Northern Renaissance Early
 Arnolfini Wedding Jan van Eyck Panel painting c.1434 National Gallery, London |
If we compare Masaccio's idealization of form and composition to Jan van Eyck's' famous Arnolfini Marriage, it becomes obvious that very different artistic conditions prevailed in the North that had little reference to those of the Italian or Southern Renaissance.
Where the Italians were generalists, interested in the universals underlying the physical world, the Northern, in this case Flemish, were literalistic, interested in the particular. Where the Italians concentrated on anatomical structure and how it is revealed by shading, the Flemish artists were unsurpassed in the rendering of surface textures. Where the Italians utilized Brunelleschi's linear perspective, the Flemish approached perspective "empirically," by observing how things appeared in the spatial world. But what could accounts for these differences?
One issue was the popularity of Classical Antiquity. Remember, that Renaissance means "rebirth" and to the Italians it was a rebirth of the "Glorious Past," the Classical ideal. Remember those Florentines who were looking for social recognition and intellectual credentials? Well, northern intellectuals and artists appear to have been less convinced of its merits, not having a "Classical" past to be reborn. Also unlike Italy there was no tradition of large-scale fresco work. This relative absence of painting, other than manuscript illustration, meant that northerners preferred the more precise manuscript techniques that dated back to the Early Medieval works such as the Book of Kells (page 285) and the later Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry by the Limbourge Brothers (page 303).
A less obvious association, but perhaps the most important, was the rise of "disguised symbolism." This means that almost any detail within the picture, however casual, may carry a symbolic message. By placing a profound faith in the observable world, northern artists and intellectuals implied that God was manifest not only in biblical narratives but in the very nature he created. (Keep this tucked away as I'll be referring back to it when we look at Romantic painting later).
Items as diverse as flowers, food, animals, and even insects were worthy of consideration since they represented God's grand design for the universe. Elements from the natural world came to replace traditional narrative sequences in the telling of stories (a picture is worth a thousand words). In this way, a picture of a landscape could be read both for its apparent life-likeness and its symbolic content.
Disguised symbolism can also be thought of as an extension through time of their nomadic, nature worshiping ancestors we looked at from the Early Medieval period. A "christianization" of their pagan gods -- a flower that represented one aspect of a nature Goddess who might have encompassed birth (creation) and death (destruction) as well as the many aspects of fertility from children to crops, now became associated with Mary, the mother of the Christian God.
The change from manuscript miniatures (the world in microcosm) to large scale painting is represented by an artist whose name we're not even sure of: The Master of Flemalle, probably Robert Campin. Again, maybe not. Regardless of his name, his work is the first phase, and perhaps the decisive one, of the pictorial revolution in Flanders and, consequently, in Northern Europe.
For the first time in Northern Europe (north of the Alps), we find the sensation of actually looking through the surface of a panel, a "picture window effect", into a spatial world of unlimited depth, stability, continuity and completeness, but still a little awkward. Compare the "Merode" with the Illumination from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in your text as an example of looking "at" as opposed to looking "through".
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Merode
Altarpiece (Triptych of the Annunciation)
   Robert Campin the "Master of Flemalie" Oil on Panel 253/8 x 107/8" c.1425 |
With the Merode Altarpiece we are transported abruptly from the aristocratic world of the International/French Court Style of Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry to the household of a Flemish Burgher. Bob, apparently, was not a Court Painter, but a townsman catering to the tastes of well-to-do fellow citizens, such as the two donors kneeling outside the Virgin's chamber. This break with tradition created a new problem for him: how to transfer a supernatural event from a symbolic setting to an everyday environment? Enter the idea of disguised symbolism, which also accounts for the "birds eye view perspective" and the extreme clarity that gives equal weight to everything in the painting and causes the eye to bounce from item to item as if each item is important. And it is.
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Disguised
symbolism
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Merode Altarpiece Detail. |
The lily on the table has three flowers, two open, one about to bloom... Father, Son, and Holy Spirit/Ghost, with Jesus, whose birth is the subject of the painting, about to "flower." The plume of smoke rising from the candle suggests a holy presence and the rose bush, violets and daisies, are all flowers associated with the Virgin: roses denote her charity, violets her humility and lilies her chastity. Okay, you get the idea by now. Everything is important as a symbol of the "unseen world," in this case the spiritual world of Christianity. In other cultures and other times different "worlds" are represented by different symbols, but that's another story we'll get to later, especially when we look at "Modern/Contemporary" Art. But let's get back to the Northern Renaissance. |
 Man in a Red Turban (Self-portrait?) Oil on Panel 101/4 x 71/2" c.1433 National Gallery, London |
Jan van Eyck,
a somewhat younger, and much more famous artist than the Master of Flemalle,
has long been credited with the "invention" of oil painting. But he is
best known for one of the most famous Flemish works of art, the Ghent
Altarpiece, completed in 1432.
On a stylistic level, the Ghent Altarpiece shares many qualities
with the Merode Altarpiece: the all embracing devotion to the visible
world, the unlimited depth of space, the angular drapery folds, and far
more realism that the "International/Court Style." Ghent Altarpiece (closed),
Cathedral of Saint-Bavo, Ghent, Flanders (Belgium) Oil on Panel 11'53/4"
x 7'63/4" c.1432 With the wings closed, the front shows the Annunciation
and simulated statues of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist
flanked by the donors, Jodocus Vyd and his wife Isabel Borluut. Although
the architecture is spacious, the figures are in ambiguous relation to
it and quite out of scale; there is little concern for a proportioned
space adjusted to the human figure.
 Ghent Altarpiece (closed), Cathedral of Saint-Bavo, Ghent, Flanders (Belgium) Oil on Panel 11'53/4" x 7'63/4" c.1432 |
When opened, a representation of the Medieval concept of the redemption of man is revealed. The entire altar piece amplifies the theme of man's redemption through the infinite love of God, who sacrificed his only son to save mankind.
In the central
panel, the community of saints comes from the four corners of the
earth and move toward the altar of the Lamb, from whose heart blood flows
into a chalice, and toward the octagonal fountain of life into which spills
the "pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of
the throne of God and of the Lamb" (Rev. 22:1).
On the outer most panels are the images of Adam and Eve, remarkably
unclassical in their nakedness (naked vs nude), symbolizing sin and the
Medieval view of the human body as indecent.
All Flemish painters
had a talent for rendering details and Van Eyck was first among equals.
To him, everything was God's creation; every object in his pictures had
to be treated with the same reverent concern.
High Renaissance
In The North
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The
Art of Northern Europe during the 16th century is characterized by
a sudden awareness of the Italian Renaissance. Many artists traveled to
Italy to study the new art first hand; others studied directly from Italian
artists who came north, or indirectly through the numerous Italian engravings
that circulated throughout Northern Europe.
In Germany, the wealthy middle class maintained close commercial
relations with Venice, and German humanists were in contact with the Neo-Platonic
Academy of Florence.
Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) became the first Northern artist to
travel to Italy expressly to study Italian Art and its underlying theories.
He was friends with Erasmus of Rotterdam (a leading Humanist writer and
activist) and
Giovanni Bellini in Venice. Like
Da Vinci, Durer wrote theoretical
treatises on Perspective, Fortifications, and the Ideal in Human Proportions...
becoming known as the "Leonardo of the North."
Much of Durer's fame and influence depended on his mastery of the
graphic arts (printmaking). In addition to illustrations for books, he
circulated and sold prints in single sheets which the average person could
afford (usually only the aristocracy or wealthy could afford to purchase
or commission works of art)... becoming known as the "people's artist"
as well as a model for professional artists and an advocate of the principle
of the Italian Renaissance.
The Virtuosity of Durer's wood cuts have never been surpassed;
by adapting the form following hatching engraving (see page 146 in your
text) to the woodcut.
In The Fall of Man, Durer approaches his "ideal" male, based on
Italian concepts, but his Eve remains a fleshy German matron. The iconography
is also Northern... The Four Humors:
Cholieric (Bile/Anger) represented by the Cat
Melancholic (Sad/Gloomy) represented by the Elk
Sanguine (Hopeful - Optimistic) represented by the Rabbit
Phlegmatic (Sluggish - Apathetic) represented by the Ox
 The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) Engraving 97/8 x 75/8" c.1504 Philadelphia Museum of Art |
Adam
and Eve at the crucial moment of The Fall are symbolized by
the cat and mouse in the near foreground. The Great Piece of Turf For
Durer, like other Northern artists, reality was found in the detail as
opposed to the Italian Renaissance concept of the Universal, the Grandiose
and the Heroic.
Durer agreed with Aristotle that "sight is the noblest faculty
of man... We regard a form and figure out of nature with more pleasure
than any other".
"Nature holds the beautiful for him who has the insight to extract
it. Even in humble, perhaps ugly things lies beauty and the ideal. That
which by passes or would improve upon nature, may not be in the end, the
truly beautiful.
 The Great Piece of Turf water color by Albrecht Durer |
Depart not from
nature in your opinion, neither imagine that you can invent anything
better... for art stands firmly fixed in nature, and he who can find it
there, he has IT." ......................................................
Albrecht Durer
Pieter
Bruegel the Elder was the greatest of the Netherland painters
of the 16th century. In Bruegel's paintings, no matter how huge a slice
of the world he may show, the activities of man (genre) remains the dominant
theme of his work. His consummate skill in the use of line and shape and
subtlety in tonal harmony make him one of the greatest landscape painters
of all time and an occidental counterpart of the great masters of classical
Chinese landscape.
On a more personal level, he enjoyed making a critical/satirical
comment on the dubious conditions of mankind. He seemed to delight in
leading us into these pictures through devious paths and confronting us
sometimes with mystery, sometimes with a less than flattering revelation
about ourselves....
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Landscape
With The Fall Of Icarus
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 Pieter Bruegel the Elder Oil on Panel 2'5" x 3'81/8" Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels |
Old
German/Netherlandish proverb: "When a man dies no plow stops" If you look carefully in the lower right corner you will see Icarus' arm above the water, but everyone else is too busy to notice, or really care for that matter. Life goes on, eh. |
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The
Parable of The Blind
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"And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."
(Matt. 15: 12-19) |
Bruegel the Elder seems an appropriate place to end our discussion of the Renaissance. For he, like other Northern artists, reveals a very different sensibility from what we have seen in the Southern, or Italian, Renaissance. Their reservation about Italian art and its reliance on antiquity rather than on the scriptures paralleled a growing distrust of Papal authority and a growing sense of nationalism. The end result will be a revolution that will lay the foundations of our modern world.
An Overview
All right, lets take a look at where we have just been. First off, there are a lot of artists we haven't looked at and many individual variations in the general styles we have looked at. But in a very broad or general way, the artists of the Italian Renaissance looked back to the "Glory that was Rome;" they wanted to paint the Grandeur of the Ideal, the "Epic of Man" and the lofty conceptions of religion as they involve the heroic and the sublime.
Where the Italians were generalists, interested in the universals, the Northern artists were literalists, interested in the particular. Two different "world views", one looking back to it's Classical past the other grounded in the here and now world of every day life. Where the Italian Renaissance saw God in the Macrocosm (the Universal), the Northern artist saw God in the Microcosm (the Universe in miniature) -- different content = different form. In other words, in the South they were awed by the magnificence of God's overall plan (the big picture, so to speak) for the universe and mankind, in general, where the Northern artist saw that same plan in Albrecht Durer's "The Great Piece of Turf" or in a single man or woman.
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Artists
and Categories
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Early
Renaissance
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High
Renaissance
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Northern |
Southern
(Italian) |
Northern |
Southern (Italian) |
Artists you should be able to identity by their work and classify by period.
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Early
Renaissance Italian
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 Giotto |
 Masaccio |
 Donatello |
 Botticelli |
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Early
Renaissance Northern |
High
Renaissance Northern
 
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The
Big Three of the Italian High Renaissance
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Lynn University Art Appreciation
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