A Thousand Words
The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting the Collection of Pierre Roose
by Hieronymus Francken II & Jan Brueghel the Elder
In this picture, painted in 1621–1623, the archdukes Albert and Isabella, the Hapsburg regents of the Southern Netherlands, have come to pay a visit to the collector Pierre Roose. More specifically, they have come to pay a visit to Roose's cabinet of curiosities. With the rise of bourgeois wealth and the mania for collecting and investing in art in the Low Countries, pictures like this became a minor specialty, and they often involved the collaboration of several artists. Not all of these paintings (in fact, very few) . . .
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland.
more on art from the online archives
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
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32.2—March/April 2019
Reality Shows, Even in a Popular TV Series by C. E. Smith
32.1—January/February 2019
The Diabolical Failure of Leaders in the Present Crises by James M. Kushiner
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on Benedict XVI on the Fairest of the Sons of Men by Michael Martin De Sapio
