Art and the culture of love in seventeenth-century Holland

by H. Rodney Nevitt

"Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland examines pictorial subjects and artists that have never been considered together and that collectively describe an important nexus of related themes in Dutch art of the Golden Age. Nevitt offers close readings of paintings and prints of "garden parties," merry companies, courting couples, and even landscape etchings with amorous references, taking seriously both the moral and the celebratory aspects of these images. Placing the works in the context of a contemporary culture of love, which manifested itself in the social practices of courtship and in a variety of amatory texts, he shows how certain pictorial traditions both reflected and shaped the experience of love."--Jacket.