ABSTRACT
The global turn that has reshaped art history over the past 30-odd years was from the beginning motivated by a basic premise: that the discipline would need to move beyond modern nation states as delimiters for research. This category, which had become firmly entrenched, would need to be denaturalized. The art of Renaissance “Italy” and “Dutch” art in the so-called Golden Age were, for instance, suddenly held up as fictions, homogenizing hermeneutics that allowed scholars to conveniently wall off certain groups of artworks from others. Delimiting factors are of course necessary. Every scholar needs a selection mechanism to set boundaries past which they will not go in search of connections and comparanda—boundaries beyond which such correlations would seem “arbitrary” and thus meaningless. The problem, however, was that the borders of the nation state were revealed to be ill-fitting in failing to map onto the actualities of the early modern world.
