{"id":4159,"date":"2016-03-02T14:45:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T22:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/?p=4159"},"modified":"2019-09-06T14:46:18","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T21:46:18","slug":"konrad-ottenheym-university-of-utrecht-netherlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/konrad-ottenheym-university-of-utrecht-netherlands\/","title":{"rendered":"Konrad Ottenheym, University of Utrecht, Netherlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Konrad Ottenheym, University of Utrecht, Netherlands<\/h1>\n

\"\"On Romans, Batavians and Giants. The Quest for the True Origins of Architecture in the Dutch Republic<\/strong>
\nKonrad Ottenheym, Professor of the History of Architecture<\/span>
\nUniversity of Utrecht, Netherlands<\/span><\/h3>\n

In thinking about the creation of \u2018national literature\u2019 and \u2018national styles\u2019 in art and architecture, most people will refer to the 19th century: the period of the rise of national states and the attempt to codify specific geographically and nationally defined identities in art, architecture and literature, based on models from a glorious past. Nevertheless, five hundred years before this era, humanist scholars, artists, monarchs and other political leaders all over Europe had already charged themselves with a comparable task. In late medieval and early modern Europe, c. 1400\u20131700,
\nauthority was formally based on lineage, and in all countries political ambitions and geographical claims were supported by true or false historical justifications. Literature, architecture, and paintings were also used to express these ideas of national or local history and that its earliest roots in the distant past.<\/p>\n

The strong and conscious interest in national and local history as expressed during this period in the arts has not yet been studied systematically in an interdisciplinary way. In art history, most
\nattention is still given to the reception of the \u2018international\u2019 canon of Greek and Roman antiquities \u2013 such as the well-known ruins in Rome and its surroundings \u2013 and of \u2018classical\u2019 Greek sculpture. And until rather recently, research on Neo-Latin literature was focused on the reception of the classical Greek and Roman authors, while historical works on the \u2018medieval\u2019 or local past were neglected. The local or medieval past, however, played a pivotal role. In current mainstream interpretations of \u2018Renaissance\u2019 art as a \u2018Rebirth of Antiquity,\u2019 antiquity has misleadingly acquired a standard definition based on the international canon. In this perspective, there seems to be only one ideal Antiquity and only one proper embodiment of Antiquity Reborn: the reception of Rome\u2019s antiquities in 15th- and 16th-century Florence and Rome. Thus, the bias toward a \u2018proper\u2019 antiquity has generated the idea of a \u2018proper\u2019 Renaissance. Consequently, most Antiquity-inspired architecture, art, and literature in Northern Europe \u2013 as well as in Spain, France, and the Italian periphery from Lombardy to Sicily \u2013 has been analysed and interpreted with Central Italian solutions as a single point of reference, and has often been seen as \u2018provincial,\u2019 \u2018hybrid,\u2019 or \u2018still a little bit medieval.\u2019 As a result, the specific meaning of conscious references to local history also remained obscure. Instead of addressing incorrect or vernacular transformations of the Roman ideal, however, we have to look for a more positive explanation for those examples of the Antique that do not resemble the \u2018standard.\u2019 Therefore, we must ask by what means \u2013 i.e., through which other models or interpretations of antiquities \u2013 artists and patrons created their reconstructions of Antiquity.<\/p>\n

In the past few decades the concept of the Rome-centered Renaissance has been seriously challenged. Recent scholarship has stressed the important role assumed by non-Central Italian
\nantiquities \u2013 such as those of Ancient Gaul and in the Low Countries, as well as texts such as Tacitus\u2019s Germania \u2013 in the genesis of \u2018Antique\u2019 architecture that was not inspired by Central Italy. Moreover, the definition of the \u2018Antique\u2019 has turned out to be far more elastic: in fact, it encompasses more than \u2018Rome.\u2019 The historical eras used in such constructions could be rather diverse. Sometimes passages or episodes from classical historical writings were quoted and integrated into early modern national or local history, such as the tales of the Trojans who had left their destroyed city to become the founders of various peoples, cities, or noble families all over Europe. In the construction of national histories, local tribes mentioned in classical texts sometimes played a central role as true and antique ancestors, like the Batavians in the northern Low Countries or even elder ancestors, as will be explained in this lecture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Konrad Ottenheym, University of Utrecht, Netherlands On Romans, Batavians and Giants. The Quest for the True Origins of Architecture in Read More →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4160,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159\/revisions\/4160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}