The visual culture of the Netherlands is one of Europe’s treasures and has been the subject of much careful study. Innovatingly, Elisabeth de Bièvre, in her new book Dutch Art and Urban Cultures 1200–1700, is able to point out with considerable erudition that the scholars have been wrong to stress its “Dutchness,” which implies that its achievements grew out of a centrally organized and homogenous society. She emphasizes instead that the United Provinces were simply a loose confederation of individual towns, each of which had its own artistic tradition, even a degree of artistic isolation. In many towns, 60 percent of the art purchased was from local painters.

Accordingly, she has taken seven of the main cities—The Hague, Dordrecht, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam, and Utrecht—and shown how each had its own mentality and customs that gave a unique quality to the artistic preferences and products of that city. In each case she has linked this local urban culture to the town’s political order, its religious opinions, and particularly to the source of its wealth. It is a mark of her thoroughness that she is able also to provide a detailed historical and geographical framework for all of them. Indeed this must be one of the very few art-historical studies of the Netherlands to provide a detailed map of that country’s geology, which turns out to be far more diverse than I had ever imagined, even though I spent much of my youth studying that science. Through