There are good reasons for beginning a discussion of the Renaissance with the art of Flanders. After all, it was here in the lowlands of north-west Europe that one of the main features of Renaissance art first became established: the close imitation of nature. From around the second decade of the fifteenth century onwards, Flemish paintings began to look very lifelike, featuring believable figures in settings that refer directly to the realities of life at the time. Such a move marked a clear turn away from the more otherworldly appearances typical of the Gothic style that had dominated throughout Europe in the preceding centuries (see box on this page).
If extraordinary lifelikeness was a central feature of much Renaissance art, so too was experimentation with artistic media and techniques. The Flemish artists discussed in this chapter used oil paint: this was particularly well suited to giving an effect of reality, and was soon to become the favoured Renaissance medium among painters. At the same time, a work such as the Arnolfini portrait (plate 1) by Jan van Eyck (before 1395–1441) is a secular painting: it is an early example of the non-religious art that gained a new foothold in the course of the Renaissance. It also provides an opportunity to consider another key Renaissance theme: the rising social status and fame of the artist.
The Gothic style in art was predominant across much of medieval Europe from the mid-twelfth century onwards. In church architecture, it was characterised by strong verticals, the use of pointed arches, and elaborate decorative elements (e.g. tracery and finials). The term is also commonly used to describe paintings and sculptures in which a decorative approach is dominant over the imitation of nature. Gothic works do not attempt to give a consistent illusion of space and feature elongated, sinuous, and flattened forms. Surfaces are ornately worked and richly coloured, often using gold leaf. From the fourteenth century onwards the essential unreality of the Gothic style intensified further in exquisite works by artists such as Jehan Pucelle (c. 1300–c. 1350) and the Limburg brothers (c. 1390–1416), whose tiny miniature paintings on manuscripts possess a delicate refinement that reflects the elite culture of the Franco-Flemish courts. The word ‘Gothic’ was initially used as a term of abuse by Italian Renaissance artists who associated it with the ‘barbaric’ north European tribe of the Goths who had destroyed the Roman Empire and its classical art. But, as we shall see, the Gothic did not simply die out with the coming of the Renaissance. The two styles often overlapped and were not so opposed as it appears.
But if all this suggests a sharp break from the medieval past, Flemish realism was also underpinned by religious symbolism that linked it to older sacred values. The Renaissance did not, as is sometimes assumed, involve a simple move away from the religiosity of the middle ages, and Christianity remained a dominant force throughout the period. Examination of large-scale altarpieces by van Eyck’s followers Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–64) and Hugo van der Goes (d. 1482) will show that art continued to form the focus of public prayer in Flemish churches or chapels, as it had for many centuries all across Europe.
The superb realism of these works was clearly intended to intensify rather than disrupt on-going Christian devotions. Despite their familiar subject-matter, drawing on well-known figures or stories from the Bible, these religious paintings were intensely ‘site-specific’. That is, they were thought out with the values and aspirations of their patrons and viewing audience in mind, and were intended to respond to their specific settings. The particularities of place, patronage and viewing audience remained important in the Renaissance. But these considerations did not stand in the way of artistic innovation. Indeed, a new concern with making artworks look different from one another developed in Flanders, as elsewhere, such that by the end of the fifteenth century many works of art had taken on a unique appearance.
The impact of oils
In van Eyck’s portrait a lavishly dressed young couple are shown in full length, standing in what may be their bedroom. Unlike the odd elongated and flattened figures in paintings from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they are presented as lifelike individuals in recognisable everyday surroundings. When looking at the painting we completely forget that it is a flat object, so convincing is the illusion of three-dimensionality. The effect of reality is all the more astonishing given that it is conjured out of the fall of light through the window at the background left. We cannot see everything equally in the room: some things are half hidden by pools of shadow (the man’s feet, for example); and at a distance they have a tendency to lose their precise outline (the view reflected in the mirror).
Key to this approach is van Eyck’s use of linseed oil to mix his paint pigments. The impact of the given medium used in a Renaissance artwork on its final appearance should not be under-estimated. In the case of van Eyck, it was oil paint that allowed him to create so convincing an illusion of reality. Before him, most painters in Flanders and elsewhere in Europe had used egg tempera to bind their pigments together. Tempera painting was characterised by unnaturally bright and opaque local colours, and was typically used in combination with flat gold-leaf backgrounds, often applied by specialist gilders. Oil paint was a comparatively cheap and easy medium to use, and this may have encouraged van Eyck to abandon gold leaf. It was also slow-drying, allowing van Eyck to be more spontaneous as he worked. Given its translucency, colours could be built up in layers and blended into one another to give an accurate impression of the textures of objects, and of the variety of tones produced when light strikes them.
Our eyes can’t help but take in the subtle tones enlivening surfaces such as the back wall of the room, and objects such as the glinting rosary beads hanging next to the mirror, the elaborate chandelier, the lavish drapes of the bed, or the ornate gatherings of the woman’s fur-lined sleeve. Van Eyck’s oil technique makes us aware that natural appearances are always dependent on interaction between surfaces and ever-shifting patterns of light. In his painting, things such as a wall, some beads, a bed, or a sleeve are linked to living beings by these means. The same play of tones across a surface brings the male sitter’s face alive, and animates the being of the little dog, which (unlike the man and woman) boldly catches our eye. It would be wrong to assume that van Eyck actually invented oil painting. But though oil had often been used before, there is no doubt that he was the first to understand its potential to bring painting very close to the appearance of real life.
The rise of portraiture and the Flemish towns
Other works from the time of the Arnolfini painting tell us that van Eyck was not the only artist to turn to portrait painting in Flanders. The elusive Robert Campin (also known as the ‘Master of Flémalle’, 1378/9–1444), who worked in the town of Tournai, made a number of penetrating individualised portraits, as did his pupil Rogier van der Weyden in Brussels. Although portraits were certainly made in earlier centuries, the type became newly fashionable as the fifteenth century progressed.
The Arnolfini portrait features two historical persons, even if it is now unclear who they are. According to one theory, the painting shows Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami getting married, with the artist himself as a witness. The inscription on the rear wall of the room, perhaps deliberately written in a legalistic hand, and featuring the words ‘Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434’ (Jan van Eyck was here 1434), is taken as evidence for this reading. So too is the ‘self-portrait’ of the artist that can be glimpsed in the reflection of the mirror. But there are no other examples of double portrait paintings being used as marriage documents in the period, and a document discovered in 1997 reveals that Giovanni di Arrigo and Giovanna Cenami did not marry until 1447, thirteen years after van Eyck’s painting, and six after his death.
Early inventories tell us that members of the Arnolfini are depicted, so the search is on to find other possibilities within the family. The male sitter has been re-identified as Giovanni di Nicolao, a cousin of the original Giovanni, who also traded in Bruges at this time. According to one recent scholar, Giovanni di Nicolao is shown with his wife Costanza Trenta, who had died in 1433. Van Eyck had already made a memorial portrait showing a dead sculptor or musician. But given the lack of overt references to death (for instance in the form of black clothing, or an explanatory inscription), it is more likely that Giovanni di Nicolao is shown with a second, though undocumented, wife.
Whoever is depicted in the Arnolfini portrait, it is clear that the painting lays much emphasis on the individuals shown, and this became an important Renaissance theme in European art (see plates 5 and 6). It is true that individuals have always existed everywhere, and that they were highly valued in many other societies. But it is also clear that in the Renaissance, a new emphasis was laid on the particulars of human appearance, as also on personality. What wider economic and social developments lie behind this new interest, and why did the new taste for portraits develop so strongly in the towns of early fifteenth-century Flanders?
By this time, the well-connected and accessible trading region of Flanders had become one of the most densely urbanised and economically vibrant parts of Europe. Bruges was the continent’s largest city and also one of its most socially progressive. It was an entrepôt, whose wealth was based on the export of woven wool, but which was also the centre of a fast-growing international market in luxury goods. In van Eyck’s portrait there is a careful display of the kind of high-quality manufactured goods on which the wealth of Bruges was based, although it is telling that not all the objects shown were locally produced. The convex mirror with ten inlaid roundels and the elaborate bronze chandelier may be Flemish, but the richly patterned woven rug is probably an import from Anatolia in Turkey.
The prominence of foreign families such as the Arnolfini was itself a reflection of the special position of Bruges as a centre of international trade. The family were Italian merchants from Lucca in Tuscany and this Mediterranean origin, with its whiff of exoticism, is neatly indicated by the oranges placed on the bench to the left of the painting, a luxury southern fruit not readily available in 1430s Bruges. But this internationalism should not confuse our perception of a link between the realistic Renaissance style used in van Eyck’s portrait, and the new urban and mercantile classes of the towns. The creation of such a portrait reflects the rise of a new social class, whose money came not from inheritance, land, or military conquest, like that of the feudal aristocracy of the medieval period, but from trade.
The rise of towns such as Bruges also offered leading inhabitants a new kind of social mobility and freedom. In the more fluid and culturally mixed market-based societies of Lowland Flanders individual people now had more opportunity to fashion themselves. This newfound freedom lies behind the growing taste for personalised painted portraits. Prominent individuals increasingly took the opportunity to shape their identities for the benefit of families, friends, competitors – and themselves.
The changing status of the Renaissance artist
In 1425, Jan van Eyck was appointed court painter to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, one of the wealthiest rulers in northern Europe. Van Eyck’s employment at the prestigious Burgundian court, whose sphere of influence stretched from southern central France to the borders of Denmark, indicates that he enjoyed a very high professional profile. This is also evident in the Arnolfini portrait, where the artist makes two references to himself. In the first place he includes a signature. This is not at all untypical in works of the Renaissance. Van Eyck usually placed them on the frames of his paintings. In this example, however, the signature is positioned at the upper centre directly between the two sitters. Its flamboyant Gothic script is enlarged so that it presses forward from the back wall toward the picture surface. The wording boldly suggests the artist’s creative presence in his work: ‘Van Eyck was here’ indicates his role, not as witness to a wedding, but rather as the proud inventor of a new kind of picture.
Van Eyck referred to himself again as the male figure in blue glimpsed in the mirror. Setting aside the marriage theory, the artist’s double self-inscription within his painting is a sign of his own high professional status and fame. We must be careful here, for it is clear that such references are not allowed to disturb the visual dominance of the patron figures at the front of the image: his self-portrait is little more than a tiny reflected blur. And artists’ signatures in Renaissance paintings were as likely to be included as commercial-style trademarks. But van Eyck’s self-references none the less challenge a common assumption held in the medieval period: that it was the rich and socially prominent patrons, rather than the makers, who were finally responsible for them. They announce the arrival of the more confident and professionally ambitious figure of the Renaissance artist.
Van Eyck’s decorous yet insistent references to himself in the Arnolfini portrait reflect the rising professional and social profile of visual artists in the fifteenth century. Paintings, like many other artworks, had long been made in workshops, typically located in lower-class areas of town, often near to the chemists’ shops where painters purchased their pigments. In these workshops, teams of artisan artists and their apprentices typically worked in collaboration with one another, and with craftsmen such as gilders and carpenters (see figure 8 below, for example). Because artists worked with their hands their art was widely seen as nonintellectual (the term used was ‘mechanical’). Like other artisans, visual artists were apprenticed to their trade as young as ten or eleven, and so did not go to school or university. Painting and the other visual arts were not taught at school or in the universities, where the curriculum was based on non-practical, typically language-based, disciplines (the so-called Liberal Arts) first established in classical times.
Van Eyck was not the first artist to enjoy an elite position at a leading court and an international reputation. And we have seen that the Arnolfini portrait, like many other of his works, was not made for the Burgundian court. But his elevated professional position clearly had an impact on the kind of progressive paintings he made. He won renown as a uniquely creative individual whose paintings were seen as extraordinary and unprecedented inventions of high cultural (and probably monetary) value. Like many other Renaissance artists, he often seems to draw attention to this new valuation within his works, reflecting on the nature of his craft within the painting itself. In the Arnolfini portrait, his elaborate signature is placed close to the mirror in which his self-portrait is glimpsed. The idea that painting itself was like a mirror in its capacity to imitate reality was becoming a commonplace in the period.
Renaissance art: north and south
We need to ask: what features make van Eyck’s portrait typical of the Flemish or ‘Early Netherlandish’ school, as it is sometimes called? We can get at an answer by comparing it briefly with similar works made in Italy in this period. Portraiture did emerge as an important image type south of the Alps, though nothing comparable with the visual directness of van Eyck’s painting appeared until much later in the fifteenth century. The painter’s Lucchese patrons may have been attracted to van Eyck precisely because his style seemed novel, so very unlike what they could have expected at home. In Italy during the 1430s and 40s bronze medals featuring profile heads of aristocratic leaders appeared, and in Florence the first sculpted portrait busts were made. But these works are ‘classicising’, deliberately recalling the artistic models of antique Rome.
In van Eyck’s paintings, the turn toward portraiture reflects a more direct concern with the world of immediate visual reality, essentially free from the influence of antique examples. And this direct interest in nature must be one reason why Flemish artists were quicker to exploit the illusionistic potential of oil paint. This leads us to another important characteristic of northern European art more generally: its very equal treatment of the things it shows. Following the example of the ancients, Italian Renaissance artists learnt quickly how to focus their attention on the human figure at the expense of the ‘lesser’ forms of nature, such as settings, landscapes, or inanimate objects. But in van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait our concentration on the figures is challenged by the equal attention lavished on architectural frames, ornate mouldings, or piles of lush draperies. This ‘allover’ effect was destined to have a long history in the art of northern Europe.
Looking at the Arnolfini portrait we notice that the two figures are not depicted with quite so much directness as the room they occupy. The presentation of the woman, in particular, with her white skin, high waist, and small oval head, still owes something to the Gothic style (see box on this page). And this kind of split between figure and setting was not unusual in Flemish art of the fifteenth century. If, in Italian art of the period, human figures were increasingly remodelled to look like ancient sculptures, in the north they retained a more traditional look, even as their settings were brought up to date. This was another way in which Flemish artists maintained a vital link with the art of the medieval past. However innovative their new realism was, they did not turn their back on older artistic traditions.
Sacred and secular, not sacred versus secular
We have assumed that van Eyck’s portrait was wholly secular. And yet many natural details in the Arnolfini painting have a deeper significance, drawing on long-standing traditions of Christian symbolism. Debates regarding the overall meaning of these symbols go on, but it is clear enough that they refer to the religious piety of the sitters and to their married status. Those who see the picture as a record of an actual marriage ceremony have emphasised the significance of details such as the dog (fidelity) and of the small wooden sculpture on the bedstead (featuring St Margaret, patron saint of childbirth). But these and other details may just refer to the sacredness of the married state, or have a still more generalised religious significance.
The two pairs of shoes (removed like those of Moses before his ascent of Mount Sinai in the Bible) suggest the sanctity of the domestic space into which we look, as does the single lit candle in the chandelier (signalling the presence of the Holy Spirit). The apple on the window-sill, tellingly placed beneath a part of the window frame that appears (from our viewpoint) like a small crucifix, must indicate the pair’s pious acceptance of their Original Sin and their hope of redemption through Christ, a point re-emphasised by the tiny scenes from the Passion that surround the mirror. Such details tell us that we view a double portrait of a young married couple at home. Their intimate relationship is legitimised by their overall truthfulness to Christ and to one another. The purpose and future fruits of their sexual union are made amply apparent by the dominating bed to the right, as by the tell-tale swell of the woman’s belly.
These symbols provide a moral framework for this otherwise worldly double portrait. They remind us that the material and spiritual sides of life were not divided in the minds of van Eyck and his patrons. Van Eyck’s disguised symbols are there to secure a connection between the exciting new world of material consumption in 1430s Bruges and the more traditional one of religious piety. A similarly confident connection between secular and sacred is evident in St Luke painting the Virgin of 1435–40 by Rogier van der Weyden (figure 1). Rogier’s long and very successful career in Brussels shows that the new taste for realism in Flanders was certainly not confined to van Eyck at Bruges.
Like the Arnolfini portrait, Rogier’s St Luke is not quite square, but it still reminds us of a window through which we view the believable world of an interior. As in van Eyck’s painting too, other apertures open off the room into which we look. At the extreme right we have a tantalising glimpse through a doorway into an adjacent room. This secondary space contains a number of objects which help to identify the male figure as St Luke, one of the four evangelists. The open book must refer to his writing of the gospel, while the ox below is his special attribute, though we do not see the wings which identify it as one of the apocalyptic beasts featured in St John’s Revelation in the Bible. The omission of these unlikely appendages tells us something about the painter’s concern to play down or conceal supernatural elements in his painting.
St Luke does not wear the usual halo revealing his sacred identity, and his large head, in particular, is treated like an individualised portrait. He has clearly moved through the door from his cluttered room into the more austere main one, but still carries something of its more contemporary feel with him. Turning his back on the book he has been writing, he kneels on an olive green cushion before the Virgin and Child to take their portrait. In his hand he holds a piece of parchment or vellum and a metal stylus known as a silverpoint. These were the materials most commonly used for drawing in 1430s Flanders. St Luke has momentarily stopped drawing to look in the direction of the mother and child, but he does not gaze directly at them.
The main room into which we look belongs to the Virgin and Child: their importance is suggested by the low wooden structure they sit on, as by the richly brocaded curtain that hangs behind and above them like a canopy. Seat and curtain are the only objects in the room, their appearance recalling church furnishings, particularly the baldacchinos that were hung over altars or thrones highlighting objects of special veneration. The interior we look into is to this extent transformed into a kind of religious shrine, as is indicated by the devotional kneeling posture taken up by St Luke. If the suggestions of physical reality remind us of the work of Jan van Eyck, then in Rogier’s painting they have a more insistent metaphysical dimension.
Rogier was indebted to van Eyck’s recent Virgin and Child with Chancellor Nicolas Rolin for his overall composition, but he downplayed the older master’s emphasis on materials and objects. Rogier’s interior is comparatively plain and cramped, though his sacred figures have more movement, seeming to float free of their worldly confines on beds of gravity-free drapery. The Virgin’s robe extends across the picture surface as if to make an intimate connection with her devotee. This connection is reinforced in colouristic terms: her rich blue drapery combines with Luke’s red to form a display of her two traditional colours that contemporary viewers would immediately have recognised.
If Luke is shown with a great realism, then the Virgin, with her small pale oval-shaped head set at a slight angle to her body, her high forehead, and down-turned eyes, still recalls the conventions of Gothic art (see box on this page). Her seemingly natural action of breast feeding can be taken as another indication of her traditional identity: she is an example of a ‘Virgo lactans’, the most ancient type of Virgin and Child image, examples of which date back to the third century AD. As in many such depictions, her downward focus on the Child is contrasted with the upward direction of his gaze, back past his mother toward God in Heaven.
Rogier’s inviting view through a three-part window onto a landscape beyond is based on van Eyck’s Rolin painting: but by comparison, his landscape is simplified to its essential ‘meaningful’ features, most of which have a theological resonance. The tripartite division of the window probably refers to the three parts of God (the Trinity), while the view out from it is carefully composed with the significance of the foreground scene in mind. The panoramic landscape, featuring a low-lying town with a wide river running through it, reminds us of contemporary Flanders, but the view is essentially generic: it is impossible to identify either the precise town or river. It serves primarily to establish Mary’s position in a high chamber as a metaphor for her virginity, and its essential forms were much repeated in Flemish painting.
Contemporary viewers may have made a connection with the pagan princess Danaë, who featured in devotional texts as a prototype of Mary, given that she was locked away in a tower to protect her virginity. In keeping with this, the Virgin is shown as carefully protected from the ‘world’ down below, not only by the elevation of her tower room, but by the castellated wall, in front of which we glimpse a garden featuring the lilies commonly associated with her. The traditional reference to the Virgin as a ‘hortus conclusus’ (enclosed garden) may also be supported by the two little figures looking out from the wall: are they her parents, Joachim and Anna whose miraculous conception of a child in old age proved the Virgin’s divinity and consequent freedom from Original Sin?
Van der Weyden’s St Luke painting the Virgin shows us that things did not simply move forward along any one line in the Renaissance, as if progressing toward a single goal. Rogier’s painting clearly follows the kind of direct approach to reality introduced by van Eyck, and is thus a typical Flemish work of the fifteenth century. But it is a painting of different type from the Arnolfini portrait: it is an altarpiece made to hang above an altar in a church or chapel. This original religious function in a place of public worship might explain the more insistent references to the sacred world noted above. In Renaissance art, style, technique, and subject-matter (iconography: see box on this page) were typically matched to specific picture type and function. Van Eyck’s portrait was probably intended to hang in the relative privacy of the Arnolfinis’ house, and the artist accordingly took a secular approach to his subject. Rogier’s altarpiece, on the other hand, would form the focus of prayer at the Mass. He therefore made more insistent reference to traditional religious ideas.
Yet the comparison with van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, also an altarpiece, shows that individual artists took different approaches to works of the same type. Van der Weyden retreats from the lavish material displays of van Eyck’s model, encouraging us to penetrate more directly to spiritual meanings. Rogier’s approach is more abstract and linear. While he certainly produces a convincing illusion of space, he also links his forms together at the picture surface to make semi-independent patterns or relationships. In contrast to van Eyck’s static and monumental version of realism, Rogier’s approach offers movement and emotion. These aspects were already very well established in Gothic art, and suggest again that even the most innovative Flemish masters of the fifteenth century conducted a careful dialogue with the past.
The importance of place and the role of the religious artist
Rogier’s painting was probably intended for the chapel of St Catherine in the cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels, where the local painters’ guild met for prayer, and where Rogier himself is buried. Even if we cannot directly identify the river in the background as the Senne and the town to either side as Brussels, this tells us that its imagery was of great local significance. In the Renaissance, artworks typically remained site-specific, their form and meaning closely tied to the places for which they were intended. As time went on an increasing number of visual images became portable: reproductive prints, some portraits, small devotional images, medals, and engraved gems or cameos, to name but a few. But even as late as 1600, larger-scale artistic commissions were typically for static or fixed works, tailor-made for their given location. And Renaissance artists never lose their traditional skill in making images respond to their given physical and cultural environment.
Rogier’s altarpiece was primarily intended for registered painters working in the city of Brussels, as the focus for their prayers when they took the Mass. With this audience in mind, it offers a reflection on the ideal painter’s identity or role. St Luke was accepted as the patron saint of painters across Christian Europe because he had, according to legend, painted the Virgin’s portrait. In Rogier’s altarpiece, the saint is featured as a sacred representative of the painter’s profession. His reverent figure, at work on a drawing, formed the visual focus point for all members of the guild as they joined together in prayer. St Luke was their proxy in the painting and also their intercessor with the Virgin and Christ. As we noted above, the painter-saint has a portrait-like quality. His characterful head, like the contemporary tools of the trade in his hands, has suggested to many that Rogier here depicted himself.
The self-portrait idea cannot easily be verified, given that we don’t really know what Rogier looked like. But it is clear that his St Luke appears very much like a typical fifteenth-century Flemish painter. The attentive figure enjoying such close intimacy with the sacred ones also helps us to understand something about the religious role of painters in the period. Having entered into the Virgin’s hallowed space the painter-saint falls devoutly to his knees. Despite the fact that he shares the Virgin’s colours and that her drapery flutters up toward him, as if to sanction his presence, his gaze doesn’t quite find its sacred object. This lack of direct eye contact may reflect the accepted idea that St Luke painted his inner visions rather than Mary herself. But it also conforms to an important visual convention in sacred painting across Europe in the period that helped to distinguish the main religious actors from their lesser devotees. Even the powerful Chancellor in van Eyck’s Rolin painting is not allowed to meet the eyes of the Virgin and Child before him.
The experience of the divine in Rogier’s altarpiece is a matter of something unseen yet intensely present. And this is in keeping with the many other indications of another world hidden just beyond the perceptual or material one described in the painting. From his inner vision, then, rather than directly from nature itself, the painter St Luke makes a preliminary design. In many other depictions of this subject Luke is shown already at work with his colours on a painting. But in this example, we are returned to the very first stages of the creative process, when the idea of the subject first enters the artist’s mind. Rather than being shown at work he pauses, as if to better experience his sacred vision.
It is here that we can understand something of the role of the fifteenth-century religious painter: he was seen as a privileged intermediary or interpreter, who gave visual shape to the inner world of religious experience. Following St Luke, he gave form to his sacred visions. But these inner visions inevitably took on familiar forms and colours, for it was vital to the process that they could be easily recognised by contemporary viewers. They were familiar not only from the words of sermons, from texts such as the Bible or other devotional literature, but also from existing examples of sacred art. It is no accident that in Rogier’s altarpiece the Virgin and Child are shown in conventional fashion, linking his work to that of earlier artists.
In the works discussed so far we have seen a new cultural move toward portraiture. If, in the Arnolfini portrait, social status and material wealth are ‘justified’ by sacred symbolism, then Rogier’s painting owes its entire meaning to the idea of portraiture: after all, it shows a religious portrait being made. Our two examples illustrate the two major picture types commissioned in fifteenth-century Flanders (portraits and altarpieces) and indicate their especially close relationship in the period. Given this overlap, it is clear that the move toward the real cannot simply be considered as a secularising one, or that concern with the sacred necessarily limited the description of nature. More essential to Flemish art in this period is the lack of tension between realism and religious meaning, between the seen and the unseen. Flemish artists typically resolve conflicts between such potentially contradictory dimensions of life, and thus produce works governed by an underlying sense of harmony.
A new kind of religion?
This confident accommodation of secular and sacred in Flemish art was not destined to last forever. The relocation of familiar sacred figures to non-church settings reflects the spread of a newly intense kind of religion across northern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one typically practised by laymen in the privacy of their homes. Despite its liturgical-style furnishings, the room containing the Virgin in Rogier’s painting is more like a private house than a church. St Luke is shown alone in an isolated interior, his intimate and direct relationship to the Virgin and Child suggested by his qualities of rapt attention and active spiritual engagement.
The power and purity of Luke’s inward vision is indicated by his separation from the doings of the outside world glimpsed in the low-lying landscape beyond. This physical isolation becomes a figure or metaphor for the interiorised religion he experiences. And this kind of active and personalised engagement with Christ was advocated in much-read devotional books such as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ of c. 1412–14 in the spiritual tradition known as the Devotio moderna (see box on this page). By the time of the Protestant Reformation, from the 1520s onwards, such an individualised form of religion would feed a less harmonious view of the relations between ‘world’ and ‘spirit’: one that saw the two dimensions as in a state of inevitable conflict or contradiction (see chapter 5).
Devotio moderna (a Latin phrase meaning ‘Modern devotion’) was a religious or spiritual movement that developed, especially in the Low Countries, from the late fourteenth century onwards and was focused on private devotion practised by the laity. Leading proponents such as Geert Groote (1340–84) and Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) laid particular emphasis on the worshipper’s personal understanding of Christ, and also stressed the importance of private meditation. The lay Devotio tradition, widely practised in the Flemish towns, was never intended to destroy the established church. But it is none the less often understood as a kind of precursor to the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century. Like the later Reformers, followers of the Devotio moderna (e.g. The Brethren of the Common Life) advocated a purified individualised approach to religion, constant reading of the biblical text, and a direct approach to God based on intense faith.
Another work from Flanders that may have been influenced by the Devotio moderna tradition is the Portinari altarpiece (c. 1475, figure 2) by Hugo van der Goes, the leading painter of the later fifteenth century in the Flemish city of Ghent. The Nativity in the central panel is shown as an ‘Adoration of the Child’, an iconography which became popular as a result of a much-read passage in a devotional book describing the visions of St Brigit of Sweden (1303–73). Brigit saw the Virgin kneeling in prayer before the baby Jesus, ‘lying on the ground naked and shining’. In van der Goes’s painting the internal light (symbol of divinity and purity) is indicated by stylised strips of gold emanating from Christ’s body. But it is never quite allowed to overturn the natural light of the wintry northern sky that extends across the three panels of the altarpiece.
The more general emphasis on quiet prayer in this work might also reflect the Devotio moderna tradition, but the connection cannot be pushed too far. Hugo imagined, not an isolated experience, but a whole community of worshippers engrossed in the vision before them. A wide semicircle of figures gather around the tiny baby on the ground, but the full circle can only be completed by a group of spectators praying before the painting. The repeated depiction of praying hands, some of which point directly to the vulnerable little form on the ground, indicates the kind of devotional activity that is also required of us, the viewers.
In Flemish painting Christ is often a surprisingly un-heroic figure: in Rogier’s St Luke altarpiece he is a slightly emaciated, physically awkward baby, whose stick-like limbs seem to twitch and stiffen in an odd way as if in response to some idea about his own forthcoming death. The figure at the centre of van der Goes’ Portinari altarpiece is similarly unimpressive. His tiny inert form makes a sharp contrast to the bulky ones that surround him in worship. As in many religious images of the Renaissance, we are encouraged to see the present scene depicted in relation to others in the Christian story.
In this example, Christ’s deathly appearance, like his nakedness, reminds us of the moments after the Crucifixion, when he lies dead beneath the cross, or is entombed. Given that Hugo’s triptych is an altarpiece this narrative connection undoubtedly had a further significance. It makes us aware that Christ is God’s sacrificial offering to men on earth. An emphasis on Christ as sacrifice is the norm in Flemish altarpieces, which were, after all, works made to support the ceremony of the Mass enacted at the altar table below. The horizontal presentation of Christ’s body may have been intended to replicate the raising of the Eucharistic host by the officiating priest.
The pathetic baby dominates the entire altarpiece, his sad fate setting its mournful contemplative tone. If, in Rogier’s St Luke, the Virgin is prominent, in the Portinari altarpiece she is secondary, as is suggested by her retreat from physical intimacy with her son. But her position also perfectly expresses her place between man and God, one that would have been immediately understood by worshipping viewers in the fifteenth century. She is shown as the ‘Madonna Mediatrix’, the motherly mediator between the secular and divine worlds. She kneels on the ground in a posture familiar in many other paintings of the time (both Flemish and Italian) to suggest her quality of humility, her total subservience to God’s will. As a divine figure herself, she understands the ultimately joyful redemptive meaning of Christ’s birth.
But it is her motherly feelings that are most stressed, her downcast gaze revealing inner emotions of sadness and loss. Her action makes her chief mourner, connecting her directly with all the others depicted in the three panels that join her in prayer. The two sides of her future experience regarding her son are suggested again by the presence of the fourteen winged angels who cluster around her, mimicking her kneeling and praying actions, hovering in space, or sitting poignantly on the cross-like stable beams at the upper right. Though it isn’t possible to distinguish happy from sad among them, it is very likely that these angels symbolise the Virgin’s seven joys and sorrows. This was a popular way of drawing together key moments in the often told story of her life (the so-called ‘Life of the Virgin’) that had been established as an official festival of the church by the Synod of Cologne in 1423.
The Renaissance artist’s freedom
If the subject-matter of van der Goes’ painting is traditional enough, its style is less so. The painter employs a broad sweep of chiaroscuro which generalises surfaces, highlighting certain forms at the expense of others. The large areas of dark shadow at the left of the central panel, for example, allow the bulky praying form of St Joseph (and the ox and ass behind him) to loom out of the darkness in a manner that is closer to Leonardo da Vinci than earlier Flemish painting. It is unlikely that Leonardo was an actual influence, yet the Portinari altarpiece, painted in the mid-1470s, was destined for Florence, the Tuscan city where he was already working. Painted in Ghent, the triptych was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, a Florentine banker who had worked in nearby Bruges for more than forty years. As with the Arnolfini portrait, the international dimensions of this Flemish work are clearly apparent.
Portinari’s commission to van der Goes was dependent on the fact that he had spent most of his life in Flanders. He also commissioned works from the Bruges painter Hans Memling (1430/40–1494), showing that he had developed a specific taste for the realism of Flemish art. The confident placement of a huge Flemish triptych in a prominent Florentine church is a sign that the gap between the Italian and Flemish schools was narrowing. In the final quarter of the fifteenth century, art became increasingly international, as artists and patrons travelled more extensively, and means of communication became more reliable and sophisticated. The altarpiece is further evidence that leading Italian patrons of the fifteenth century did not make the kind of negative judgements against northern art that later became common.
The two wings feature careful portraits of the patron and his family, who kneel and pray to Christ. Portinari and his elder son Antonio are joined by their name (or onomastic) saints, Thomas and Anthony, who also protect Pigallo, the younger son. In the opposite panel are Tommaso’s wife, Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, and daughter Margherita alongside their name saints, Mary Magdalene and Margaret. The presence of portraits of the patrons in large-scale altarpieces was well established in Flemish painting, and is another example of the overlap between portraiture and religious art noted earlier. In the Portinari painting, the patrons’ position in the wings and small scale establishes their relatively lowly place within the sacred order, though of course their very inclusion in the painting represents an extraordinary privilege.
The variation of sizes between secular and sacred figures establishes a hierarchy of importance in a way that is quite traditional in sacred art: even a very progressive painter such as Hugo took careful account of older artistic conventions. But in the central panel he manipulated scale, space, and position with much more freedom. In van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece the sacred figures in Heaven are raised to the upper part of the picture field and are enormous by comparison with those on earth below. Hugo simply abandons this kind of top-down hierarchy, making the smallest and least impressive visual form into the figure of greatest significance.
This inversion of the usual arrangement has a theological meaning, illustrating the essential contradiction of the Christian story, whereby the all-powerful God humbles himself by taking on frail human form. The idea that the birth of Christ overturned all existing hierarchies and expectations to stress a new moral value of humility is reinforced by the placement of the lowly shepherds so close to him. Their crude bulky forms jut forward toward Christ as if to show an especially close connection. The shepherds’ treatment reveals the painter’s free approach to the space in his picture, which is manipulated at will and as expressive need arises. As we will see in the following chapter, this ‘subjective’ approach to perspective space was very different to that used by Italian painters in the same period.
Hugo treats the shepherds’ depiction carefully, emphasising their role as symbols of Christ’s humility. Their coarse features are closely individualised and they have dirty hands with thick stubby fingers. The contrast of their rough limbs and ruddy physiognomies with the pale and delicate figures of the angels nearby, or with the Virgin herself, is very deliberate. We noted earlier that a play between realistic and more stylised Gothic elements is typical of many fifteenth-century Flemish paintings. Hugo knowingly manipulates different styles to create new expressive effects, allowing different artistic languages to collide. Further stylistic contrasts within the work are provided by the massive figures of Joseph and the other male saints and the documentary-style donor portraits.
Lowly social types such as shepherds do not often appear in earlier Flemish art, where realism is limited to the close description of exclusive interiors. In keeping with the outdoor setting, Hugo introduces a new rural note that was destined to have a long afterlife in northern Renaissance art (see plate 4). This sense of the countryside is also evident in the tiny vignettes showing earlier moments in the story of the Nativity placed in the landscape background. His altarpiece coincides with the rise of small prints on paper (primarily woodcuts and engravings) that often showed everyday scenes from contemporary peasant life. These low-life genre images were increasingly used by sixteenth-century painters across northern Europe to situate their art in the here and now.
Hugo’s play with space and scale, like his free combination of different styles, is ultimately used to reveal Christ’s humility. But the boldness with which he overturned expectation suggests that leading artists of the later fifteenth century now had more expressive freedom. Hugo’s preference for the visually unusual looks to the future rather than the past. The same kind of pointed confrontations of secular and sacred, ugliness and beauty, low and high, became a marked feature in the work of many later masters in northern Europe. Having said this, it is also true that his very modern visual and conceptual juxtapositions still served a more traditional purpose.
Standing before the Portinari altarpiece it is hard to escape the sense that the triptych, like many Flemish religious paintings before it, arrives at a resolution of opposites. The bringing together of donor portraits, monumental saints, the beautiful Gothic Virgin, and a group of crude and earthy shepherds creates a sense of the wider viewing community, one made equal by their shared devotion to Christ’s sacrificial body commemorated at the Eucharistic ritual of the Mass. The low take their rightful place alongside the high within the charmed semicircle, the half-formed shape that can only be completed by the viewers gathered before the altar.
Flemish art as Renaissance
Is it fair to describe the Flemish works discussed in this chapter as ‘Renaissance’? Renaissance means rebirth, referring to the revival of the art of classical antiquity which had been forgotten in the so-called medieval, ‘middle’ or ‘dark’ ages. If artists such as van Eyck, van der Weyden and van der Goes had no concern with the classical models, then it may seem mistaken to insist that their works were part of the movement. But Flemish art did become very lifelike in the fifteenth century, more so even than the classicising art of Italy in the same period. In this way, at least, it fulfilled one of the basic principles of Renaissance art.
Free from the classical past, Flemish artists were able to make a more direct approach to the real world of appearances, one that put them (albeit briefly) in front of their southern counterparts. Their art found its perfect medium in the translucent tones of oil paint, which did not take on in Italy until the 1470s. But it would be a mistake to assume that Flemish art was simply or naively ‘realistic’. If their figure-types reflect the older stylisations of Gothic art, so their apparently natural-looking settings are underpinned by more conventional religious meanings. As we will see in the next chapter, expression of sacred meanings was equally central to the art of fifteenth-century Italy.
