From Artless to Artful Illustrated Histories of the Eighty Years ’ War in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

The interplay between text and image was a central part of history writing on the Eighty Years’ War, known as the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648). Already during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the still ongoing Revolt became the subject of numerous extensively illustrated history books printed in the Dutch Republic. Initially, all major illustrated Dutch history works relied heavily on copies of older news prints produced by the Cologne-based print maker Frans Hogenberg and his workshop. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, enterprising Dutch publishers reissued these histories and made significant investments to furnish them with new printed images. Rather than focusing on the Revolt as a news event or as the subject of political propaganda, as had been the case in the Hogenberg illustrations, these new printed images paid particular attention to personal and dramatic aspects of the history of the Dutch Revolt. Moreover, Dutch publishers accentuated the luxurious character of these history books and their high-quality images. In this article, I argue that these new printed images, guided by a commercial drive of mainly Amsterdam printers for the production of appealing illustrated books, marked a significant turning point in the visualisation of the Dutch Revolt.


van duijnen
In the Dutch Republic, large illustrated histories on the Revolt were thus mainly produced in the first and last quarters of the seventeenth century, dominated by the work of two particular printmakers, Hogenberg and Luyken. While the textual content of these books remained relatively stable, the illustrations were subject to sweeping changes. Over the course of fifty years, the particular events chosen as topics for these etchings shifted, their physical dimensions changed, and so did the use of perspective and the relationship to text. Despite this profound shift, such differences have remained largely on the margins of scholarship on the Eighty Years ' War. 7 Only in the past fifteen years historians have started to analyse the role of Dutch printed images during the Revolt, most prominently Daniel Horst in his De Opstand in zwart-wit, and Christi Klinkert in her study Nassau in het nieuws. 8 More recently, Ramon Voges has published on Frans Hogenberg's prints as historical sources sui generis 9 , whereas Lisa de Boer has expanded on the place of Hogenberg's prints in early seventeenth-century Dutch histories. 10 Post-war seventeenth-century illustrations, however, have largely remained outside the scope of historical research. An exception is Wolfgang Cilleßen's article on continuity in Dutch illustrated books concerning the 'Spanish Tyranny'. 11 Importantly, Cilleßen has shown how these propaganda booklets discussing Spanish atrocities were printed throughout most of the seventeenth century, before being supplanted by books on the more acutely felt 'French Tyranny' from 1672 onwards. 12 Where Cilleßen has shown a continuity in popular prints, I would like to offer a perspective on the changes in Dutch illustrated books aimed at a prosperous and learned public, as presented in the various editions of the works of Bor, Grotius, and Hooft. In this article I argue that changes in illustrations were rarely based on shifts in textual content. In fact, prints transformed drastically, even if the textual basis for illustrated histories van duijnen remained fairly consistent over the course of the seventeenth century. To capture these changes, I compare the works of the two printmakers who were central to early and late seventeenth-century production, Frans Hogenberg and Jan Luyken respectively. Through their prolific outputs, I will show how a booming publishing industry in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic reinvented the image of the Revolt by binding it to the format of expensive and lavishly illustrated folio books.

A new market for Revolt imagery
When a selection of Dutch publishers started to produce expensive illustrated books in the 1670s, established history works dedicated to the Revolt would have made a relatively 'safe' investment. Bor, Hooft, and Grotius were wellknown and respected authors who appealed to a learned and prosperous readership. The fact that their works on the Revolt had already been published before did not represent an obstacle to such a venture. In fact, old books and their perceived defects provided Dutch publishers plenty of incentives to print new editions. Outdated spelling was updated, transcriptions of historical documents were added 13 , and new printed images were commissioned.
The publishers' concerns regarding the defects of older editions were most clearly articulated in the 1679 edition of Bor's Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen. The production of this book, with its new, large double-folio prints, presented a substantial undertaking and required article -artikel kinds of images of different sizes and quality as 'konstplaaten' (art prints). 15 Even cartographic siege views could be marketed under the category of 'konstplaaten'. 16 The qualification of Hogenberg's plates as 'artless' should first and foremost be read within the broader commercial context discussed in this article: as a common sales pitch that claimed that the new images were simply better than the old ones.
In comparison with the changing practices with regards to illustrations in expensive folio books, the contemporaneous Dutch production of cheap illustrated works demonstrated more continuity. Popular books on the so-called Spanish Black Legend -the stereotypical image of the Spanish as exceedingly cruel and intolerant -kept recycling the same themes and images throughout the seventeenth century, providing readers a mix of printed images adapted from the sixteenth-century designs of Hogenberg van duijnen affordable and expensive. Essentially, these books were illustrated by an overlapping corpus of high-quality etchings; each work contained some original prints that were absent in other editions. 22 The importance of these new etchings was not only stressed by the publishers' gibe at the 'artless' Hogenberg prints. It was also underlined by the fact that both the new editions of Bor and Grotius included an index of images at the beginning of the book with corresponding page numbers. This then was not simply a list to inform the bookbinder where to insert the prints, as was common in this period, but it was an actual index or 'register' that could be used by the reader to browse directly to a specific image. An instruction to the bookbinder was often explicitly labelled as such, and normally put at the end of a book, which was not the case in either Bor or Grotius.
The introduction and promotion of these new printed images publication. After the dedication, we find an overview of all the images included in the text, sorted in two categories: small (single-folio) and large (double-folio). 23 As stated in this index, all images marked with an asterisk were new ones not found in the previous edition, undoubtedly to prove the value of this edition above its older incarnation from 1677. As the text of 1703 incorporated few changes, pointing to newly added prints can indeed be seen as a sensible sales strategy -though it must be remembered that most illustrations were already more than twenty-five years old by that time. In any case, the use of such detailed image indexes seems to have been a somewhat isolated occurrence, possibly aimed specifically at print collectors. 24 The creation of a new corpus of printed images on the Revolt was thus shaped by particular market forces, took place within a narrow subset of reruns of expensive illustrated folio books, and was initiated by a select number of Amsterdam publishers.  Prints on the Dutch Revolt came in all shapes and sizes: portraits, allegories, maps, as well as interpretations of particular events. These types were not absolute and could easily overlap with one another. However, illustrated histories from the two clusters of books in question contained prints relating mostly to the last category, namely the interpretations of particular war events. They offered sights of battles, sieges, executions, and massacres. As such, I have chosen to ignore illustrated books that contain only portraits in which the 'visual' history of the Dutch Revolt is limited to the faces of rulers.
Printed portraits used in histories showed continuity across the seventeenth century and provided publishers limited room for change as these portraits often drew upon 'the respectful lines of the original commission '. 25 In the first cluster of early seventeenth-century Dutch publications on the Revolt, most prominent and numerous were those illustrations that had been copied from or modelled on 'news prints' -the historiographical term for the type of broadsheet prints on contemporary news events that had come into being in the sixteenth century. 26 These news prints consisted of a printed image in a broadsheet format combined with a short text or poem that clarified the images for the reader. Historical events, reaching back as far as the conquest of Tunis in 1535, were depicted in some of the earliest prints issued from the Hogenberg workshop. 28 Later works, however, focused on contemporary news events.
The 'simplified style' of the Hogenberg workshop ensured prints could be produced as fast as six days after news reports had reached Cologne. 29

van duijnen
In the early seventeenth century, the Hogenberg workshop continued to produce news prints on the progress of the Eighty Years' War. In these Dutch history books, Hogenberg's work was thus transformed from contemporary news prints into a series of book illustrations of more distant historical events. Yet despite their changing function -from news prints to illustrations in history books -the appearance of these prints remained largely unaltered. This was not necessarily in conflict with Hogenberg's own practices. As a printer and publisher, Hogenberg not only produced prints on contemporary events, but also gave his news prints a second life as part of extensive picture albums. 32 In these bundled series, the 'news print' as a singular impression of a news event was repurposed for an image that functioned in a larger sequence of prints on historical events. This format suggested cause and effect between consecutive printed images, as well as a linear sense of history. 33 The influence of the news print as a genre is evident in the illustrated edition of Bor's history on the Revolt published between 1621 and 1634.
Most prints in this work were copied after Hogenberg and reworked into a smaller format so as to fit as in-text illustrations. 34 These illustrations largely employed a bird's-eye view, characteristic of Hogenberg's prints, providing a panoramic view of the events and relying on cartographic and topographic cues. 35 The same principle applies to a number of new prints by Simon Frisius article -artikel produced in 1613-1615 and mostly based on Dutch news prints. Frisius followed Hogenberg's style, and his images mainly consisted of cityscapes and bird's-eye views. 36 Thanks to the panoramic views in Hogenberg's prints, sieges and pitched battles often gave the reader the impression that he or she got a good overview of the major troop movements, siegeworks, and skirmishes. Rather than focusing on a single dramatic moment, the prints in Bor followed a diachronic sequence, suggesting that these prints displayed a 'truthful' and all-encompassing history of the Revolt. 37 By showing how particular events followed up to one another, these prints claimed to portray what had 'truly' happened -a claim that often served partisan readings of history.

Bor revisited
The first cluster of illustrated history books on the Revolt were heavily indebted to the broadsheet prints that had visualised news events from the  By 1700, book illustrations on the Revolt had thus changed in function, form, and content. Moving away from the detailed siege maps and cityscapes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, warfare could now be captured through a miraculous event that showed Spanish soldiers saving a child whose mother had been blown apart by Dutch cannon fire.
Prints of executions were no longer solely concerned with 'Spanish cruelty'. Amanda Pipkin, for instance, argued that Hooft went beyond the 'epic style' of Bor by 'adding' the personal story of the bride. This claim is incorrect, since Bor had already narrated this anecdote some twenty years earlier in his 1621 edition. 72 In 1679 then, it was not the story in itself that was new, but rather the printed image of the story. Effectively, by removing the Hogenberg's overview of the Spanish Fury and adding Luyken's print of the Antwerp bride, the publishers of the 1679 edition shifted the focus in Bor's story from generalized murder and plunder to a sentimental story of great personal drama. 73 As the case of the Antwerp bride shows, printmakers and publishers created meaning explicitly through the production of new images as much as they did so implicitly through omission, adding and removing prints that each accentuated different parts of textual narratives. The visual history of the Eighty Years' War also shows elements of continuity and elements of change were fostered simultaneously, depending on the readership targeted by the publishers. The anti-French propaganda prints demonstrate a form of continuity, as printmakers readily tapped into old visual tropes concerning the Black Legend from Hogenberg's corpus on the Revolt. Paradoxically, actual images dealing with the Revolt, as found in the late seventeenth-century history books discussed here, did change, precisely because these illustrations were produced after the Dutch Revolt and no longer needed to operate within the bounds of religious and political polemics. The war was long over, and new enemies, the French in particular, had appeared on the horizon. This changing historical context also meant that Luyken's illustrations did not need to function as information-dense representations of news events, as had been the case for the Hogenberg prints. Thus, in contrast to the original Hogenberg prints, which only had received a few lines of explanatory text, the illustrations for the 1679 edition of Bor were accompanied by thousands of pages of text to fill in the necessary details for the reader. This new context enabled Luyken to focus on a dramatic condensation of historical events instead of reproducing the diachronic overviews characteristic of Hogenberg.
The primary role of these prints was no longer to spread (partisan) news, or to convince the reader of providing factual information, or even to argue against article -artikel the truce with the Spanish, as had been the case for the atrocity propaganda produced during The Twelve Years' Truce. Instead, the 1670s had seen a crystallisation of dominant narratives on the Revolt in the Republic, partly due to the pressure of the French invasion of 1672. 74 In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that the more polemical histories written during the truce by Reformed theologians like Gysius and Baudartius were left out of the renewed publication cycle that started off in the 1670s: the end of the war had left less space for these virulent narratives, especially in the burgeoning market for luxurious folio books.

Conclusions
If anything, Luyken's prints were not simply illustrations that passively reflected the accompanying text. Just as Hogenberg's prints had been central to the imagination of the Revolt during the war itself, Luyken's work was central to its post-war reinterpretation. In a number of cases, Luyken was the first printmaker to portray stories that had circulated for more than fifty years in textual format. Simultaneously, the shift towards new subjects also meant a move away from the tried and tested atrocity propaganda based on Hogenberg's work. Neither the 1679 edition of Bor nor the 1703 edition of Hooft portrayed the infamous executions of Egmont and Hoorne. Yet both editions did include Luyken's print of Pacieco, whose dramatic final moments were captured in a luxurious double-folio etching. Effectively, the end of the war had allowed for a different image of the Spanish enemy. No print did this more strikingly than Casper Luyken's work on Bergen op Zoom, which completely ignored the stereotype of infant-killing Spaniards that continued to circulate in popular print. Indeed, popular propaganda prints relied primarily on reproducing old tropes, whereas the illustrations from luxurious books analysed in this article sought to present new victims as well as new perpetrators.
From a broad perspective, the shift from Hogenberg to Luyken ties together changes in seventeenth-century memory culture, printmaking, and publishing. On the one hand, the move away from polemics and the news print format opened up a broader range of topics to be visualised within luxurious illustrated folio books. On the other hand, general developments in the Dutch Republic towards an increasingly personal and dramatic interpretation of history allowed for these subjects, whether these concerned innocent brides or Spanish officers, to be displayed in a novel and spectacular manner. Yet, most importantly, publishers recognised that reprinting old texts had limited appeal. Publishers stressed the importance of these van duijnen new luxurious prints with the use of registers, at times even making clear distinctions between 'old' and 'new' prints. Finally, the Amsterdam publishers themselves implicitly described the shift from Hogenberg to Luyken as a shift from 'artless' to 'artful'. As publishers in the late seventeenth century eagerly qualified all kinds of images, including cartographic siege views, as 'konst-plaaten', this remark seems to have had little to do with the composition or content of the images in question. Perhaps the publishers' comment referred simply to the fact that Luyken's prints were far more detailed and included many more etched lines than the copies of Hogenberg's work. Yet it is more likely that the publishers' statement was first and foremost a formulaic claim that their edition provided something 'new' and better: new images to replace the 'old' Hogenberg prints.
In other words, the publishers made a commercial claim about providing a product that was better than the work of their predecessors. If historians have often ignored Luyken's prints, their importance was clearly a given for late seventeenth-century publishers and their customers. They realised that the real changes in these expensive histories did not concern the text, but the images.