Despite being considered one of the most important representatives of seventeenth-century topographical battle iconography in his time and today, Peter Snayers and his topographical oeuvre have never yet been thoroughly researched. For the first time, this book zooms in on Snayers's life, his oeuvre and his patrons. Using unpublished archival documents Snayers's training in Antwerp, his emigration to Brussels and integration in court society, as well as his studio, art production for the market and climb on the social ladder are investigated. Snayers's topographical oeuvre is constructed for the first time and studied in detail, especially with regard to the extent that they combined historical fact and artistic fiction, remembrance and glorification. The author identifies and examines Snayers's visual and written sources and studies his artistic inventions based on the works of predecessors and colleagues, including Georg Braun, Frans Hogenberg, Jacques Callot and Peter Paul Rubens. She also reconstructs Snayers's patronage network on the basis of archival documents and the canvases themselves and examines the intentions, functions and meanings that Snayers's tailor-made paintings had for his patrons. New light is shed on one of his most important commissions, the series ordered by the Italian commander Octavio Piccolomini, thanks to unpublished correspondence between the painter and Piccolomini's agent. By analyzing a wide range of previously unpublished archival documents on the painter, his works of art and patrons and by placing his topographical battle paintings in a historical framework, this book restores Peter Snayers to his rightful place in seventeenth-century Flemish art history.

The book contains the first catalogue raisonne of Snayers's topographical oeuvre, supplemented by a record of all signed and with certainty attributed genre paintings of military subjects, landscapes and religious works. Moreover, by studying early modern topographical battle iconography for the first time in a contextual, cross-disciplinary way based on the study of art, the cartography, the literature and the architectural, military, political and socio-economic history, this book casts fresh light on this fascinating genre.