Jessica Fröberg

The Swedish Institute in Rome Annual Fellowship, Art History

During my stay at The Swedish Institute in Rome, I will continue my research for my dissertation project Transmedial narrativity: Netherlandish altarpieces in Sweden c. 1480–1525 that I undertake as PhD-student at the Institution for Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. For my dissertation I study the Netherlandish altarpieces that were imported to Sweden from Antwerp and Brussels during the Early Renaissance. The overall aim of this project is to show the importance of the visual narrative in Netherlandish sculpted altarpieces and to demonstrate how artists through an intermedial approach communicated the biblical stories in a distinctly narrative visual language. As part of this study I also analyse the narrative compositions and how it transferred between diverse visual media.
For this project I also study possible similarities in the common representations of the biblical motifs in Italian frescos and Netherlandish altarpieces. The theological and iconographic ideas that streamed from Italy and transferred to the visual culture of Northern Europe can be observed in the Netherlandish altarpieces. By studying the cultural exchange that connected Italy with Flanders I try to identify the visual material that formed the artists repertoire and the client’s influence.