Running parallel to the Renaissance in Italy was a very separate one further north, in the Netherlands. These were the two richest regions of fifteenth-century Europe, and demand for painting was strong. Cities like Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp had economic and cultural links with their Italian counterparts. For instance, the couple in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage were Italian, working in the Bruges arm of the family business. But painting here had never been overhauled by revolutionary artistic events like it had been in Italy. The Renaissance in the south was about re-creating classical Rome; there was a buzz of expectancy about the times they lived in. That did not exist in the north. Architecture stayed decidedly Gothic, and religious insecurities and political monarchy didn’t encourage anyone to embrace fully the pagan imagery or ancient republican texts of the Italian city-states. In Italy Masaccio and Leonardo were respectively credited with discovering linear and aerial perspective, and had been loudly praised because of it. But completely independently, the artists of the Netherlands had, in some ways, quietly stumbled across them too. The artists there, working in their medieval guilds, were painting exactly what they saw, mimicking the real world. They did it so incredibly well that they came to the same conclusions as their southern Renaissance cousins about many things. It was all very different in Italy, where they didn’t mimic nature but instead theorized about how perspective, lighting and solidity would change art.
The major development that allowed the Netherlandish painters to imitate nature so exactly was oil paint, used there for centuries but perfected and popularized in the time of van Eyck. The old tempera paint was fast-drying, which meant artists had to work at breakneck speed in small areas to finish what they were doing before the whole thing dried. It was not a technique that encouraged labour intensive detail. But oils were perfect for building up the minutest details, and van Eyck and van der Weyden were the first and greatest of all northern painters to exploit it.
The Renaissance was also the great awakening of the consciousness of the individual – thought became free of the Church and people questioned everything for themselves, nowhere more so than in Italy. As van Eyck’s highly detailed style suited the exploration of the human face so well it was in high demand for portraits, especially in Italy. Bellini followed the Netherlandish lead and switched to highly detailed oil painting in Venice, while Mantegna in Mantua copied the works of van der Weyden. But this cross-pollination didn’t reach every artist. Bosch proves just how different artists could be. His painstakingly accurate detail comes out of the local tradition, as do his magical demons and limitless symbolism. But his incredible imagery seems to come from the dreams of a medieval artist, not one working at the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Contrary to popular belief he wasn’t a mad genius working in a vacuum. Thirteen years after Columbus discovered America, Bosch painted his greatest medievalist masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It has nothing to do with mainstream Renaissance art theory, but it does, like Bosch himself, have everything to do with the religious quandary in the Netherlands. Throughout the fifteenth century the place had been overrun by wars, plagues, famines and economic crises. It looked like God had abandoned them, and many people were scared of the consequences. Religious fanaticism spread, as did witch-hunts, guilty souls flagellating themselves in the streets, and new sects proclaiming salvation. The Catholic Church was proving itself incompetent at providing the religious comforts its flock needed. It had been vying with the secular princes for power for so long that it was losing touch with its celestial purpose.
Only ten years after Bosch’s painting, the German Martin Luther would make his protests that finally led to the break up of the old order. The Germans, geographically between Italy and the Netherlands, also found themselves artistically stuck in the middle. Dürer was historically from the traditions of the north but intellectually he was a member of the Italian Renaissance. His attempts to find the ‘formula’ for the perfect human proportions, along with his systematic study and sketching of nature, were the sort of rigorous practices carried out by the best Italian artists. He studied painting in Italy, and his engravings (some of the best ever created) spread the principles of perspective, solidity and composition all over northern Europe. Other German artists took up the Italian challenge in different ways. Grünewald, like most Germans, was still painting the concerns and medieval imagery of the past. His gritty religious scenes used an incredible expressiveness, as well as gory detail, for the figures of the crucified Christ. Similarly Cranach knew what was out there but he used the new tricks to give his sexy paintings more punch rather than to follow or expand the new findings. Altdorfer did the same, but he was also wrapped up in a growing patriotism that was rejecting the imagery of the Italians, but not their developments. He set about creating a grand tradition of German landscape painting. Holbein, the youngest of the talented Germans, found himself painting in a region factionalized by religion, where finding work became so difficult he had to move out. He went to England, a country that at the time was on the outskirts of art. France was also turning around its artistic fortunes. Fouquet and then Clouet helped to bring about a culture of artistry, which was heavily backed by the French king’s patronage.
The hyper-realism of artists like van Eyck carried on as the national style in the Netherlands right into the nineteenth century, but it never really matched the brilliance of the earliest masters. Lack of church patronage in Protestant Holland was just as marked as it was in Germany, and painters had to find a new market or face extinction. Altarpieces for churches were out, while small-scale paintings for the rising middle classes were in. Bruegel’s comical and moralistic pictures filled the gap and started a tradition of humane non-religious art in the north that continued for 400 years.
THE PAINTING Van Eyck’s most famous portrait asks more questions than it answers. Until recently it was thought to be a portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, but we now know that they got married fourteen years after this painting was made. The Netherlandish ruler Duke Philip the Good was both van Eyck’s and Giovanni’s employer and bought all his silk from the Italian, which was a reason given for all the brilliant fabrics in the painting. But there could be another reason. The lurid red of the bed might signify lust in the shoeless couple holding hands, about to try for a child as they are watched over by a carving of St Margaret, patron saint of pregnant women. The woman looks pregnant already but enormous stomachs were the fashion, and if it were a wedding portrait, with the dog symbolizing fidelity, it would not have included a pregnant bride. The painting has been called a sort of photo-document of the wedding itself. Beneath a single candle representing the all-seeing eye of God is a mirror, catching all the details from the other side. In the mirror you can see two people standing at the door – van Eyck and Philip the Good? We will probably never know, but above it van Eyck wrote, in Latin, ‘Jan van Eyck was here, 1434’. Did he mean in the room, painting? In the mirror greeting them? Or was it written, as has been thought, like a witness’s signature to their marriage? Whatever the truth, the picture is a brilliant advertisement for van Eyck’s revolutionary new style of realistic oil painting.
THE ARTIST Van Eyck has been credited with inventing oil painting and so changing art forever – he didn’t. But he popularized oils so much that he might as well have invented the technique. By mixing ground-up colours with slow-drying oils rather than fast-drying eggs, van Eyck allowed himself the time he needed to perfect all the subtle details, from the hairs of the fur to the fruit at the window. This was impossible with the old egg-based tempera paint. He could build up layers and layers of translucent oils to create the incredibly fine detail that has been the trademark of Netherlandish painting ever since. But his reputation wasn’t built just on that. Like Masaccio in Florence he was developing a real light source, giving his figures gravity and his spaces real depth.
b. ?Maasseick c. 1395; d. Bruges 1441
The Arnolfini Marriage, 1434
Oil on panel
82 × 60 cm (32¼ × 23½ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING The intimacy of this paninting has held people’s attention for almost 600 years. Van Eyck had recently painted a similar composition to this one, which was technically brilliant but did not have van der Weyden’s human charm, and has not stood the test of time in the same way. Flemish painters were interested in the beauty of incredible detail, as it was their way of imitating nature, but van der Weyden became equally absorbed with the expressiveness of his characters. The patron saint of painters, St Luke, is kneeling down to sketch the Virgin and Child, but his Christ doesn’t look blankly divine and all-knowing like in other paintings. His fingers and toes are stretched out and wiggling, and He’s laughing, happily staring up at His mother like a normal child. She smiles back, without any of the usual impersonal grandeur. Her clothes, like the room, are still amazingly grand (she could be a rich Flemish aristocrat in her garden study), but we are looking down on her from the same plain as the painter and St Luke. Instead of setting them up as a fabulously heavenly pair, sitting on a throne surrounded by angels, The artist puts them in the same room as us. The sense of closeness in the small room is increased by the long view down the twisting river, and van der Weyden makes us feel the space by putting another couple standing at the battlements. Without them his river view might look like a painting hanging in the next room. Despite the concern for accuracy this was painted at a time when symbolism was everywhere, which is why the ox hiding under the desk behind St Luke would not have looked odd. The saints needed to be seen with their familiar attributes, as without them they were just mortals.
THE ARTIST ‘Roger of the Meadow’, as his name translates, was one of the most influential artists of the fifteenth century. He and his studio of helpers were imitated all over Europe, even in Italy. But when he died he was forgotten, leaving only his art behind. Who van der Weyden really was and how he lived is still a mystery. His work has been confused with other artists, and it is only since the twentieth century that he has been rediscovered as one of the world’s greatest painters.
b. lournai c.1399–1400; d. Brussels 1464
Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 1435–37
Oil on panel
138 × 111 cm (54¼ × 43¾ in)
Alle Pinakothek, Munich
THE PAINTING These panels formed the doors to a triptych that is now broken up. The separated sections hang in New York, Vicenza and Bruges. Only these two outer doors remain in Memling’s adopted Netherlandish town. He painted them in the monotone technique called en grisaille, which makes them look less like painting and more like carved sculptures standing in arched stone niches. Fra Angelico painted The Annunciation twenty-five years before, in Florence, but Memling wasn’t interested in his kind of Gothic symbolism, his use of sparkling gold or his depictions of Renaissance architecture. God is divinely giving life and ultimately saving humanity, but Memling painted it with amazing restraint. The figures are cool and graceful, painted with typically Netherlandish precision, and they feel real because Memling’s mastery of light and shadow gives them depth and solidity. The Archangel Gabriel is holding his attribute, the fleur-de-lis topped staff. His banner says Ave Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum, which means ‘Greetings most favoured one! The Lord is with you’. This is a slightly more subtle way of telling the story than Fra Angelico’s approach, with his angel firing Latin sentences from his mouth into the air. That would not have been realistic enough for the down-to-earth middle-class art of the Netherlands. We know it is the Virgin because in the jug next to her is the lily, symbolic of springtime (when the Annunciation happened) and of her purity.
THE ARTIST German-born Memling was the most important artist of his day in Bruges, where he lived through the fighting and upheaval of the change from Philip the Good to Spanish rule in the Netherlands. He was the heir to van Eyck and van der Weyden, but where van der Weyden was a painter of emotion Memling was one of restrained coolness and perfect balance. His eye was trained for minute detail, in faces as well as landscapes. This is the kind of detail that inspired Bellini in Venice to paint his highly detailed portraits, like Doge Loredan, in the northern technique of oil paint. Lots of Memling’s paintings ended up in Italy, like the centre panel of this triptych. Throughout the ninetheenth century Memling was considered the most important Netherlandish artist of his time, and is still considered one of the greatest.
b. Seligenstadt 1430–40; d. Bruges 1494
The Annunciation (two exterior panels of a triptych), c. 1472
Oil on panel
83 × 26.5 cm (32¾ × 10½ in)
Groeningernuseum, Bruges
b. Louvain 1465–66; d. Kiel, nr Antwerp 1530
Portrait of a Man, c. 1510–20
Oil on panel,
80 × 64.5 cm (31½ × 25¼ in)
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
THE PAINTING Massys learnt a lot from Leonardo, and this is his male Mona Lisa to prove it. As with the Mona Lisa, we know little about this sitter. Do the ink in front of him and the quill in his hand mean he is a writer? Why does he also hold a rosebud and a pink crucifix, and have a halo? One of Massys’ great friends and influences was the world’s first best-selling author, the intellectual Erasmus. It would be tempting to link this portrait to him if only the surviving portrait Massys painted looked more similar. The distant receding landscape shows the influence of Leonardo’s new aerial perspective that faded gradually away, and though Massys still loves to use highly accurate detail he has softened the skin textures with Leonardo’s technique of building up layers of paint and shadows (sfumato). The man’s oddly engaging expression has something of Leonardo’s enigmatic expressions too, yet worn on a very northern European face.
THE ARTIST Massys was a tinsmith until he was twenty, and only took up painting to impress a girl and woo her away from another painter. Although he was self-taught, within five years he had become a master of the Antwerp painters’ guild and by 1510 was the city’s best painter. Massys helped bring the minutely observed Gothic traditions of northern painting together with the new brand of realism that was forming in Italy, helping to unite the two great artistic cultures of Europe.
b. Tours c. 1420; d. Tours 1481
Virgin and Child, 1452
Oil on panel
95.3 × 86.4 cm (37½ × 34 in)
Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp
THE PAINTING One of France’s greatest fifteenth-century paintings was also one of the strangest. The figures look like cold pieces of marble, surrounded by dumb-faced angels in hellish Technicolor. Christ is as expressionless as the cherub angels, and why do the Virgin’s breasts look like spherical implants, bursting out of her undone bodice? Her fashionably shaved head shows off her perfectly beautiful features, as she demurely looks downward. She is certainly no ordinary Virgin, but then she wasn’t meant to be. This is Agnes Sorel, King Charles VII’s mistress. Christ is pointing at the other panel that used to be attached to this one, showing Etienne Chevalier, the King’s Treasurer. Chevalier had both panels painted to hang over his recently dead wife’s tomb, but his secret was that he too was in love with Agnes. She is painted like an untouchably perfect idol, which to him she was. So on one level it is a painting about religion, a devotional painting of a goddess, while on the other it is a painting about sex, still devotional, of a different sort of goddess. It is a rare combination of two powerful human preoccupations.
THE ARTIST Fouquet rose to become the only truly Renaissance artist of fifteenth-century France. During a stay in Rome, where he painted the pope’s portrait, he understood and took on Leonardo’s developments in perspective together with the sculptural innovations of Donatello. The icy detachment of some of his figures, like this Virgin, reflects his own cool character.
THE PAINTING This fantastical world of frolicking people had one purpose for Bosch – to show us that lust leads to hell. Like Bronzino’s famous allegory of sex, Bosch’s is a moral tale, but it couldn’t be further from Bronzino’s polished Renaissance world. The centre panel of a triptych, between Eden and Hell, it shows that lust is the sure way to damnation. It is easy to see from Bosch’s paintings why people think he was a madman with an imagination tainted by illness, but he was painting for an audience that understood him. Even so his greatest work is still full of mysterious images that we can’t understand today. Some are from fifteenth-century Netherlandish slang, puns and sayings that were obvious and funny then but have been obscure for centuries. To the Netherlanders in the fifteenth century the fish was a phallic symbol and the berry stood for sex. So birds feeding berries to open-mouthed men and swimmers nibbling at them were sexual puns; like the winged strawberry in the left corner looking like a mating dragonfly on a woman’s back. The fruit parings (peelings) that so many of the couples are inside represented pairings of people; the Netherlandish play on paring/pairing is the same as the English. The fruit paring itself is hollow, however, signifying the emptiness of sensuality. The ‘Pool of Venus’ in the background is ringed by men riding (the same innuendo then as now) in a frenzy around the women. Some carry outstretched fish and others are already together in a hollow fruit paring. But despite the lewd associations there isn’t much graphic imagery here. Bosch didn’t want to titillate. He wanted to show the degrading effect of lust on humanity, because he truly hated animalistic baseness in mankind.
THE ARTIST Although understood in his time, Bosch was still a total anomaly in Netherlandish art. There was no one else like him, nor has been since. He totally ignored the Renaissance, and relied on Gothic ideas of body types, composition and style to carry his personal visions of heaven and hell. He was an upright, religions, middle-class provincial who was independently rich enough not to need money from his work, so he was free to paint totally individually. But his individuality meant he was misunderstood. After his death he was virtually forgotten until he was rediscovered again in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century he inspired Surrealists like Dalí.
b. s’Hertogenbosch c. 1450; d. s’Hertogenbosch 1516
The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1505
Central panel of a triptych, oil on panel
218.5 × 195 cm (86 × 76 in)
Prado, Madrid
THE PAINTING A man with a hammer is about to crush the head of his foreshortened victim while the Persian King Saporat helps him to aim. Next to him the blindfolded man’s head is about to join the others on the ground. The king had been ordered by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to massacre these 10,000 Christians, and in every corner of Dürer’s Mount Ararat there are bloody murders. Forty-five years earlier the Turks had conquered the eastern Christian Empire and were threatening Europe from Spain to Vienna. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, commissioned this for his church as a constant reminder of who the enemy really was. Dürer was doing something rather like what Michelangelo had started that year in the Sistine Chapel; he was trying to master every twist of the human body. In the centre, a figure is holding a banner saying Albrecht Dürer, German. What’s he doing there? Dürer probably would have said ‘why shouldn’t I be? It’s my painting!’
THE ARTIST Dürer was the greatest artist in fifteenth-century Europe outside Italy. He is credited with single-handedly carrying Italian Renaissance ideals into northern Europe. Like his Italian contemporary Leonardo he wrote about perspective, measurements, fortifications and his lifelong obsession, the proportions of the human body. And like him he was pushing the boundaries of what it meant to an artist in society. Dürer spent his life trying to increase the status of art and himself. His self-consciousness led to his first self-portrait aged thirteen, and he just kept on painting himself. With Rembrandt, he is one of the only artists to keep a record of his artistic development through how he looked. The most famous self-portrait shows him staring directly at the viewer in the way that was reserved for Christ, or kings. Dürer actually painted himself looking like Christ with long flowing hair, beard and hand raised as if blessing us. He was deeply religious, but was trying to show that as a great artist he was like God, as he could create life on canvas. This was dangerous stuff in fifteenth-century Germany. Rembrandt is also the only artist who comes close to Dürer’s incredible printmaking talent. Dürer was the only Renaissance artist to spend serious lime making prints. Because they were cheap and easy to distribute he became the first mass-market artist, and one of the most famous artists ever, from his own time to now.
b. Nuremberg 1471; d. Nuremberg 1528
The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, 1508
Oil on panel transferred to canvas
99 × 87 cm (39 × 34¼ in)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
THE PAINTING In this painting Grünewald captures all dumb thuggery and bloodlust of the mankind that Christ was born to save. Christ has just been arrested and is on His way to be judged. He is spat on and beaten by a mob incensed that this mortal claimed to be the Messiah. Grünewald has painted the story at the point where someone is calling out, ‘Now Messiah, if you are the prophet, tell us who hit you’. Here the jailer shouts the words and the grotesque-faced man behind him grabs Christ’s hair with one hand, about to pummel Him with the other. Christ is blindfolded, bleeding and looking pretty pathetic. His thin, bearded face and down-turned mouth have none of the divine resignation you’d expect. It was all very real-looking to a fifteenth-century German. This could be a battered criminal being dragged through the streets of any German town on his way to being tied up in the stocks. Grünewald isn’t letting anyone forget that Christ was a living human being. He makes us sympathize with the haggard broken figure, without any heroism, and reminds us that He forgave the sins of this ugly, vulgar crowd of humanity that we are all part of ourselves.
THE ARTIST Grünewald was second only to Dürer as Germany’s greatest Renaissance artist. They were both religiously troubled Protestant converts who had unhappy, childless marriages, but the rest of their lives couldn’t be more different. Dürer made very sure that his Renaissance attitudes would bring him fame, fortune and lasting respect. Grünewald was so unconcerned with these things – or so bad at making them happen – that his real name, Neithardt, was only discovered in the 1930s. He had a feeling for colour and a reliance on paint that his contemporary Dürer could not match. He was an excellent draughtsman but he never made the etchings that could have made him famous; instead he stuck to making dramatic, colourful paintings. His incredibly powerful imagery was recognized in his lifetime, but it wasn’t enough to get him work when he left his patron, the Archbishop of Mainz, after he supported the wrong side (the peasants) in the Peasants’ War. He worked as an architect, then sold quack medicines and paint. In 1528 he died of the plague while working as a hydraulic engineer. The city councillors who employed him said on his death, ‘he didn’t achieve very much’.
b. ?Wurzburg c. 1470–80; d. Halle 1528
The Mocking of Christ, c. 1503
109 × 73.5 cm (43 × 29 in)
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
THE PAINTING This is Altdorfer’s masterpiece. In this massive battle scene he has crammed thousands of armoured knights into every piece of land. Only the mountain peaks that recede through the sea and into the mist are figure-free. The landscape looks a bit like Leonardo’s in the Mona Lisa, but Altdorfer was no lover of Italian art. Painting the alpine landscape near his home town, south of the River Danube, he was part of a loose group of artists called the Danube School. They painted their native German landscape in an expressive way, conjuring up emotions with it. This scene is one of the most grandiose in art. Alexander is in the centre-left on his golden chariot, driven by three white horses. He has just beaten Darius, and their legions of warriors are still lancing, spearing and fighting. The immense battlefield is laid out, but Altdorfer hasn’t painted it with the perfect mathematical perspective of the Italian Renaissance, as Dürer would have done. He knew how to use perspective (the figures get smaller in the distance), but his horizon is impossibly high, which no Italian Renaissance painter would have dreamt of doing. He did not need to follow perspective slavishly. He wanted to create a mythically grand epic with the sun setting in one corner and the moon coming out in the other, and it works. He was helping to create a German grand tradition of painting because he didn’t like or want to use the foreign Italianate imports from south of the Alps. This classical subject was commissioned as part of a set for the Duke of Bavaria, but instead of painting classical warriors, Altdorfer paints up-to-date German ones.
THE ARTIST Altdorfer was a late Gothic artist who knew how to paint landscapes to bring out emotion, Like Gozzoli in Florence he was adding Gothic detail to Renaissance ideas like perspective, vanishing points and realistic colour. He was the first artist in western art to paint a landscape without any figures at all, making the view the subject. Though be didn’t really have any followers he was seen in the nineteenth century as one of the first pan-German national painters. Like Bosch in the Netherlands, Altdorfer was one of his town’s richest citizens and a prominent figure. In 1533 he turned down the opportunity to be mayor, to carry on with his new career as an architect.
b. Regensburg 1480; d. Regensburg 1538
The Battle of Alexander the Great at Issus, 1529
Oil on panel
158 × 120 cm (62¼ × 47¼ in)
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
THE PAINTING Cranach was a master of erotic art, and cornered the market in sultry female nudes in sixteenth-century northern Europe. Here he has taken the story of the Judgement of Paris as an excuse to paint three at once. This has always been a popular subject as it has four of art’s timeless elements – sex, ego, death and power. Wrapped up in sex and beauty it is a classical story, showing off its owner’s erudition and ego. Paris is judging a beauty contest, and his decision sets off a chain of events that leads to the Trojan wars and to his own death. There is a sexual power struggle between the three goddesses, as they try to bribe Paris into deciding who is the most beautiful. Not happy with three purely classical nudes, Cranach dresses them up with the jewellery and hairstyles of his day. Mercury is holding the prize of a ball in his hand, and looks as if he is from a medieval parade, while the shepherd Paris is promoted to a dashing knight in armour with a brilliant white, if far too small, horse. Cranach gives him and the winner Venus his favourite prop, a ridiculous feathered hat. Like Altdorfer, Cranach was influenced by the Danube School, with evocatively painted German alpine landscapes like this one with mountain castles and distant forests. The unnaturally elongated Mannerist bodies of his goddesses, with their penetrating coy stares, are typical of Cranach’s style, which influenced a huge school of Germanic painters.
THE ARTIST Cranach’s life before thirty is a mystery, but after his appointment as court painter to Frederick the Wise in 1505 he became one of the most influential painters north of Italy. He didn’t look to Renaissance ideals like Dürer. Instead he developed a slick court style for Frederick and hired a massive workshop to carry out painting his Venuses, portraits and religious scenes in landscapes. Where Dürer was struggling to discover the perfect system to measure the human body, Cranach was happily painting a stylish mix of Gothic and Mannerist elements often set in up-to-date German landscapes. His portraits of his good friend the Protestant reformer Martin Luther have been reproduced all over the world, along with his prints for the first Protestant bible. But Cranach really represents that robust strain of German art that was vaguely affected by the Renaissance but never actually participated in it.
b. Kronach 1472; d. Weimar 1553
The Judgement of Paris, c. 1528
Oil on panel
102 × 71 cm (40 × 28 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
THE PAINTING Jane Seymour was the third of Henry VIII’s six wives and the only one to give him the one thing he needed from his marriages – a son. She had been lady-in-waiting to his first two wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and had seen Anne executed just months before her own marriage to him. They married quietly the year this portrait was painted, only a year before she gave birth to the sickly future Edward VI. The childbirth killed her. Holbein used the old fast-drying tempera paint as well as the newer slow-drying oil paint to get the jewel-like finish he wanted. Her pose is formal, befitting a new queen, but her expression is almost characterless. Holbein was a master of penetrating likenesses of his sitters, but here he makes Jane a slightly prim, vacuous ideal of a noblewoman. Around her eyes she has something of the Cranach school of beauty, adding some fashionable looks to her otherwise exact features. She is gently lit from her upper left, and a light shadow behind and around her features gives her solidity. Holbein’s precise and exacting brushwork is clear and timeless, and he doesn’t care about southern ‘classical beauty’. He usually painted realistic features like van Eyck and the other Netherlandish artists, but he also learnt from Leonardo and the Italians how to soften and balance an intimate portrait like this.
THE ARTIST Holbein was the best portrait painter in sixteenth-century northern Europe. He was Dürer’s successor as the northern Renaissance artist, but because of the troubled times he lived in he had to leave Germany and look for work in England. The religious Reformation in central Europe effectively ended the demand for religious paintings, and artists who couldn’t find work elsewhere were ending up in poverty or other professions, like Grünewald had done. Though Henry VIII was turning England into a Protestant state, Holbein, carrying a letter of introduction from the intellectual Erasmus, went to the artistic backwater of London in 1526 to look for patrons. It worked. Within two years he had made enough money to go home to Basel and buy a house for his wife and children. Increasing fame in English court circles managed to get him the position of Court Painter by 1536, drawing and painting portraits for the king. He only saw his family once more before he died of the plague, in London.
b. Augsburg 1497–98; d. London 1543
Jane Seymour, 1536
Oil and tempera on panel
64.8 × 40.6 cm (25½ × 16 in)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
THE PAINTING The French King Francis I poses on his horse and looks directly out at us, smirking. Despite the grandeur of the balanced composition, with its Leonardo-like receding landscape and classical building, it has an engaging intimacy about it. The king’s enigmatic face is mirrored in the stallion’s mouth and eyes. There is a strong diagonal across the picture which might lead us to its meaning. The king’s golden sceptre ends at his polished golden codpiece and carries down through his sword to the horse’s genitals. Francis’ court was all about eroticism, wit and art, and this tiny cabinet picture (for a private room) combines all three. Maybe Clouet was asked to paint it as a token for one of the king’s mistresses. But intimate and personal as its wit suggests, Francis isn’t about to let us forget just how important he is. The intricate Milanese armour with golden faces on its shoulders, elbows and knees proves his rank and fashionability. The strapwork decoration on his armour was new, and Clouet carries its fussiness on to the horse’s coat to give the whole thing more balance. Francis I was the main force in the French Renaissance. He loved Italy and its arts and wanted to re-create the culture of their courts in his own country. Bronzino’s witty and polished allegory of sex hung in his new country palace at Fontainebleau. In 1516 his artistic patronage had become so great that his invitation to Leonardo to come to his court was accepted. It has gone down in legend that when Leonardo died in France three years later, it was in the arms of Francis I.
THE ARTIST Clouet is one of the great artists of the sixteenth-century French Renaissance. He trained under his famous father, the court painter Jean, but it was only in the nineteenth century that the two painters became distinguished from each other. Not much is known about his life, but in his painting he fused the work of Leonardo, Bronzino and other Italians, the northern precision of his own Netherlandish background and the elegant Mannerist portraiture of France. There are only two signed paintings by him, but the style he epitomized in the French court at Fontainebleau was carried on by generations of artists. It was during his time that French art firmly left its Gothic past behind and began to develop into the world force in painting that it remains today.
b. ?Tours c. 1510; d. Paris 1572
Francis I of France on Horseback, c. 1540
Oil on panel
27 × 22 cm (10½ × 8¾ in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
b. Brogel c. 1525; d. Brussels 1569
Peasant’s Wedding, c. 1566–67
Oil on panel
114.3 × 162.6 cm (45 × 64 in)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
THE PAINTING It is a peasant wedding feast in sixteenth-century Netherlands, and the beer is flowing. This is one of Bruegel’s most famous paintings, and he has captured all the excitement and fun of the feast. Sitting under the wall-hanging is the smug bride, stupidly grinning, while a few seats away her new husband is shovelling a spoonful of something into his goggle-eyed face. Parents and guests are chatting as the crowd pushes its way through the barn door looking for a free lunch. The bagpipe player stares hungrily at the cooks who carry the food in on an old door. The scene is crammed with funny details that Bruegel had observed from life, He is supposed to have gone out dressed as a peasant himself to watch them as they actually behaved, and to paint them without being discovered.
THE ARTIST Bruegel was one of the most important artists of sixteenth-century northern Europe. Like other Netherlandish painters he went to Italy to learn his craft at the heart of the Renaissance. But instead of imitating Roman ruins, subjects or styles, he came back to Antwerp and painted the country peasants and landscapes as he saw them. He had learnt how to use perspective and lighting to give solidity and real space to what he painted, but he used that expertise to paint the real characters he saw around him, not the classical tales of Italy. He founded a huge family of painters and his style was imitated for centuries.
