Art and Architecture in Flanders and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract Around 1420 a new pictorial language emerged in Flanders, based on the faithful observation of reality and the virtuosic application of oil paint. This visual revolution, associated primarily with Jan van Eyck, coincided with the equally momentous artistic developments that occurred in Florentine art around 1420. Yet, although Van Eyck and his successors, notably Rogier van der Weyden, shared many of the aims of their Italian peers, the term ‘Renaissance', in the conventional sense of a classically inspired ‘rebirth', is unhelpful for much of the art of northern Europe in the fifteenth century. It was not until after 1500 that the cultural climate of Italian humanism, with its attendant influence on the visual arts, began to manifest itself in the work of artists such as Jan Gossaert-though not in the work of his successors, such as Pieter Bruegel. The first part of this chapter considers the elements in fifteenth-century northern art and architecture that can and cannot be usefully seen within the cultural model of the Renaissance. The second part focuses on the sixteenth century, when Italian understandings of classical antiquity, mediated in part by northern humanists, reshaped the artistic and architectural traditions of the north.