Politics As Painting2016

"Apart from a handful of art historians no sane person has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens and like Rubens he worked for the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. But while Rubens has gone down in history as an artistic trailblazor and painting powerhouse, Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck paints for Albert and Isabella are political propoganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing compared to her husnband, for in De...