The Northern Renaissance was the art of the Renaissance north of the Alps, flourishing from the 1420s to about 1600 in the Low Countries, Germany, France and England. Its paintings join minutely observed detail and glowing oil color to religious themes, and later to portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life. Its first center was the Burgundian Netherlands, where dukes and wealthy merchants in Bruges, and later Antwerp, commissioned altarpieces and portraits. Gothic habits lingered there long after Italian ideas arrived.
Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck opened the period in the 1420s and 1430s. Van Eyck refined oil painting, building color in thin, translucent glazes that make velvet, metal and skin glow. His Ghent Altarpiece, begun by his brother Hubert and completed in 1432, remains in St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent. In the Arnolfini Portrait (1434, National Gallery, London), a convex mirror reflects the room and two visitors at the door. Rogier van der Weyden added intense grief, as in The Descent from the Cross (about 1435, Prado, Madrid). Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece, admired for its realism, reached Florence in 1483 and now hangs in the Uffizi.
In Germany, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) twice traveled to Italy, where his woodcuts and engravings were admired. His frontal Self-Portrait of 1500 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) recalls images of Christ. Matthias Grünewald painted a Crucifixion of torn, greenish flesh for the Isenheim Altarpiece (about 1512-1516, Colmar). Lucas Cranach the Elder portrayed Martin Luther in Wittenberg. Hans Holbein the Younger, later court painter to Henry VIII, stretched a distorted skull across the foreground of The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London).
Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder developed personal styles that later painters copied for generations. Bosch filled The Garden of Earthly Delights (about 1490-1510, Prado) with hybrid creatures and crowds of small nude figures. Bruegel painted peasants, seasons and proverbs on large panels. In The Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), the eye drops from a hilltop into a frozen valley. Such works helped make landscape and genre painting subjects of their own.
Italian forms took hold slowly. The Antwerp Mannerists (1500-1530) were among the first Netherlandish painters to adopt them, and later the so-called Romanists trained in Rome itself. In France, Italians such as Rosso Fiorentino founded the School of Fontainebleau for Francis I. The Reformation nearly ended religious painting in England and the northern Netherlands, and the image-breaking riots of 1566 destroyed many altarpieces across the Low Countries. In the last years of the 16th century, Karel van Mander and Hendrick Goltzius led a final Mannerist phase in Haarlem.
