Art history professor’s research on religious art to be part of Amsterdam exhibition

Dr. Elissa Auerbach, an art history professor at Georgia College & State University, is an expert in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish religious art.

Her research examines how Dutch artists adapted traditional representations of the Virgin Mary for a broader market after the Protestant Reformation and how Marian imagery might’ve impacted Protestant theological teachings in literature.

Auerbach’s research will now be part of an exhibit in Amsterdam, honoring the 350th anniversary death of poet and Calvinist preacher, Willem Sluiter (1627-73). The display coincides with a symposium scheduled for December at Vrije Universiteit, a public research university in Amsterdam.

“It is a great honor for my research on the 17th-century Dutch Calvinist preacher Willem Sluiter to be included in a scholarly exhibition about him,” Auerbach said. “It seems I’m one of the few Americans who has worked on a devotional book Sluiter first published in 1669 about the Virgin Mary.”

The exhibit and symposium are being organized by Dutch scholar Ellen Vujevic in collaboration with the Netherlands Museum De Scheper in Eibergen. The organizers have published articles about Auerbach’s research in two newspapers in that region.

Auerbach began teaching at Georgia College in 2006 and received her Ph.D. in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art from the University of Kansas in 2009. Her dissertation on Sluiter is called, “Re-Forming Mary in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints.”

In 2017, IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies published her article, “Domesticating the Virgin in Early Modern Netherlandish Art.” It included research Auerbach presented in 2016 at the 10th  International Conference of Iconographic Studies at the University of Rijeka in Croatia.

She’s always been fascinated by the Virgin Mary’s depiction as a traditional Roman Catholic theme in early, modern-Dutch visual culture, and how that representation relates to developments in devotional practices, science and domestic conduct after the Reformation in the Netherlands.

John Calvin and other Protestant leaders put the Virgin Mary at the center of their criticisms of the Catholic Church, which gave rise to the Reformation, Auerbach noted. In the decades after Sluiter published his book, however, the mother of Christ grew in popularity in Dutch Protestant devotional literature and art.

“I discovered Sluiter’s book like a needle in a haystack in Special Collections at the Amsterdam University Library,” Auerbach said. “Sluiter’s illustrated book was the missing link I needed to help make sense of the resurgence of interest in Mary among Dutch Protestants in both their religious practices and art patronage.”

“Sluiter was one of the first Dutch Calvinists to author a book on Mary’s virtues,” she said, “which was quite a risk at the time—given that John Calvin had condemned Marian devotion as sacrilegious.”

Auerbach was interviewed for a press release on her research for the exhibition website by Sluiter’s ninth-generation descendent, Peter Sluiter, and journalist Arend Heideman. Peter Sluiter is a contributor to the exhibition and a retired human rights activist. He was formerly secretary general of the European Parliamentarians against Apartheid.

Auerbach is currently researching the phenomenon of spiritual pilgrimages to illegal places of Catholic worship in post-Reformation Dutch altarpieces, prints, illustrated books and maps.

Her recent publications focus on spiritual pilgrimage to forbidden holy sites in the Northern Netherlands; the domesticated Virgin Mary in scenes of the Holy Family in early modern Netherlandish visual culture; pilgrimage and liminal landscapes in the Dutch Republic; Marian Piety in post-iconoclasm Haarlem in Hendrick Goltzius’s print series, “The Life of the Virgin;” and Cartesianism in Rembrandt’s print, “The Death of the Virgin.”

Auerbach uses her research in courses she teaches, including Northern and Italian Renaissance Art; “From Rubens to Rembrandt;” “Sacred Things in the Middle Ages;” “The Ancient and Medieval Worlds;” and “From the Renaissance to the Modern World.”

At Georgia College, Auerbach also has taught and directed faculty-led summer study abroad programs in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome.