On December 3rd, Nicholas Herman gave a lecture at Rutgers University as part of the Art History Graduate Student Organization Distinguished Speaker Series entitled “The Painted World of Books.”

Early modern painting was the ultimate metamedium, capable of describing a vast array of objects on a two-dimensional plane. Or so it seems. Depictions of books, in particular, provide a locus for understanding painters’ nuanced relationships to tangible real-world things. This talk will investigate the verisimilitude of books in the art of Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries, relying on the newly launched Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) database to compare and contrast. What is revealed is an array of approaches, ranging from archeologically exact renditions of actual books to structurally plausible but impossibly lavish avatars imbued with fictive production histories and material biographies. In the end, the prism of the book provides a way to see beyond the conventional paradigm of symbolism disguised as reality, exposing the ability of early modern painting to imagine alternative worlds.