Homing in on the Venetian Renaissance
Understanding Late Gothic painting
Tracking the Renaissance to the Low Countries
In this chapter, I trace the spread of the Renaissance northward, first to Venice, then to Germany and the Low Countries. I also examine the Late Gothic style in Flanders.
With almost a quarter million residents, Venice was a Renaissance boomtown and one of Europe’s greatest cities. Population-wise, it dwarfed Rome. Almost all of Europe’s trade with the Near East and Far East filtered through Venice. In fact, Venice was the greatest port town in Europe. The city teemed with exotic goods and merchants from all over the known world.
Europeans venturing south over the Alps, on pilgrimages or business trips, typically stopped to “refuel” in Venice before journeying to other Italian destinations. Those travelers sometimes hauled artworks across the Alps with them. Great Venetian families often collected the latest in Dutch, French, and German styles.
Venice was an artistic melting pot. This meant that a Venetian artist like Giovanni Bellini could learn of the oil-painting innovations of a Flemish artist like Jan van Eyck simply by checking out the paintings trickling in on the art market or by observing visiting artists who had mastered northern techniques. Venetian artists had the world at their brush tips, and they wound up surpassing other nations and Italian city-states in oil painting and the use of rich colors.
Venice offered another advantage for artists: It was politically stable for more than a thousand years — so stable, in fact, that most official documents referred to the city as the “Most Serene Republic.” Today, few people realize that Venice had the longest-running republican (representative) form of democracy, uninterrupted from around 750 to 1797 when Napoleon Bonaparte marched in and squelched everything. It was hardly a perfect democracy; only the 1,400 or so people of noble bloodline could vote. But Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers of the United States studied Venice closely as a model for representative democracy. In Renaissance times, this form of government meant that, although the rest of Italy was a bloody battleground for competing dukes, princes, and foreign kings, an artist or cutting-edge author could generally find safe haven and a good market in Venice.
In the following sections, I explore the art of Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto, as well as the architecture of Andrea Palladio.
Although Renaissance artists got to mix their own colors on their palettes, it was usually some underling in the studio who had to grind the pigments in a pestle and mortar so that they could be mixed with oil or egg tempera. In the Renaissance, artist’s workshops were often like mini-corporations. Besides the immediate family members, the shop included numerous nonfamily apprentices and journeymen performing different tasks and assisting in the production of art. The young folks had the laborious jobs of sanding wood, grinding pigment, cleaning the studio, and running errands. The older apprentices sometimes painted parts of a picture — filling in the drapery, painting the backgrounds, and so on. The goal was to imitate the master’s style.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) grew up in a family of artists, so he had a privileged spot in the studio. His father, Jacopo (c. 1400–c. 1470), kept splendid sketchbooks of drawings that were really corporate trade secrets. (These drawings are now in the Louvre and the British Museum.) The sketchbooks showed novices how to make good animals, interesting scenes, and convincing perspective.
The pressure was on Giovanni, because his older brother, Gentile (c. 1429–1507), had already proven to be an outstanding painter.
Fortunately for Giovanni — and for us — he surpassed all expectations. His Virgin and Child images are some of the most lifelike and intimate in all of art history. Bellini’s Madonnas often pop up on Christmas cards and stamps. His paintings glitter with the rich Byzantine colors he grew up seeing in Venice’s great churches (see Chapter 9).
In Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, the gleaming effects mentioned earlier are set against the dark backdrop of a secluded wood. The theme is taken from Ovid’s ancient book, The Feasts, which describes the origins of Roman festivals. Bellini illustrated a feast hosted by Bacchus, the God of Wine. At the party, the beautiful nymph Lotis, shown at the far right on Bellini’s canvas, falls asleep after consuming too much wine. The figure shown lifting her skirt is Priapus, the lustful God of Virility. In Ovid’s humorous account, Priapus’s attempt is foiled by a braying donkey. Lotis wakes up and repels the God of Virility.
Bellini animated the staged scene by organizing the figures along a slightly wavy compositional line. The viewer feels the drunken sway of this pastoral fantasy.
Giovanni Bellini’s sister, Nicolosia, married the artist Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506), further expanding the Bellini art business. But whereas Giovanni’s art explored color and soft contour, Mantegna picked up on Jacopo Bellini’s (his father-in-law’s) interests in line and perspective. For Mantegna, color takes a back seat to drawing.
Mantegna had a knack for creating elaborate stage sets of ancient architecture that seemed to tunnel back in space. He painted a portrait of the Gonzaga family in Mantua in what appears to be an open-air pavilion. The illusion of depth is so convincing that the actual walls of the Gonzaga bedroom where the frescoes are painted seem not to exist. In other works, his crumbling Roman capitals and broken arches make for some of the most imaginative architecture ever painted.
Mantegna also liked to show the human figure in perspective, sometimes dramatically foreshortened (made to look as though either receding in space or projecting out of the picture plane, through the use of perspective). His Dead Christ depicts Jesus stretched out on his back like a corpse in a morgue. The figure is so foreshortened that the viewer gets a close-up view of Christ’s punctured feet, which seem to project out of the painting. Regardless of your religious beliefs, the picture is painful — and Mantegna’s precise lines don’t soften the gruesome image.
Giovanni Bellini’s pupil, Giorgione (c. 1477–1510), on the other hand, was all about softness. He took Venetian painting in the direction it would follow for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato technique (that smokiness around the contours of people and objects; see Chapter 11) is also used by Giorgione. The warm light and glowing presence of Giorgione’s figures make them seem a natural part of the rustic landscapes they frequently inhabit.
One of Giorgione’s greatest works, The Tempest, shows a nude woman suckling a child while sitting on a hill near a stream. She gazes wistfully into the distance, seemingly unaware of the child. On the other side of the bank, a young man holding a staff and dressed as if he were from another world stops to watch her. In the background, a storm gathers and lightning flashes in the sky. But neither the impending storm nor the woman’s faraway gaze can dispel the serenity of this poetic and mysterious painting. It haunts the viewer without letting him into its secrets.
Many books have been written in an attempt to explain this puzzling picture, but nobody has figured it out. Even Giorgio Vasari, writing just 50 years after Giorgione’s death, had to admit that the meanings of some of the artist’s works had been lost. Vasari also said that Giorgione was soon eclipsed by the fame of his star pupil, Titian. Apparently, the older artist overheard people praising a part of his work but then became unnerved when he realized that it was the portion he had delegated to Titian.
When the great German draftsman and printmaker, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) first visited Venice in 1494, he couldn’t stop drawing and painting watercolors. As he approached Italy, he made watercolors of the Alps from his carriage window. The drawings started when he reached Venice. German artists at the time didn’t usually draw or paint from nude models — but Italians did. When Dürer met Italian artists who were working directly from live models, he started drawing nudes as well. He also made quick sketches of the fashionable dresses that the beautiful Venetian women wore, drawing them in the streets.
Dürer had such a good time on his first trip that he returned to Venice in 1506. Dürer’s most famous work from this second journey is the Madonna (or Feast) of the Rose Garlands; it owes a lot to the example of Bellini. Commissioned for the Venetian charterhouse of German merchants, this altarpiece depicts graceful figures flanking the Virgin. All the subjects are rendered in rich, warm colors and painted in a carefully blended technique reminiscent of Bellini’s.
The trips to Italy reshaped Dürer’s style of art and even his style of dress. His Self-Portrait at Age 26 (see Figure 12-1), which he made after his first trip, shows an increasingly confident artist decked out like an Italian dandy. Behind him, the window reveals a view of the Alps separating Germany and Italy. The portrait shows off Dürer’s newly acquired rank as Ehrbaren, a member of Nuremberg’s merchant class, even as it reminds everyone that he has traveled widely. Everything about the picture says, “I have come into my own.” Yet, when the artist returned to self-portraiture two years later, in 1500, he made his image resemble Christ’s. That painting, now in Munich, may have been inspired by a comment jotted down in the artist’s own notes, “the more we know, the more we resemble the likeness of Christ who truly knows all things.”
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Many people in Dürer’s day believed that 1500 would be the year of the Apocalypse or Judgment Day. (The Y2K fears of crashing computers and food and water shortages were echoes of that type of thinking.) In that climate of fear, the savvy Dürer illustrated a book on the Apocalypse in 1496 and published it in Latin and German editions. It became a best-seller. The woodcuts from this book secured his status as one of Europe’s best printmakers.
The beautiful Venetian women that caught Dürer’s eye are best captured on canvas by the painter Tiziano Vecellio da Cadore, better known as Titian (c. 1488–1576). When he was alive, Venetians called him “the sun amidst small stars.” Today Titian is regarded as Venice’s most famous, and possibly greatest, painter. His rich, earthy palette can include fiery colors, as well as blues of the coolest sapphire. His portraits are so psychologically powerful that each of them seems like a page lifted out of Shakespeare. A portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor earned the artist a knighthood, and Titian was subsequently presented with a huge, golden chain that he wore in all his self- portraits. Spanish royalty avidly collected his works, and later Baroque artists from Diego Velázquez to Peter Paul Rubens copied his paintings.
Titian painted the largest altarpiece Venice had ever seen, The Assumption of the Virgin, which still stands in the church of the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. But the work for which Titian is best known today, the painting whose sexiness inspired the humorist Mark Twain to write A Tramp Abroad, is the reclining nude Venus of Urbino (see Figure 12-2).
Scala / Art Resource, NY
Mark Twain, the great American satirist, jokingly recorded how, upon entering the Uffizi in Florence, you proceed to that most-visited little gallery in the world — the Tribune — and there, against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you many look upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses — Titian’s Venus. It isn’t that she is naked and stretched out on a bed — no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude, there would be a fine howl — but there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat over that wants to — and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.
Her left hand does seem to be preoccupied. Perhaps Titian intended to create a fertility symbol of that hand — along with other elements in the painting. You can puzzle those out for yourself.
This version of the Goddess of Love hails from Urbino, Italy, because Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the son of the duke of Urbino, commissioned the picture.
By the mid-16th century, Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation had spread over large parts of Europe. Its followers railed against the excesses of the Catholic Church and the selling of indulgences. They encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves, instead of accepting the Church’s interpretation without question.
Such protests were really getting under the Vatican’s skin. In 1545, Pope Paul III called Catholic bishops from all over Europe to attend a series of meetings in northern Italy. At these meetings, known as the Council of Trent, Catholics passed reforms for the Church and tried to suppress the heretical offshoots of Luther, Calvin, and the rest.
The Council of Trent took place intermittently from 1545 to 1563 in Trent, Italy, and established the Counter-Reformation, or Catholic Reformation. The Council passed tougher codes of conduct to reform the priests. They also declared the importance of religious images, because the Protestants were destroying the images of saints that once decorated churches. The Council stated that artists should pursue more dramatic and sober scenes in art to better instill a sense of piety in their audience.
Trent was practically in Venice’s backyard, and it wasn’t long before a series of political alliances brought the Inquisition to Venice to stamp out heresy. The Inquisition soon got wind that a Last Supper painted by Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) for a monastery didn’t portray the Christian story with the seriousness and solemnity advised in the edicts of the Council of Trent. (Check out the painting for yourself in Figure 12-3.) Just who complained about the canvas is unclear, because the monks loved having it in their dining hall. Nonetheless, when Veronese was hauled before the tribunal, they asked him to explain the eccentricities of his painting and what various figures in the painting were supposed to be doing.
The inquisitors were especially peeved that the artist showed two German guards at the far right taking bread and wine, as if the Protestants were administering their own Communion. Paolo Veronese was ordered to correct his Last Supper. The tribunal even wanted the dog in front of the table, who sits splayed out (as dogs often do), taken out of the composition. The artist tried to point out that the dog, the dwarf, the man with the nosebleed (holding the handkerchief at the left of the picture), and the two German guards are all in the foreground of the picture — in other words, in the viewer’s space, not in Christ’s space. Christ and his disciples are under the colonnade on a stage removed from the raucous elements of the scene.
But the Inquisitors wanted it repainted. Fortunately for the friars who loved the painting and for the Venetians who resented Rome trying to control their art, the artist came up with a clever compromise. Veronese simply painted in a few inscriptions referencing the fifth chapter of Luke on the railings of the stairs. Luke 5 describes the supper in the house of Levi in which Christ dined with “publicans and sinners.” By renaming the painting Feast in the House of Levi, it was suddenly okay to have all sorts of riff-raff sharing a table with Christ — in fact, the story required it! The Roman inquisitors could do nothing, the Venetians got the picture they wanted, and we all inherited a colorful masterpiece that celebrates the splendor of Venice’s Golden Age.
Scala / Art Resource, NY
Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto (1518–1594), was Veronese’s main rival. Tintoretto claimed that his art combined “the drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian.” Whether he reached the perfection of either is still up for debate, but no one can deny that Tintoretto was one of the stars of the Venetian Renaissance — and an aggressive self-promoter.
Tintoretto’s Saint George and the Dragon displays the artist’s energetic storytelling style. St. George was a 3rd-century saint who supposedly rescued a Libyan princess from a ferocious dragon. After George killed the beast, the king and all the townspeople converted to Christianity. Tintoretto’s altarpiece is a dramatic vertical composition that pulls you in different directions as you try to keep up with the action. In the foreground, the beautiful princess runs toward you, faintly looking over her shoulder. You look over her shoulder, too, and you see George on his white charger spearing the dragon into the sea. Between the damsel and the chivalrous knight lies the corpse of one of the dragon’s victims. His body seems to be stretched between the two events. This corpse mimics the pose of Christ’s crucifixion. The light source for the painting is God, sending out oval rays in an extraterrestrial light show. This little altarpiece is a high-octane representation of a chivalric Christian legend. Today we have Schwarzenegger on DVD; Renaissance Venice had the action-packed paintings of Tintoretto.
The most influential High Renaissance architect was Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). Palladio’s style, which is called Palladian or classicism, is based on the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius (c. 70 B.C.–c. 25 B.C.), Roman ruins, Renaissance ideals, and his experience as a stonecutter and mason. Palladio’s style is formal, elegant, and clean (without much ornament). His hands-on experience as a mason helped him to put Vitruvius’s theory into practice with impressive results.
Typically, Palladio’s buildings have a Roman temple front or facade like the Maison Carrée (see Chapter 8). Most of his work is in Venice and the Veneto (the region around Venice) where he grew up. One of Palladio’s greatest achievements is San Giorgio Maggiore, a Benedictine Abbey and church in Venice, begun in 1565. Palladio chose to build the abbey/church as a basilica and then impose a classical temple front on the Christian basilica. To make the basilica and classical facade harmonize, he created an interlinked double temple front — a tall one based on the height of the basilica’s nave, and a wide one, conforming to the lower height of the side aisles. He interlocked the two fronts into a single tiered facade with four huge columns.
Many buildings have been influenced by Palladio’s style, especially in England, Ireland, and North America, including the facade of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and the Jefferson Memorial.
Late Gothic art, which developed in Flanders around 1420, was a long way from the elongated, Gothic figures on Chartres Cathedral, built between 1194 and 1220 (see Chapter 10). Late Gothic refers to the new naturalism in Flemish art and had a lot in common with the Early Italian Renaissance (see Chapter 11). Both strove to depict life realistically, to make people look like people. The main difference between Late Gothic and Renaissance art is that Late Gothic artists weren’t trying to resurrect Greco-Roman culture as Renaissance artists were.
Van Eyck came from a family of artists, and his earliest dated work is the Ghent Altarpiece (or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb) which he and his brother Hubert painted for the Cathedral of Saint Bavo in Ghent, Belgium, in 1432. Standing almost 12 feet high, and opening to 15 feet wide, the 12-panel Ghent Altarpiece pulled out all the stops. The images burst from the wood panels like peals from a pipe organ. Throngs of saints adore the sacrificial lamb; choirs sing; a beautifully dressed woman plays an organ in the painting; Mary, Christ, and John the Baptist preside over the altar like kings and queens; even Adam and Eve join in naked from the sidelines! After this giant outpouring, van Eyck preferred to work small — virtually every other work of art he did was on a modest, intimate scale. His pictures got more lifelike and detailed, but it was as though you were looking through a little window to witness their magic.
One such “window” onto a domestic scene is Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding (or Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife) (see Figure 12-4). The double portrait is a reminder of how much people traveled at the time: The man is Giovanni Arnolfini, an Italian merchant from Lucca who lived most of his life in Bruges, Belgium. He and his wife are dressed stylishly in fur-lined garments, but not so lavishly as to be mistaken for royalty. The greeting chamber in which they are shown has an expensive bed (as was the Flemish custom), but the walls are not covered in expensive tapestries and the floor is bare wood. Besides trading in silks, merchants from Lucca often imported oranges and lemons from Spain, which sold at a premium. An orange appears on the window ledge and three more are casually spread on the wooden chest to suggest the wealth of the couple and perhaps the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. In fact, every object in the painting has a literal and a symbolic meaning or meanings. Freighting objects with meaning was the norm in Netherlandish art. The cute dog between the couple, for example, is a standard symbol of fidelity. But he’s also an expensive breed, an affenpinscher, suggestive of the pair’s wealth.
Some art historians believe that the painting depicts an actual wedding and have dubbed the painting The Arnolfini Marriage. One scholar has argued that the couple have kicked off their shoes to show that they’re standing on the holy ground of matrimony. A solitary marriage candle burns overhead, and Giovanni raises his right hand as if to take his vows. The convex mirror on the back wall shows the reflection of two figures, perhaps witnesses to the marriage, and the signature on the back wall declares: “Jan van Eyck has been here, 1434,”as if he were one of the witnesses, possibly the one with the red turban in the mirror.
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Although many scholars still accept the wedding interpretation, there are some major weaknesses in the argument. Giovanni di Arrigo and Jeanne did not marry until 1447, 13 years after van Eyck did the painting. Lorne Campbell has suggested a cousin, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini is a better candidate, and that this is a portrait with his second wife. As to the holy ground of matrimony, the couple have only removed their overshoes; Giovanni still wears black boots. No evidence has been found that lighting a single candle was a marriage tradition of the time, and most couples joined their right hands during their marriage ceremony. If Jan van Eyck were actually witnessing the event — in the way a wedding photographer might document the occasion today — it’s strange that he didn’t give the exact date. Several of his other portraits give the exact day they were finished. Some scholars have suggested that the couple is already married, and others propose that they’re betrothed but have not yet tied the knot. Whatever the state of their wedlock, the relationship between the couple is intriguing. Their hands are joined, yet each stares solemnly into his or her own world.
Jan van Eyck didn’t have the corner on the realist market; another artist called the Master of Flémalle (c. 1406–1444), now generally identified as Robert Campin, also painted realistic images in oil. He was especially good at lifelike portraits and small devotional altarpieces, like the Merode Altarpiece.
However, Campin’s achievements were overshadowed by his pupil, Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399–1464), whose large and dramatic altarpieces introduced a new and often painful emotionalism in northern religious art. The earlier Gothic art was dramatic and emotional too, but because it’s less realistic, its emotionalism doesn’t penetrate the viewer as deeply. Van der Weyden figures aren’t symbols — they’re real people in despair or some other powerful emotional state. He dramatizes emotion by placing his figures front and center. Sometimes he includes a background landscape.
Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition (see the color section) is carefully choreographed to play upon the viewer’s feelings. The figures are so realistically modeled that they appear to be actually standing in front of the stone wall behind them. They look like characters in a Passion play (a theatrical re-enactment of Christ’s final hours) performing on the edge of a stage. Notice that Mary’s drooping body echoes the body of Christ; this implies that her love for her son is so intense that she feels what he feels, and part of her dies with him.
The cross-shaped composition reinforces the theme of the painting, while giving van der Weyden a perfect frame in which to set up his symmetrical arrangements of people. Two weeping women with similar poses and white head wraps stand on either end of the horizontal axis of the painting. A pair of people on the left tend to the fallen Mary and hold up her arms. A pair on the right tend to Jesus, one of them (probably Nicodemus, the Jewish leader who followed Christ) supports his legs. Joseph of Arimathea, in the center, and the man on the ladder form the vertical or y-axis. The descending arrangement of these men helps the viewer to feel the weight of Christ’s body as it sinks toward the ground. Their bowed heads, Jesus’s dangling arm and drooping form, and the man descending the ladder, all contribute to the painting’s downward pull.
Trade with Venice, Florence, Rome, and other Italian city-states exposed northern countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands to Italian art, igniting a Renaissance in the North. Italian Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini who moved to France to work for King Francis I, and northern artists like Dürer and Bruegel, who studied in Italy, also helped transport the Renaissance spirit and style northward. Like the Italian Renaissance, the rebirth in the northern countries inspired artists to depict earthly life naturalistically and imaginatively.
In the following sections, I focus on the paintings of the Netherlands and Germany where the new emphasis on Renaissance humanism (an outlook stressing individual worth and human values) created a demand for portraiture and genre scenes, and where religious fervor sparked some of the most visceral and violent Christian art.
The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) painted some of the darkest images of humanity ever created. His most famous work is a triptych (a work of art with three hinged panels that you can close like a book) called The Garden of Earthly Delights (see the color section). One look at this painting is enough to convince you that Bosch was as pessimistic as he was devout. In his painting, the whole world seems stuck on the sensual life and bound for hell. Apparently, to Bosch, even listening to music was a sin. As gruesome as his depiction of hell is (the right panel), it may be the most creative vision of the Inferno ever conceived.
On the left panel, Christ introduces the newly created Eve to Adam in an Eden inhabited by peacefully grazing animals (some of which are quite bizarre). In the large middle panel, which represents life after the Fall of Adam and Eve, naked people cavort, flirt, and ride horses and pigs in what looks like a sexual funhouse. Although the earthly-delights panel is intended to warn man to forsake his pleasure quest and turn to God, it seems designed to turn people on rather than off. The right panel shows the price man pays for a life devoted to satisfying the senses.
Notice that in the left and middle panels ominous owls eyeball mankind like an all-seeing conscience or to foreshadow his doom.
Birds flit through each section: In Eden, they fly blissfully through blue sky. On Earth they morph into giant fowl, cutting through the air with winged people and flying fish and griffins — perversions of nature. In medieval lore, witches were believed to corrupt nature by stealing eggs and sperm from humans and other species and mixing them to create hybrids. Their goal: to replace God’s and nature’s harmony with discord. In hell, tiny black birds take off from the rectum of a man who’s being swallowed by a giant bird. (Bosch’s hybrids may have been inspired by medieval manuscript drolleries — see Chapter 10 — but he’s taken drolleries to a new level of weirdness.)
Edenic fruit reappears in the fallen world as an apple orchard from which people freely pluck and eat. Giant strawberries, blueberries, and cherries are conspicuous features of the middle panel, suggesting that mankind lives only for his pleasures, which loom larger than everything else. Notice that people and birds offer each other fruit as the serpent did in Eden. Future hybrids are suggested by interracial mingling and by a man cozying up to an owl — although the owl appears indifferent to his advances.
In hell, pleasure is transformed into pain. The fiery pit is divided into different torture arenas for each pleasure: the gaming arena, the music “room,” the toilet bowl — a hole in hell into which one man vomits, another excretes gold coins (obviously he horded too much money in life), and a man-eating bird defecates undigested people. In other arenas, animals maul and bag the hunters who preyed upon them, and beastly “personifications” of lust fondle gluttons and lechers.
In the music “room” musicians and music appreciators get punished for pleasing their aural sense rather than praying. Their lutes and flutes become instruments of a torture: One man is crucified on a harp, another is racked on the strings of a lute, while another is impaled by a hunchback as he incessantly grinds out tunes on an oversized hurdy-gurdy.
The gaming section of hell features fallen cards, dice left forever on a table, and a spilled pitcher (there are no refills in hell). A die tottering on a woman’s head suggests that gambling was how she balanced her books in life. A naked man is sandwiched between a gaming table (to which he’s pinned), a ravenous beast, and an impaled hand with a die perched on its fingertips. The latter image implies that even without a body or head to direct it, the hand is still banking on a lucky roll. In Bosch’s hell, people don’t give up their pleasures — they’re tormented by them.
The German painter Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528) took Gothic drama even further than Rogier van der Weyden. He depicted intense, often violent emotion more effectively than any other Renaissance artist. His grim paintings of the Crucifixion depict the horrors of Christ’s gruesome death with vivid realism.
Grünewald’s most powerful rendering of the Passion (the sufferings of Jesus up to and through his crucifixion, as in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) is in the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted for the Abbey of St. Anthony in Isenheim, Alsace, between 1510 and 1515. The left panel shows an impassive St. Sebastian impaled by arrows; the right panel depicts the mild St. Anthony; in the bottom, Christ is in his tomb, mourned by the two Marys and Joseph of Arimathea.
But it’s the dramatic center panel that grabs the viewer’s attention and won’t let go. Christ’s battered body hangs so heavily that it bows the horizontal arm of the cross. His outstretched fingers scratch at the sky, and his muscles strain with anguish. The bright red cloaks of John the Baptist on the right and the Apostle John on the left echo the color of the blood flowing from the wound in Christ’s chest. Grünewald expresses the intensity of Jesus’s last moment on earth as viscerally as Mel Gibson does in The Passion of the Christ. Rigor mortis has already set in, freezing Jesus’s final agony, which Grünewald depicts with brutal realism.
Grünewald’s most terrifying work is The Temptation of St. Anthony, painted from 1510 to 1515. According to St. Athanasius, who wrote The Life of St. Anthony, when Anthony retreated to the desert to live an ascetic life (contemplation and self-denial — in other words, the opposite of the modern American way), the devil fought with Anthony on several occasions, surrounding him with temptations and vicious demons. In The Temptation of St. Anthony, Grünewald depicted a bevy of strange beasts persecuting the saint. The vivid primary colors that Grünewald uses help to dramatize the scene.
The Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) specialized in landscapes and scenes of common people working in the fields, eating, hunting, and skating, as well as flirting, drinking, and raising Cain in bars. His depictions of peasant life are full of rough-hewn people and rustic charm. Paintings like The Peasant Dance and The Wedding Dance are magnificent windows into 16th-century peasant life.
Bruegel is famous for his partying peasant scenes like Peasant Dance and Wedding Dance. In the animated Wedding Dance, red pants, shirts, and skirts, interspersed over the canvas among greens, browns, and white hats, pants, and aprons, create a visual dance rhythm for the eyes. You feel as though you’re gyrating through the space with the dancers.
Not only did Bruegel capture the essential character of peasant life, but he used landscape to evoke moods, as in his The Hunters in the Snow (also known as Return of the Hunters), which depicts peasants hunting, working, and ice-skating and fishing on a frozen lake in a winter landscape. The painting was part of a series of works representing the months of the year. The Hunters in the Snow represents January and February. The figures are shown from a distance or with their backs turned to the viewer; the composition and frigid landscape, bleak sky, and distant alpine peaks — not the people — communicate the paintings’ moods and messages.
Of course, there are no mountains in Antwerp or Brussels where Bruegel made most of his work. So how did he paint such convincing glacial peaks? In about 1552, Bruegel, like many northern artists, journeyed to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance. He was above all impressed by Michelangelo; by Venetian landscapes and people-scapes probably by artists like Titian, Giorgione, and Vittore Carpaccio; and by the majestic Alps. He filled notebooks of sketches of the Alps, which he later used in his paintings in Antwerp and Brussels. His biographer said Bruegel swallowed the mountains on his Italian trip so he could spit them out later in his studio. He spit them out for the rest of his life.
But Bruegel had a darker side, too. Like Bosch, who was one of Bruegel’s greatest influences, and Grünewald, he sometimes ventured into the world of the macabre — for example, in his Dulle Giet (Mad Meg) (1562) a chaotic landscape inhabited by giant demons and ranting people, and in The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) and the Triumph of Death (c. 1562). The first two works look like Bosch could have painted them. In fact, as a young artist, Bruegel was paid to imitate Bosch, whose popularity soared after his death.
In The Triumph of Death, an army of skeletons (some carrying cross-marked coffins like body shields) massacre humanity in countless gruesome scenes. The invading armies of death look like endless streams of Grim Reaper clones and remind viewers of the Black Death, which decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, wiping out roughly half the population.