in the early seventeenth century. The fourth chapter studies Rembrandt's deviations from traditional Marian iconography in his 1639 etching, the Death of the Virgin, and its representation of a doctor that signifies the developments of the Scientific Revolution and Cartesianism in the Dutch Republic.