The articles in this issue illustrate the rich variety of fields, media, and approaches evident in the art history that JHNA defines as its purview. They range from a book of hours with woodcut images and a text in movable type, a devotional cabinet embellished with intricate flora, fauna, sculptures, and relics, a well-known history painting, and a distinguished landscape artist, to a princess’s strategies of display.
Anna Dlabacova’s article relates experimental book production aimed at lay people to religious practices of the late 15th century. Besloten hofjes (enclosed gardens) form the focus of Andrea Pearson’s article, which explores how these cabinets incorporated the various senses into devotional practice. Valerie Hedquist’s essay on Hendrick ter Brugghen’s St. Sebastian Tended by Irene argues that the artist joined Roman Catholic pictorial traditions with post-Tridentine iconographic innovations and references to contemporary cultural attitudes regarding the plague as experienced in multi-confessional Utrecht. Saskia Beranek centers her essay on the display strategies that Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange, adopted for her galleries, and suggests what they reveal about her agendas and ambitions. Marion Boers concentrates on Pieter Molijn, the pioneer of the Dutch tonal landscape, who after 1630 used a successful business model to produce landscapes in different styles for different clients.
The new look of the articles will strike you immediately. With this issue, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art has launched an updated design, layout, and functionality. The home page announces the changes immediately. The individual essays exhibit a wholly different layout and design as well, all courtesy of Sarah Rainwater Design of Providence, RI. Rainwater Design is also responsible for a website redesign for our host organization, Historians of Netherlandish Art. The back end of the two websites, with their more advanced digital framework, allows all sorts of new features and efficiencies. You will notice both the new style of viewing images in a rotating image gallery and search functionality accessed through the upper right menu tab. The endnotes reveal themselves when you hover over them and the return arrows at the end of the note will return you to the spot from which you clicked to view the endnote.
A grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has supported these website upgrades. We hope that the new website for JHNA will encourage scholars to submit proposals that adapt the technology developed for digital humanities to the specific needs of art history. It allows more frequent integration of video and audio enhancements in addition to new ways of displaying image and text, which together create a new experience reading both on line and on mobile devices. This includes visual data mining and archival modeling, geographical visualizations and mapping, high resolution imaging and dynamic inquiry. But it is worth emphasizing that JHNA will continue to publish articles (and their pdfs) in traditional formats, as in the current issue.
Our Managing Editor, Heidi Eyestone, should be singled out for her enormous contribution over the last year to the website re-design and upgrading process. Once the design was established, she took on the truly heroic job of migrating material with student staff from our original platform Joomla to the new WordPress platform. This entailed resetting every element of the JHNA website and working closely with the Rainwater Design staff to solve problems when they arose. It goes without saying that Heidi’s long-range planning, technical expertise, and commitment have made her an indispensable colleague. For financial support, we thank Carleton College
Paul Crenshaw, President of HNA, and Martha Hollander, past HNA board member, have also contributed importantly to this project. And we are grateful to Russ Coon, our former webmaster, for his generosity with the migration. In addition, we call attention to the technical help given by Carleton students Sara McAuliffe, Qimeng Wu, Noah Scheer, and Peycen Ouyang, as well as Rebecca Stover and Jesse Barrera-Ledezma.
We once again thank Cindy Edwards who has minded the work of copyediting with such impressive attention to detail.
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. Each article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.
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. We welcome submissions at any time for publication in 2018 or 2019. Please consult Submission Guidelines.
Alison M. Kettering, Carleton College, Editor-in-Chief
Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Queen’s University, Associate Editor
Dagmar Eichberger, Universität Heidelberg, Associate Editor
Mark Trowbridge, Marymount University, Associate Editor