Van Eyck and the Burgundian Court
Jan van Eyck was a principal founder of the new Netherlandish school of painting that revolutionised art across Europe. As court painter he was based in Bruges, a vital crossroad for trade and international finance, where large numbers of Italian merchants and bankers began to commission paintings to send back home.
Painting Practices and Techniques
Netherlandish painters created effects of astonishing realism by shifting from egg tempera to oil paint. The reflections in mirrors, the glint of light on metal or the textures of silk and velvet were created in incredible detail. Italians struggled to rival such effects until finally adopting oil paint themselves.
Early Connections: Italy and the North
The direct relationship between Northern European painting and Italian Renaissance art was nothing new, since artistic influences had flowed back and forth from the time of Giotto in the previous century. These ties and connections, however, grew closer and closer.
The Great Renaissance Courts of Italy
The D’Este rulers of Ferrara had an especially close relationship with Rogier van der Weyden over a 25 year period. The Sforza Duke of Milan was so keen to follow this fashion for Netherlandish painting that he sent his own court painter to train in Rogier’s workshop, and the Duke of Urbino recruited a Flemish painter to work for him at his ducal palace.
The Medici and Florence
Medici patronage of Renaissance art is legendary, yet it is not often realised that at least a third of their collection of paintings were Netherlandish. The directors of the Medici bank in Bruges vied with one another to send the most spectacular works back to Florence which then made an immediate impact on Florentine painters.
Venice and Northern Italy
Netherlandish paintings were equally fashionable outside the aristocratic courts of Italy, in the republican cities of Lucca and Genoa. Their influence can most clearly be seen in the works of the most important artists in Venice such as Giovanni Bellini who is deeply indebted to the Netherlandish tradition.
Portraiture
The stylised representation of the sitter in pure profile that characterised the Italian tradition of portraiture was abandoned when confronted with the Netherlandish ability to capture uncanny likenesses that were unprecedentedly lifelike. Leonardo, Raphael and others studied Northern portraits in great detail in their attempts to revolutionise the genre.
Landscape
Compared with the intricately detailed and convincing panoramic landscape backgrounds in paintings by Van Eyck and others, views of landscape in early Italian Renaissance art can appear quite crude and even naïve. The Italians effectively assimilated Northern landscape into their own tradition, even to the extent of literal copying.
Antwerp Mannerism and the Lure of Italy
Moving into the early sixteenth century, the directions of artistic influence began to shift. Beginning with Gossaert, Flemish painters began to travel to Renaissance Italy and respond to the new taste for the classical and the Italianate in art.
New Directions: Rubens & the Northern Tradition
As the sixteenth century progressed Netherlandish painters interacted more knowledgeably with Renaissance art across Italy from Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome, to Titian in Venice. Their reinvigoration of the Northern tradition led the way to Rubens but also to Dutch painters like Vemeer in the seventeenth century.
