On Failure: Error and Defeat in Netherlandish Art

This volume examines failure as a productive category in early modern Netherlandish art, demonstrating how error, risk, and defeat shaped artistic practice and cultural imagination. Rather than treating failure as a marginal or negative phenomenon, the contributions reveal its capacity to generate innovation, provoke reflection, and question narratives of success. The book challenges triumphalist models of art history. It offers instead a recursive historiography that highlights the creative and cultural potential of failure.

Contributors include Koen Bulckens, Stijn Bussels, Marianne Eekhout, Nicole Ganbold, Hanneke Grootenboer, Joost Keizer, Marte Sophie Meessen, Braden Lee Scott, Natasha Seaman, Laura Valterio, Minke Walda, and Clim Wijnands.