Name Hessel Miedema Role Author | ||
Books Jan Nagel: a sixteenth-century master | ||
Education University of Amsterdam | ||
Hessel Miedema (born 21 January 1929, Sneek) is a leading Dutch art historian and the world authority on Karel van Mander.
Biography
He was born in Sneek, but grew up in Amsterdam, where he studied art history at the University of Amsterdam. After his studies in 1957 he became curator of the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden. In 1963 he returned to Amsterdam to write his dissertation on Karel van Mander. Though best known for his (Dutch and English) work on Van Mander, he is also an artist and linguistics expert who has written poems and stories in his native Frisian. He wrote the poem De greate wrakseling with illustrations by his own hand in West Frisian in 1964 about a sculptor who fights for innovation against the strict structures of musea. The sculptor realizes at a certain point that he has forgotten to knock his art to pieces.