This special issue of JHNA has been guest edited by Stijn Bussels, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and director of the European Research Council starting grant program Elevated Minds, The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam, at Leiden University (2013-2018). His co-editor is Bram van Oostveldt, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Researcher for the ERC research program. The two editors have worked with the JHNA staff with admirable collegiality and efficiency.
The program has re-evaluated the role of the antique concept of the sublime for understanding seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting and prints. Given that the Dutch Golden Age is often perceived as focusing on worldly art, this is an unexpected topic. Yet cultural historians, including the contributors to this issue, have recently noted how differently early modern thinkers conceived of the sublime, as they relate it to effects of the unsettling, overwhelming, transporting, or enchanting in Dutch and Flemish art.
The issue has been long in the making. Supported by a European Research Council starting grant, the program allowed the directors and ten authors to meet together for a workshop in December 2014 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, Wassenaar. In a model of peer review cooperation among scholars, they shared drafts of their articles under the skillful guidance of the two directors.
Another special issue will be published in early 2017 dedicated to the late Walter Liedtke (1945 – 2015), Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Walter was a founding member of HNA and an internationally recognized scholar of Dutch and Flemish art. The issue will comprise numerous essays by fellow curators and academic scholars, edited by Stephanie Dickey, Nadine Orenstein, and Alison Kettering.
JHNA welcomes to the editorial board Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Bader Curator and Researcher of European Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, our newest Associate Editor. Jacquelyn has already been active in developing an initiative to attract more research that makes central use of digital technology as a mode of inquiry.
JHNA would also like to congratulate Angela Jager for her article, “‘Everywhere illustrious histories that are a dime a dozen’: The Mass Market for History Painting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” published in JHNA, vol. 7:1 (2015), which was awarded the 2016 Prize for Online Publishing by the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH). The essay poses the highly original question of how and why large quantities of history paintings dominated the art market in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.
Once again, we want to thank Cindy Edwards who has attended to the work of copyediting with impressive attention to detail. We also acknowledge our managing editor Heidi Eyestone, Visual Resources Librarian of Carleton College. Heidi’s generous aid with images, uploading, and much else connected with this issue, and her long-range planning, technical expertise, and commitment have made her an indispensable colleague. Additional technical help by outgoing assistants Megan Gleason and Florence Wong is gratefully acknowledged, as well as the careful work of Qimeng Yu and Sara McAuliffe, who will continue to assist the journal next year. We wish to thank our webmaster Russ Coon for his numerous efforts on behalf of JHNA. For financial support, we thank Carleton College.
JHNA is archived by Portico, an electronic service initiated by JSTOR and supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and the Library of Congress. Preserving scholarship published in electronic form indefinitely, it ensures long-term access to our content. Our membership in CrossRef allows us to register our articles, each with a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that provides a persistent link to its location on the internet. It allows libraries and other organizations as well as readers of on-line journals to find and connect to these articles.
We encourage you to consider JHNA as a venue for your own publications. With your help, JHNA has become one of the premier journals of the early modern art of the Netherlands and its region. The next formal deadline for submission of articles is March 1, 2017 (for publication in 2018 or 2019), although we welcome submissions at any time.
Alison M. Kettering, Carleton College, Editor-in-Chief
Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Queen’s University, Associate Editor
Dagmar Eichberger, Universität Trier and Universität Heidelberg, Associate Editor
Mark Trowbridge, Marymount University, Associate Editor