Northern Renaissance HUM pg.

479-488
Differences between
Italian & Northern
Renaissance
Jan van Eyck
Double Arnolfini Portrait
Hieronymus Bosch
Garden of Earthly Delights
Memento mori
woodcut
engraving
Albrect Dürer
The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
Self Portrait*
Grünewald
Isenheim Altarpiece
Hans Holbein the Younger
Portrait of Henry VIII
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Peasant Wedding*
linear perspective*

Prior to the Reformation, in the cities of Northern Europe, a growing middle class
joined princely rulers and the Church to encourage the arts. In addition to
traditional religious subjects, middle-class patrons commissioned portraits that—
like those painted by Italian Renaissance artists (see chapter 17)—recorded their
physical appearance and brought attention to their earthly achievements. Fifteenth-
century Northern artists, unlike their Italian counterparts, were relatively
unfamiliar with Greco-Roman culture; many of them moved in the direction of
detailed Realism, already evident in the manuscript illuminations of the Limbourg
brothers (see Figure 15.1).
The pioneer of Northern realism was the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck (ca.
1380–1441). Van Eyck, whom we met in chapter 17, was reputed to have perfected the
art of oil painting (see Figure 17.11). His application of thin glazes of colored
pigments bound with linseed oil achieved the impression of dense, atmospheric
space, and simulated the naturalistic effects of light reflecting off the surfaces
of objects. Such effects were almost impossible to achieve in fresco or tempera.
While van Eyck lacked any knowledge of the system of linear perspective popularized
in Florence, he achieved an extraordinary level of realism both in the miniatures
he executed for religious manuscripts and in his panel paintings.
Van Eyck’s full-length double portrait of 1434 is the first painting in Western art
to have portrayed a secular couple in a domestic interior (see LOOKING INTO, Figure
19.6). The painting has long been the subject of debate among scholars who have
questioned its original purpose, as well as the identity of the sitters. It was
long thought to represent the marriage of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini (an Italian
cloth merchant who represented the Medici bank in Bruges) to Jeanne Cenami, but it
has recently been discovered that Jeanne died in 1433, a year before the date of
the painting. Since so many elements in the painting suggest a betrothal or wedding
vow, however, it is speculated that Giovanni, who knew van Eyck in Bruges for many
years, might have remarried in 1434 and commissioned the artist to record the
union.
In the painting, the richly dressed Arnolfini raises his right hand as if to greet
or vow, while the couple joins hands, a gesture traditionally associated with
engagement or marriage. Behind the couple, an inscription on the back wall of the
chamber reads “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic” (“Jan van Eyck was here”); this
testimonial is reiterated by the presence of two figures, probably the artist
himself and a second observer, whose painted reflections are seen in the convex
mirror below the inscription. Van Eyck’s consummate mastery of minute, realistic
details—from the ruffles on the young woman’s headcovering to the whiskers of the
monkey-faced dog—demonstrate the artist’s determination to capture the immediacy of
the physical world. This attention to detail and deliberate lack of idealization,
typical of Northern painting, sets it apart from most Italian Renaissance art.

Bosch
The generation of Flemish artists that followed Jan van Eyck produced one of the
most enigmatic figures of the Northern Renaissance: Hieronymus Bosch (1460–1516).
Little is known about Bosch’s life, and the exact meaning of some of his works is
much disputed. His career spanned the decades of the High Renaissance in Italy, but
comparison of his paintings with those of Raphael or Michelangelo underscores the
enormous difference between Italian Renaissance art and that of the European North:
whereas Raphael and Michelangelo elevated the natural nobility of the individual,
Bosch detailed the fallibility of humankind, its moral struggle, and its
apocalyptic destiny.
Bosch’s most famous work, the triptych known as The Garden of Earthly
Delights (Figure 19.7), was executed around 1510, the very time that Raphael was
painting The School of Athens. A work of astonishing complexity, the imagery of
Bosch’s painting has baffled and intrigued viewers for centuries. For, while it
seems to describe the traditional Christian theme of the Creation, Fall, and
Punishment of humankind, it does so by means of an assortment of wildly
unconventional images. When the wings of the altarpiece are closed, one sees an
image of God hovering above a huge transparent globe: the planet earth in the
process of creation. An accompanying inscription reads: “He spoke, and it came to
be; he commanded and it was created” (Psalm 33.9). When the triptych is opened, the
left wing shows the Creation of Eve, but the event takes place in an Eden populated
with fabulous and predatory creations (such as the cat at lower left). In the
central panel, amidst a cosmic landscape, hordes of youthful nudes cavort in a
variety of erotic and playful pastimes. They frolic with oversized flora and fruit,
real and imagined animals, gigantic birds, and strangely shaped vessels. In the
right wing, Bosch pictures Hell as a dark and sulfurous inferno where the damned
are tormented by an assortment of sinister creatures and infernal machines that
inflict punishment on sinners appropriate to their sins (as in Dante’s Inferno; see
chapter 12). The hoarder (at the lower right), for instance, pays for his greed by
excreting gold coins into a pothole, while the nude nearby, punished for the sin of
lust, is fondled by demons.
The Garden of Earthly Delights has been described by some as an exposition on the
decadent behavior of the descendants of Adam and Eve, but its distance from
conventional religious iconography has made it the subject of endless scholarly
interpretation. Bosch, a Roman Catholic, seems to have borrowed imagery from a
variety of medieval and contemporary sources, including the Bible, popular
proverbs, marginal grotesques in illuminated manuscripts, and pilgrimage badges, as
well as the popular pseudo-sciences of his time: astrology, the study of the
influence of heavenly bodies on human affairs (the precursor of astronomy); and
alchemy, the art of transmuting base metals into gold (the precursor of chemistry).
The egg-shaped vessels, beakers, and transparent tubes that appear in all parts of
the triptych were commonly used in alchemical transmutation. The latter process may
have been familiar to Bosch as symbolic of creation and destruction, and, more
specifically, as a metaphor for the biblical Creation and Fall.
Regardless of how one interprets Bosch’s Garden, it is clear that the artist
transformed standard Christian iconography to suit his imagination. Probably
commissioned by a private patron, Bosch may have felt free to bring fantasy and
invention to traditional subject matter. The result is a moralizing commentary on
the varieties of human folly afflicting sinful creatures hopeful of Christian
salvation.
More conventional in its imagery, Bosch’s Death and the Miser (Figure 19.8) belongs
to the tradition of the memento mori (discussed in chapter 12), which warns the
beholder of the inevitability of death. The painting also shows the influence of
popular fifteenth-century handbooks on the art of dying (the ars moriendi),
designed to remind Christians that they must choose between sinful pleasures and
the way of Christ. As Death looms on the threshold, the miser, unable to resist
worldly temptations even in his last minutes of life, reaches for the bag of gold
offered to him by a demon. In the foreground, Bosch depicts the miser storing gold
in his money chest while clutching his rosary. Symbols of worldly power—a helmet,
sword, and shield—allude to earthly follies. The depiction of such still-life
objects to symbolize vanity, transience, or decay would become a genre in itself
among seventeenth-century Flemish artists.

Printmaking
The Protestant Reformation cast a long shadow upon the religious art of the North.
Protestants rejected the traditional imagery of medieval piety, along with church
relics and sacred images, which they associated with superstition and idolatry.
Protestant iconoclasts stripped the stained glass from cathedral windows, shattered
religious sculpture, whitewashed church frescoes, and destroyed altarpieces. At the
same time, however, the voices of reform encouraged the proliferation of private
devotional art, particularly that which illustrated biblical themes. In the
production of portable devotional images, the technology of printmaking played a
major role. Just as movable type had facilitated the dissemination of the printed
word, so the technology of the print made devotional subjects available more
cheaply and in greater numbers than ever before.
The two new printmaking processes of the fifteenth century were woodcut, the
technique of cutting away all parts of a design on a wood surface except those that
will be inked and transferred to paper (Figure 19.9), and engraving (Figure 19.10),
the process by which lines are incised on a metal (usually copper) plate that is
inked and run through a printing press. Books with printed illustrations became
cheap alternatives to the hand-illuminated manuscripts that were prohibitively
expensive to all but wealthy patrons.

Durer
Renaissance printmaking, and one of the finest graphic artists of all time, was
Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471–1528). Dürer earned international fame for his
woodcuts and metal engravings. His mastery of the laws of linear perspective and
human anatomy and his investigations into Classical principles of proportions
(enhanced by two trips to Italy) equaled those of the best Italian Renaissance
artist–scientists. In the genre of portraiture, Dürer was the match of Raphael,
but, unlike Raphael, he recorded the features of his sitters with little
idealization. His portrait engraving of Erasmus (see Figure 19.3) captures the
concentrated intelligence of the Prince of Humanists.
Dürer brought to the art of his day a desire to convey the spiritual message of
Scripture. His series of woodcuts illustrating the last book of the New Testament,
the Revelation According to Saint John (also called the “Apocalypse”), reveals the
extent to which he achieved his purpose. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—one of
fifteen woodcuts in the series—brings to life the terrifying events described in
Revelation 6.1–8 (see Figure 19.1). Amidst billowing clouds, Death (in the
foreground), Famine (carrying a pair of scales), War (brandishing a sword), and
Pestilence (drawing his bow) sweep down upon humankind; their victims fall beneath
the horses’ hooves, or, as with the bishop in the lower left, are devoured by
infernal monsters.
Dürer was a humanist in his own right and a great admirer of both the moderate
Erasmus and the zealous Luther. In one of his most memorable engravings, Knight,
Death, and the Devil, he depicted the Christian soul in the allegorical guise of a
medieval knight (Figure 19.11), a figure made famous in a treatise by Erasmus
entitled Handbook for the Militant Christian (1504). The knight, the medieval
symbol of fortitude and courage, advances against a dark and brooding landscape.
Accompanied by his loyal dog, he marches forward, ignoring his fearsome companions:
Death, who rides a pale horse and carries an hourglass, and the devil, a shaggy,
crosseyed, horned demon. Here is the visual counterpart of Erasmus’ message that
the Christian must hold to the path of virtue, and in spite of “all those spooks
and phantoms” that come upon him, he must “look not behind.” The knight’s dignified
bearing (probably inspired by heroic equestrian statues Dürer had seen in Italy)
contrasts sharply with the bestial and cankerous features of his forbidding
escorts. In the tradition of Jan van Eyck, but with a precision facilitated by the
new medium of metal engraving, Dürer records every leaf and pebble, hair and
wrinkle; and yet the final effect is not a mere piling up of minutiae but, like
nature itself, an astonishing amalgam of organically related elements.
In addition to his numerous woodcuts and engravings, Dürer produced hundreds of
paintings: portraits and large-scale religious subjects. His interest in the
natural world inspired the first landscapes in Western art (Figure 19.12). These
detailed panoramic views of the countryside, executed in watercolor during his
frequent travels to Italy and elsewhere, were independent works, not mere studies
for larger, more formal subjects. To such landscapes, as well as to his
meticulously detailed renderings of plants, animals, and birds, Dürer brought the
eye of a scientific naturalist and a spirit of curiosity not unlike that of his
Italian contemporary Leonardo da Vinci.
Grünewald
Dürer’s German contemporary Matthias Gothardt Neithardt, better known as
“Grünewald” (1460–1528), did not share Dürer’s Classically inspired aesthetic
ideals, nor his quest for realistic representation. The few paintings and drawings
left by Grünewald (as compared with the hundreds of works left by Dürer) do not
tell us whether the artist was Catholic or Protestant. In their spiritual intensity
and emotional subjectivity, however, they are among the most striking devotional
works of the Northern Renaissance.
Grünewald’s landmark work, the Isenheim Altarpiece, was designed to provide solace
to the victims of disease and especially plague at the Hospital of Saint Anthony in
Isenheim, near Colmar, France (Figure 19.13). Like the Imitatio Christi, which
taught Christians to seek identification with Jesus, this multipaneled altarpiece
reminded its beholders of their kinship with the suffering Jesus, depicted in the
central panel. Following the tradition of the devotional German Pietà (see Figure
15.11), Grünewald made use of expressive exaggeration and painfully precise detail:
the agonized body of Jesus is lengthened to emphasize its weight as it hangs from
the bowed cross, the flesh putrefies with clotted blood and angry thorns, the
fingers convulse and curl, while the feet—broken and bruised—contort in a spasm of
pain. Grünewald reinforces the mood of lamentation by placing the scene in a
darkened landscape. He exaggerates the gestures of the attending figures, including
that of John the Baptist, whose oversized finger points to the prophetic Latin
inscription that explains his mystical presence: “He must increase and I must
decrease” (John 3:30).

Cranach and Holbein

The German cities of the sixteenth century produced some of the finest draftsmen in
the history of Western art. Dürer’s contemporary Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–
1553) was a highly acclaimed court painter at Wittenberg and, like Dürer, a convert
to the Protestant reform. In 1522, he produced the woodcuts for the first German
edition of the New Testament. Although he also worked for Catholic patrons, he
painted and engraved numerous portraits of Protestant leaders, the most notable of
whom was his friend Martin Luther, whose likeness he recreated several times. In
the portrait illustrated in Figure 19.4, Cranach exercised his skill as a master
draftsman, capturing both the authoritative silhouette and the confident demeanor
of the famous reformer.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), celebrated as the greatest of the German
portraitists, was born in Augsburg, but spent much of his life in Switzerland,
France, and England. With a letter of introduction from his friend Erasmus, Holbein
traveled to England to paint the family of Sir Thomas More (see Figure 19.16)—
Western Europe’s first domestic group portrait (it survives only in drawings and
copies). On a later trip to England, Holbein became the favorite of Henry VIII,
whose likeness he captured along with portraits of the king’s current and
prospective wives.
In common with Dürer and Cranach, Holbein was a master of line. All three artists
manifested the integration of brilliant draftsmanship and precise, realistic detail
that characterizes the art of the Northern Renaissance. Holbein, however, was
unique in his minimal use of line to evoke a penetrating sense of the sitter’s
personality. So lifelike are some of Holbein’s portraits that modern scholars have
suggested that he made use of technical aids, such as the camera lucida, in their
preparation (see chapter 17, Exploring Issues).

Bruegel
The career of the last great sixteenth-century Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (1525–1569), followed the careers of most other Northern Renaissance masters
by a generation. Like Dürer, Bruegel had traveled to Italy and absorbed its
Classical culture; his style, however, would remain relatively independent of
Italian influence. Closer in temperament to Bosch, he was deeply concerned with
human folly, especially as it was manifested in the everyday life of his Flemish
neighbors. Among his early works were crowded panoramas depicting themes of human
pride and religious strife. Bruegel’s Triumph of Death may be read as an indictment
of the brutal wars that plagued sixteenth-century Europe (Figure 19.14). In a
cosmic landscape that resembles the setting of a Last Judgment or a Boschlike
underworld, Bruegel depicts throngs of skeletons relentlessly slaughtering all
ranks of men and women. The armies of the dead are without mercy. In the left
foreground, a cardinal collapses in the arms of a skeleton; in the left corner, an
emperor relinquishes his hoards of gold; on the right, death interrupts the
pleasure of gamblers and lovers. Some of the living are crushed beneath the wheels
of a death cart, others are hanged from scaffolds or subjected to torture.
Bruegel’s apocalyptic vision transforms the late medieval Dance of Death into a
universal holocaust.
Many of Bruegel’s best-known works were inspired by biblical parables or local
proverbs, popular expressions of universal truths concerning human behavior. In his
drawings, engravings, and paintings, he rendered these as visual narratives set in
the Flemish countryside. His treatment of the details of rustic life, which earned
him the title “Peasant Bruegel,” and his landscapes illustrating the labors
appropriate to each season were the culmination of a tradition begun in the
innovative miniatures of the Limbourg brothers (see Figure 15.1). However,
Bruegel’s genre painting(representations of the everyday life of ordinary folk)
were not small-scale illustrations, but monumental (and sometimes allegorical)
transcriptions of rural activities. The Wedding Dance (Figure 19.15) depicts
peasant revelry in a country setting whose earthiness is reinforced by rich tones
of russet, tan, and muddy green. At the very top of the panel, an improvised
wedding table appears among the trees. The red-haired bride, clothed in black
(center left), has joined the villagers, who cavort to the music of the bagpipes
(right foreground). Although Bruegel’s figures are clumsy and often ill-
proportioned, they share an ennobling vitality. In his art, as in that of other
Northern Renaissance painters, we discover an unvarnished perception of human
beings in mundane and unheroic circumstances—a sharp contrast to the idealized
conception of humankind found in the art of Renaissance Italy.