Saskia Beranek (PhD, 2013) has published her first monograph, The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait: Amalia van Solms and the Shape of the Self in European Art (Routledge). In it, Beranek examines how portraits served as powerful tools beyond mere facial records, actively negotiating relationships, building bridges, engendering communities, soothing egos, evoking memories, and constructing fame. Equally as important, however, is that this is the first sustained English-language study of Amalia van Solms. Amalia should be understood as the most important woman of the Dutch seventeenth century, long sidelined even in the scholarship about her own artistic commissions.
Available now from Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/The-Cultural-Work-of-the-Early-Modern-Dutch-Portrait-Amalia-van-Solms-and-the-Shape-of-the-Self-in-European-Art/Beranek/p/book/9789048562572