Early Netherlandish Paintings as Devotional Objects: State of Research ca. 1990-2020

The aim of this essay is to survey debates about early Netherlandish paintings as devotional objects from roughly the late 1980s to about 2020. During this period, an important shift in the study of this topic occurred: religious images were increasingly considered as devotional objects by virtue of how they were thought to have been used rather than how they appeared. In the last decades, questions about the functions of devotional imagery, about pictorial rhetoric, and about the responses that rhetoric might provoke in viewers, as well as its relationship to contemporaneous spiritual literature, have become core questions for subsequent scholarship dedicated to early Netherlandish painting. The essay concludes with a section devoted to research perspectives.