New study on the art of Early Modern Scandinavia

Abstract

A monograph by Kristoffer Neville, Chair at the Department of Art History, University of California, Riverside, The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe, 1550–1720, that has just come out in Olga Ermakova’s translation (Boston: Academic Studies Press and St. Petersburg: Bibliorossica, 2023, 388 p.) is of considerable interest for a Russian reader, who is not frequentlry offered a truly new academic study on Nordic history. However, this work encompasses a somewhat narrower topic, than one can assume by the title: it considers almost exclusively the court culture in Denmark and Sweden. Nevertheless, it does not undermine its purely academic value. The author fully succeeds in substantiating his key thesis and convincingly inscribes the history of the art sponsored by the Danish and Swedish royal courts in the 16th — early 18th centuries, into the history of culture — mainly that related to the activity of different rulers’ courts, too — in the region we call today Central Europe. Despite some critical remarks on the study itself (one can regret, e. g., that the author almost does not touch upon the role of well-known 16th-century Polish-Swedish dynastic connections in the history of art in Sweden) as well as on the translation (there are some inaccuracies, mostly in rendering proper names, especially the French ones), the book leaves a positive impression and, besides, opens a new perspective for looking at how Scandinavia’s connections affected, e. g., the formation of the images of Russia and the Russians in Sweden and other European countries.

Keywords:

Denmark, Sweden, court art, Early Modern Period