Domestic scenes in Western European painting of the 15th-17th centuries. Reality and symbolism

A varied, motley and mysterious world of household images, which first became the subject of such terrible artistic interest in the XV-XVII centuries, is revealed here and in its picturesque style, renaissance or baroque, and in its semantic sublists, secular and religious.

The book is addressed to both art historians and everyone who is interested in the world of vintage paintings and ancient life.

Doctor Art History Book M.N. Sokolova, dedicated to the Western European Genre Painting of the XV-XVII centuries, offers a radical new look at the content of secular art of this period. The author uses numerous modern work on this topic, but at the same time criticizes them for excessive one-sidedness. According to his opinion, an understanding of early genres should not be reduced to the motives of the criticism of the morals, the chinds of human sins or just to the laughter discharge. Neither satirical or negative-didactic nor purely laughing rates of genre painting do not give the key to comprehending its principled novelty. M.N. Sokolov puts forward a hypothesis that, from his point of view, can shed light into the essence of this novelty. Almost all early-fucked images were imbued with the cult of nature as a universal principle, regulating life and opposing traditional medieval theocentrism. Having reached a special heyday at the turn of the new time, the worship of the nature of the mother combined humanistic philosophical creating with utopian poetry. Therefore, it found an active response in the artistic consciousness, giving rise to the style that can be conventionally called naturalophilosophical realism. Along with nature, the concepts of love, fortune, death and time as cosmic energies, predetermining the course and natural, and historical and social existence had the most important for the addition of this aesthetic model. Household genres directly reflected these new views on humans and nature. The author consistently considers both the processes of community, the genre of religious art and the emergence of independent secular household images in the Netherlands (and then Dutch and Flemadskaya), German, French, Italian and Spanish schools. At the same time, special attention is paid to wedding-family images, iconography of human ages, childhood and old age, poverty and richness, kitchen scenes, iconography of games, folk festivities, labor processes. Special chapters are devoted to the symbolism of the lifestyle, which unites several important iconological lines at once, peasant images, as well as gardens of love, in the most visual form expressing the utopian aspirations of Renaissance humanism.

Masterpieces Yana Van Eki, Bosch, Dürer, Georgeon, Peter Breygele senior, Caravaggio, Rubens, Velasquez, Hals, Vermer, Rembrandt and Brothers Lyena are considered in the book along with many less well-known, but in their own significant works. The identity of the argument in combination with the wealth of illustrative material makes the book of exciting both for specialists, and for wide circles of readers