Reindert Falkenburg
Professor Emeritus of Early Modern Art and Culture
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Research Areas: visual arts, tensions and crises in late medieval and Renaissance art
Reindert Falkenburg seeks to engage the entire faculty and student body in innovative and interesting research, exploring cross-discipline collaborations across the faculty and encouraging undergraduate students to participate in research.
Falkenburg's own research explores the visual arts primarily from the perspective of image/viewer relationships. He studies tensions and crises in late medieval and Renaissance art, in particular, the role of the visual arts in the aesthetic, religious, moral and spiritual formation of early modern man.
His scholarly interest regard especially works by 16th century Dutch and Flemish masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. His books include The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550.
Currently, he is finishing a monographic study, titled Mirror of Mirrors: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Most recently, Falkenburg served as chair of the Art History Department at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Before that he was Professor of Western Art and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; Deputy Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History; and Research Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
Falkenburg teaches The Idea of the Portrait, a class on one of the most fundamental forms of human expression in art. Falkenburg holds his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, and masters and undergraduate degrees from Gronigen University in the Netherlands.