Northern Renaissance

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The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. Before 1497, Italian Renaissance humanism had little influence outside Italy. From the late 15th century, its ideas spread around Europe. This influenced the German Renaissance, French Renaissance, English Renaissance, Renaissance in the Low Countries, Polish Renaissance and other national and localized movements, each with different characteristics and strengths.

In France, King Francis I imported Italian art, commissioned Venetian artists (including Leonardo da Vinci), and built grand palaces at great expense, starting the French Renaissance. Trade and commerce in cities like Bruges in the 15th century and Antwerp in the 16th increased cultural exchange between Italy and the Low Countries, however in art, and especially architecture, late Gothic influences remained present until the arrival of Baroque even as painters increasingly drew on Italian models.[1]





Reproduction of Johann Gutenberg-era Press on display at the Printing History Museum in Lyon, France.



Age of Discovery[edit]

Main article: Age of Discovery

One of the most important technological development of the Renaissance was the invention of the caravel. This combination of European and African ship building technologies for the first time made extensive trade and travel over the Atlantic feasible. While first introduced by the Italian states, and the early captains, such as Giovanni Caboto, who were Italian, the development would end Northern Italy's role as the trade crossroads of Europe, shifting wealth and power westwards to Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands. These states all began to conduct extensive trade with Africa and Asia, and in the Americas began extensive colonisation activities. This period of exploration and expansion has become known as the Age of Discovery. Eventually European power spread around the globe.


The Ghent Altarpiece (interior view) by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, painted 1432. Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. Early Netherlandish painting often included complicated iconography, and art historians have debated the "hidden symbolism" of works by artists like Hubert and Jan van Eyck.

The detailed realism of Early Netherlandish painting was greatly respected in Italy, but there was little reciprocal influence on the North until nearly the end of the 15th century.[2] Despite frequent cultural and artistic exchange, the Antwerp Mannerists (1500–1530)—chronologically overlapping with but unrelated to Italian Mannerism—were among the first artists in the Low Countries to clearly reflect Italian formal developments.

Around the same time, Albrecht Dürer made his two trips to Italy, where he was greatly admired for his prints. Dürer, in turn, was influenced by the art he saw there. Other notable painters, such as Hans Holbein the Elder and Jean Fouquet, retained a Gothic influence that was still popular in the north, while highly individualistic artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder developed styles that were imitated by many subsequent generations. Northern painters in the 16th century increasingly looked and travelled to Rome, becoming known as the Romanists. The High Renaissance art of Michelangelo and Raphael and the late Renaissance stylistic tendencies of Mannerism that were in vogue had a great impact on their work.

Renaissance humanism and the large number of surviving classical artworks and monuments encouraged many Italian painters to explore Greco-Roman themes more prominently than northern artists, and likewise the famous 15th-century German and Dutch paintings tend to be religious. In the 16th century, mythological and other themes from history became more uniform amongst northern and Italian artists. Northern Renaissance painters, however, had new subject matter, such as landscape and genre painting.

As Renaissance art styles moved through northern Europe, they changed and were adapted to local customs. In England and the northern Netherlands the Reformation brought religious painting almost completely to an end. Despite several very talented Artists of the Tudor Court in England, portrait painting was slow to spread from the elite. In France the School of Fontainebleau was begun by Italians such as Rosso Fiorentino in the latest Mannerist style, but succeeded in establishing a durable national style. By the end of the 16th century, artists such as Karel van Mander and Hendrik Goltzius collected in Haarlem in a brief but intense phase of Northern Mannerism that also spread to Flanders.

The Renaissance[edit]



  1. ^ Janson, H.W.; Anthony F. Janson (1997). History of Art (5th, rev. ed.). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-3442-6. 
  2. ^ Although the notion of a north to south-only direction of influence arose in the scholarship of Max Jakob Friedländer and was continued by Erwin Panofsky, art historians are increasingly questioning its validity: Lisa Deam, "Flemish versus Netherlandish: A Discourse of Nationalism," in Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 28–29.


  • Chipps Smith, Jeffrey (2004). The Northern Renaissance. Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0-7148-3867-0. 
  • Campbell, Gordon, ed. (2009). The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-533466-1. 

Further reading[edit]

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