The Whitewashed Image: Iconoclasm and the 17th Century Dutch Landscapes

Amy Powell
Art History
UC Irvine

In 1566 a wave of Protestant iconoclasm swept through the Netherlands. Although it subsided fairly quickly, the 1566 breaking of images marked the beginning of the rise of Calvinism as the official (if not the majority) religion of the northern Netherlands. Because the Reformed Church did not permit the use of religious images, the northern Netherlands saw a drastic curtailment of church art patronage beginning in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Deprived of ecclesiastical commissions, artists began to produce for the open market, where a largely urban burgher class bought relatively inexpensive paintings. The most popular genre of painting sold on this open market was the landscape. My project asks how the memory of iconoclasm and the persistence of iconophobia shaped the making of Dutch landscapes in the century or so after 1566.