Margaret Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe is a collection of six studies of familiar and lesser-known masterworks by Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, and Otto van Schrieck. The author skillfully elicits the various political aspects of these works, in terms of gender relations, marriage, social relations, governance, and philosophy; and does so for art objects spanning three centuries, made under and for widely differing circumstances. This range is one measure of Carroll’s erudition. Another is the tools she brings to this complex task: skill in locating the apt source in classical or Renaissance political theory, and a nuanced knowledge of the social, religious, and political circumstances informing each period.

Chapter 1, “The Merchant’s Mirror,” provides an opportunity for Carroll to expand one of her basic contributions to early Northern scholarship: a fresh reading of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), which she originally proposed in 1993 (Margaret D. Carroll, “In the Name of God and Profit: Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” Representations 44 (1993): 96–132). She interprets the couple’s activity not as a betrothal or marriage but as the conferral of a legal mandate that enabled Arnolfini’s wife to attend to his business affairs during his absences. This provocative interpretation has been surprisingly little noted by scholars, yet her analysis—greatly enlarged and updated here—has the significant advantage of complementing and strengthening the picture’s much-discussed emphatic display of luxurious possessions. For a leading merchant like Arnolfini, such display was proof of commercial success and reassurance that he could be trusted at a time when suspicion of merchants was common. Like others, Carroll stresses the courtly character of some of the furnishings and clothing, and this redoubles her mercantile view, since the wife of a ruler played a comparable role in governance. Carroll, however, wisely bypasses the conundrum of the couple’s identity; her reading applies to either of the two Giovanni Arnolfinis then living in Bruges.

Her interpretation has much to recommend it, yet it need not require entirely displacing more traditional views. In a painting defined by its doubleness (mirror image, contrasting halves of the room, etc.), Arnolfini conceivably might have wanted Van Eyck to memorialize both the marriage and the subsequent mandate. Each action shares a consensual basis (nicely explicated by Carroll), and is essential to the merchant’s functioning. A double event might even account for the curious absence of month and day in Van Eyck’s date, so strikingly at odds with his usual practice.

Marriage and coupling lie at the center of the paintings studied in chapter 2, “Breaking Bonds: Marriage and Community in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and Carnival and Lent.” In Proverbs (1559), the conventional ill-matched couple is represented by a seductive young woman placing the blue cloak of adultery upon the stooped, old man in front of her. This encapsulates the picture’s repeated invocations of folly, deception, self-interest, and the world-upside-down, embodied in the numerous proverbial sayings enacted in village and countryside. Carroll views this catalog of social breakdowns as a tribute to native folk wisdom (proverbs) and the expression of growing distress over the political misrule of the Low Lands by Spanish outsiders. On the other hand, Carnival and Lent (1559), she sensibly argues, establishes a counterbalance to Proverbs, raising the question of whether they were meant to be paired. Carnival, unlike Proverbs, plays out in an urban setting, and its pivotal middle couple is calm and harmonious. They appear oblivious to the activities around them, manifesting the complementary seasons of the church year. The decorous confrontations shown—community is maintained even during conflict—are a positive ideal, the antithesis of Proverbs’s discord. Even the activity of marketing, which Carroll, like others, notes is typically condemned by Bruegel for its self-interest and profit-seeking, here enhances community: the fish-sellers facilitate the observance of Lent.

Bruegel’s print entitled Ice-Skating Outside St. George’s Gate (ca. 1559), along with his painting the Tower of Babel (1563), are presented as indicators of local and regional politics in chapter 3, “The Conceits of Empire.” The print, which juxtaposes the massive Antwerp ramparts and the city’s new imperial gate of St. George against the dangers and fragilities of ice-skating, is seen as a reflection of the burdens imposed on Antwerpers by the increasingly oppressive control of the Spanish Hapsburgs, as well as the financial weight of the new taxes and lost housing resulting from the ramparts’ construction. The financial scandals associated with the project likely made the ramparts’ visual emphasis particularly galling to contemporaries. The Tower of Babel, suffering construction problems and sinking on its site in Bruegel’s version, was typically invoked to bemoan the decay of religious conditions and the spread of confusion in the Low Countries. Spanish efforts to “erect” new ecclesiastical structures—more bishoprics, the Inquisition—made the Babylonian theme especially exploitable in contemporary predictions of the country sinking into ruin under a foolish ruler (read: Nimrod/Philip II).

Carroll’s deftness at revealing multiple layers of political meaning continues as she turns to the seventeenth century, starting in chapters 4 and 5 with Rubens. “The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence” (chapter 4) is well-known to many in the field and outside it. This classic essay on Rubens’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (ca. 1615–18) was first published in 1989 and anthologized in 1992 (in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, New York: Icon Editions, 1992, 139–160). Its reprinting here bolsters the author’s overarching enterprise and showcases anew her expertise with sources, especially Renaissance political theory on the rights of the absolute (male) ruler, which was likened to a legitimate use of sexual force and domination. An important aspect of her analysis, buried in endnote 2, is the definition of rape in Ancient and Renaissance legal accounts, in which (heterosexual) rape was identified as “violence against any woman with a desire to commit fornication,” even if sexual penetration did not occur. On this basis, perpetuating the traditional title of Rubens’s painting as the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, rather than substituting the modern, sanitized alternative—their Abduction (a re-titling also encountered with Giovanni da Bologna’s 1583 Sabine and Bernini’s Proserpina [1621–22])—is critically important for maintaining the fully historical, grievous nature of the sexual assault perpetrated by the male abductors.

In “‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’” (chapter 5), Carroll turns her gaze to the complexities of the Marie de Médici cycle (1622–25), created for the queen regent shortly after her return from banishment by her teenage son, King Louis XIII. Carroll’s reading stresses the series’ multiple political requirements: to display Marie’s achievements through heroic deeds, of the type performed by heroic men; to reconcile this “manliness” by affirming her womanliness, achieved in part by likening her to a bare-breasted Amazon; and to present a warning to courtier-viewers of the ever-present danger of political treachery, a barely disguised allusion to her experience with her son. Carroll further demonstrates the importance of the Neostoic philosophy of Justus Lipsius in providing an ideal of unwavering constancy (not “woman-like lamentations”) for the representation of Marie, especially when confronted by adversity.

The final chapter examines “The Nature of Violence,” mainly in a painting genre initiated by Frans Snyders: scenes of animal combat. Carroll surveys Snyders’s cockfight and other animal-predation paintings; she then examines the forest-floor paintings of Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schriek (d. 1678), which render living Wunderkammer images of animal violence. She concludes with a magisterial watercolor by Maria Sybilla Merian from her Surinam notebooks that records the predations of South American spiders and ants. From these instances, Carroll carefully relates the culture of animal violence to contemporary currents in scientific investigations and natural philosophy, which asserted the “natural” and divinely ordained basis of animal and human predation. Again she relates this to the philosophy of Lipsius, as well as to the live-animal experiments of the Medicis’ physician, Francesco Redi, and the famous observation of British philosopher Thomas Hobbes describing life in nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.” These convictions were used to justify war, including the Netherlands’ revolt.

While the individual analyses in each chapter are masterful, incisive studies of the work(s) under consideration, they also trace, more or less, a linked evolution of political ideas that Carroll outlines in her introduction. I wish, however, that she had more fully engaged the contradictions evident in this progression, especially the seismic shift between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, she stresses that Bruegel’s politicized imagery, and the Netherlands’ resistance to the increasing domination of Catholic Spain, reflect contemporaries’ view that defiance of tyranny is justified because despotism is contrary to nature; while on the other hand, Rubens’s Leucippus, Snyders’s cockfights, and Van Schriek’s battling forest animals express the new conviction concerning the inherent “naturalness” of violence, including relations between men and women, and licit in absolutist rulers. This tension, amounting to a virtual reversal, deserves more consideration than a brief nod on page xix.

With her superb individual studies and her searching investigations into questions of historical belief-systems and their transformations over time, Carroll’s important, clearly written book makes an impressive contribution to contextual art history and the history of ideas. It is certain to stimulate scholars, and likely to engage non-specialists and students who have an interest in this volatile, fascinating extended period and region.