Recent Release: Plaster Casts in the Life and Art of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters
September 25 2025
Picture: brill.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Earlier this summer Brill published Volume 18 of their Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History dedicated to the subject of Plaster Casts in the Life and Art of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters. This volume was penned by Isabella Lores-Chavez.
According to the blurb:
In the early modern Dutch Republic, plaster casts offered artists a way to overcome limitations of space and time, and to define themselves. This book presents the first comprehensive account of the impact of plaster casts on the artistic practice, intellectual endeavors, and social status of seventeenth-century Dutch painters.
These modest objects were, in fact, real works of sculpture, incorporated into a variety of compositions where they signalled an artist’s ambitions and technical virtuosity. Marginalized in the history of Dutch art, plaster casts lie at the center of this study’s novel interpretations of paintings and drawings, paired with period sources.
