Painted cityscapes have always captivated the viewers of medieval works
of art. To this day scholars are mesmerised by their capacity to mirror
the urban context from which they sprang, combined with their ability to
symbolize a more abstract world view, religious idea or social ideal.
Especially oil painting, which thrived in the fifteenth-century Low
Countries among a heterogeneous elite and the well-off urban middling
groups, succeeded as no other medium in capturing the urban landscape in
its finest details. In order to gain an insight into how late medieval
citizens, clerics and noblemen conceived of urban society and space,
this book combines a serial analysis of a large corpus of painted city
views with a critical discussion of some well-documented and revealing
works of art. Throughout the book a variety of questions are addressed,
ranging from the religious conception of the city, the theatrical
dimension of urban space, the extent to which Early Netherlandish
painting depicted the city as an economic space, how images of city and
countryside functioned as identity markers of the donor, and how
technical advances in the field of cartography impacted the portrayal of
towns in the sixteenth century. In doing so, this study explores the
duality of some of the major interpretive schemes that have determined
the last few decades of historiography on late medieval Netherlandish
culture, oscillating between bourgeois and courtly, realistic and
symbolic profane and religious, and innovative versus traditional.
