Essere Umano: to Be Human: Northern Renaissance

ART HISTORY Journey Through a Thousand Years “Essere Umano: To Be Human” Week Five: Northern Renaissance Northern Renaissance Art Under Burgundian Rule - The Brothers Limbourg Usher in the Renaissance – The Belles Heures Video - Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century – The Unicorn Tapestries – Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait – A Goldsmith in His Shop - The Medieval and Renaissance Altarpiece – The Monforte Altar – Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565, oil on wood, 162 x 117 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) Dr. Stephen Zucker & Dr. Beth Harris: “Northern Renaissance Art Under Burgundian Rule” From smARThistory (2015) The Burgundian Netherlands (map: National Gallery of Art) We often think of the Renaissance as an entirely Italian phenomenon, but in northern Europe there was also a Renaissance. Though profoundly different, the Italian and Northern Renaissances shared a similar interest in the natural world and re-creating the illusion of reality in their paintings and sculptures. In the fifteenth century, the northern European countries we know today as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were controlled by the enormously wealthy Dukes of Burgundy (Burgundy is a region in France). This region during the fifteenth century is often referred to, today, as the Burgundian Netherlands. The court of the Dukes of Burgundy were the most important patrons of the early Northern Renaissance, but newly wealthy private citizens also commissioned art as part of a growing interest in private meditation and prayer. Portraits were also commissioned in growing numbers. Like Florence, cities in northern Europe (Bruges, Ghent and then later Antwerp and Brussels), were rich industrial and banking centers during this period and this allowed a large merchant-class to flourish creating an ideal environment for artistic production. Classical antiquity? In Italy, the Renaissance was deeply influenced by the art and culture of Ancient Greece and Rome—in part because the art and architecture of antiquity was more immediately available (ruins were plentiful in many cities). Northern Europe however did not have such ready access to ancient monuments and so tended to draw instead more directly from medieval traditions such as manuscript illuminations. Oil paint: glazes Though the medium of oil paint had been in use since the late Middle Ages, the artists of the North more fully exploited this medium’s unique characteristics. Using thin layers of paint, called glazes, northern artists created a depth of color that was entirely new, and because oil paint can imitate textures far better than fresco or tempera, it was perfectly suited to representing the material reality that was so important to Renaissance artists and their patrons. In the Northern Renaissance, we see artists making the most of oil paint— creating the illusion of light reflecting on metal surfaces or jewels, and textures that appear like real fur, hair, wool or wood. The great artists of this period created work that reflected their increasingly mercantile world, even when they worked for the court of the Dukes. The spiritual world reigned supreme but the representation of wealth and power were also a hugely important motive for patrons whether a pope, a duke, or a banker. […] Bruce Cole & Adelheid Gealt: “The Limbourgs Usher in the Renaissance” From Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism (1989) [The] Flemish masters, working in a culture that accepted the material world as a manifestation of divine creation, found a means to describe nature, people, and light, in a manner still astonishing [despite the fact that they did not embrace the spirit of Renaissance humanism as it had been conceived in Southern Europe….] [T]hey anticipated the Italians in the exploration of landscape and in the development of the portrait. Their vision, unconstrained by the conventions of classical art or the generalizing forms adopted by the earliest masters of realism in Italy (such as Giotto), was meticulous, precise, and comprehensive. Nature and humanity were faithfully recorded by [artists like] van Eyck, Roger der Weyden, and their followers, such as Memlinc. Thus, while Van Eyck and Rogier places a renewed emphasis on humanity in their portraiture, they treated their subjects with unsparing frankness and honesty. They set the standard for verisimilitude by which all subsequent realism has been measured, and they reminded their viewers that humanity, though important, was not perfect; the imperfections on the exterior were mirrors for more serious flaws of human nature. A general pessimism about human nature kept Northern thinkers from leaping to Pico [della Mirandola]’s optimistic conclusions about man. But the determination to face life as it really was yielded a legacy just as important and enduring as Italy’s Renaissance. Northern artists tended to examine humanity in a broader context, looking at the environment in which people lived and at the social fabric that people created for themselves. Though humanity was often found wanting, the keys to understanding life offered by artists in the North were important to Western culture. Later images of social satire, themes of mortality and suffering, the exploration of the human psyche, and landscape both urban and natural all trace their origins to the arts of Northern Europe in the fifteenth sixteenth centuries. As in Italy, the resurgence of art independent of cathedral decoration – paintings, sculptures, as well as prints and drawings – occurred in both courtly and urban settings[…] This flood of artistic creation – mainly altarpieces, portraits, images of saints, and tombs – was partially destroyed by iconoclastic outbursts in the sixteenth century. To what extent overzealous Protestant reformers, anxious to rid themselves of the images representing [what they perceived as] Catholic idolatry, eradicated the legacy of the fifteenth century will never be known. But what survives reveals a culture clinging to faith, wishing to see clearly and accurately the embodiment of this faith. Equally important, patrons wished to be seen in order to be remembered; thus portraits of donors in altarpieces abounded. […]Art existed to embellish the rituals of life and death; it made the mysteries of religion more comprehensible by giving them concrete, visible form […But even the subjects of portraits, despite their detail and realism, were somewhat medieval in feeling, because they felt remote and far off from the viewer, part of a larger whole…] beings of another dimension. This was the higher reality, laden with meaning. No tree, no flower, no detail was too small to partake of some greater significance within the larger whole. The beauty these artists reflect is not the beauty of their invention but that of divinity made manifest. Finally, these works are beautiful in the medieval sense; their multiplicity of form and their complexity, as well as their material richness, endow them with a splendour associated with the spiritual. […] The birth of painting north of the Alps occurred in the court of Jean, the duke of Berry. Three brothers of notable talents and abundant invention, Pol, Jehanequin, and Herman Limbourg, worked for the duke from 1411 until his and their deaths in 1416 from the plague. Although the Limbourgs’ lives are well documented compared to those of other artists of the fifteenth century, very little is known about their training. Two of the brothers were apprenticed to a Parisian goldsmith when they were quite young, but little else is known about how their original style evolved. It seems likely, however, that the brothers went to Italy, where they saw the art in Florence and perhaps Siena. When the trip took place is uncertain, but it was surely one of the earliest of such journeys in what was to become a centuries-long and fruitful dialogue between the art of Italy and Northern Europe. Herman, Paul and Jean de Limbourg, January, from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1413-16, ink on vellum (Musée Condé, Chantilly). The figure in a blue robe on the opposite side of the table is a portrait of the patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry. The duke must have been pleased with the brothers’ art for he gave them commissions for the illustration of several important manuscripts. Whether religious or secular, the illuminated, or illustrated, manuscript was an object of luxury. Follow this Link to Get a Glimpse at The Teenage Limbourg Brothers’ Work! https://smarthistory.org/herman-paul-and-jean-de-limbourg-the-belles-heures-of-jean-de-france-duc- de-berry/ The duke’s love of illuminated manuscripts and the Limbourgs’ talents intersected and resulted in a monument of surpassing quality, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Very Rich Hours), of about 1415. This book of hours contains a series of calendar pictures that are strikingly novel. It was traditional for books of hours, which contain liturgical text meant for private prayer and meditation, to begin with twenty-four small illustrations of the [constellations] and the labours of each month. But the Limbourgs disregarded this tradition and instead painted a comparatively large picture of each of the labours, with the complicated astrological information placed in an arch above each picture.[…] Thus these calendar pages escape the often narrowly conceived world of manuscript illumination to become, despite their miniature format, major works of art. These pages are, in fact, among the earliest

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