Architecture and Painting

Abstract

The epochs in the history of art occupy so central a position in western achievement yet so strongly resist the neat distinctions of period and categorisation as the fifteenth century. The arts of fifteenth-century Christendom, known variously as 'late medieval', 'early Renaissance', 'late Gothic', even 'florid' and 'flamboyant', present an extraordinarily heterogeneous picture. The most profound changes come from the most mimetic of media, manuscript and panel painting, and to leave architecture, and to a lesser extent sculpture, unaltered until the mid-sixteenth century. The contrasting sensibilities of van der Weyden and van Eyck established the two poles within which Netherlandish painting operated to the end of the century. The Quattrocento sanctioned all kinds of personal commemoration for political, military, literary and artistic achievement. The cultivation of purely aesthetic values and interests, allied to a proliferation of new kinds of secular art in northern Europe and Italy, cannot obscure the fact that fifteenth-century art remained predominantly religious.