22-NEW War and Peace in Netherlandish Art, 1500–1700
On campus
Course 22 – Summer School on Campus
Monday 13 – Friday 17 July 2026
Dr Adam Sammut
Course Description
This course explores the extraordinary degree to which Netherlandish art of the period 1500–1700 was shaped by war, and how artists themselves helped determine the outcome.
It was an attack on religious art that catalysed the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), also known as the Dutch Revolt. This saw a previously unified Habsburg territory divide into a Spanish-ruled Catholic South and an independent Protestant North. In the South, in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, artists redecorated churches hollowed out by iconoclasm. In the North, the collapse of religious patronage encouraged the rapid proliferation of specialised genres. Landscape paintings reflected the values of a newly-affluent middle class, who took pride in the countryside as a symbol of ‘Dutchness’. As propagandists, courtiers, diplomats, and satirists for one side or the other, artists became important agents in the formation of proto-national identities.
Artists also worked for reconciliation, producing peace-themed imagery in the wake of the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic (1609–21). After the Truce’s expiry, Peter Paul Rubens became exceptionally active as a diplomatic envoy. He accepted major commissions from nations previously at war with Spain, including the Banqueting House ceiling for Charles I of England.
Students will explore the work of the Brueghel dynasty, Rubens, Rembrandt, Romeyn de Hooghe, and others, together with objects in a range of media. Classroom sessions will be complemented by visits to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Banqueting House, Whitehall, and the Queen’s House in Greenwich.
How to Book
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If you have any questions please email us at short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk
Lecturer's Biography
Dr Adam Sammut FRHistS is a historian of seventeenth-century Flemish art and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Department of History of Art, University of York. Adam’s PhD thesis (University of York, 2021) was published as a monograph under the same title, Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp: Art and Political Economy in an Age of Religious Conflict (2023). Prior appointments include Rush H Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence (2024–25); Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History of Art at York (2021–24); Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC (2018) and exhibition assistant, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest (2018–21). In 2023, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2025, Adam was awarded the inaugural Burlington Magazine Prize for Research on South Netherlandish Art 1400–1800, administered by the University of Cambridge.