Chapter Eight

Renaissance and Reformation in the North

Between Wealth and Want

Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe

• Controlled by the dukes of Burgundy, the region of Flanders (modern Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg) included the prosperous cities of Bruges and Antwerp

• Bruges was a major center of culture. The financial capital of the north, the city was home to the Medici banking interests in the region

• Because the city’s prosperous merchant class, like the nobility, actively supported the arts, Bruges was home to a thriving community of painters

Burgundy in 1467

Bruges

• Throughout the fifteenth century, Bruges’s population ranged between 40,000 and 50,000, quite large by Northern European standards

• Wages in Bruges were the highest in Northern Europe, especially for craftspeople, and the city provided the most extensive social-care networks anywhere—including 11 hospitals and hospices. Erasmus compared the people of Bruges to the people of Golden Age Athens

• In Bruges, painting was a major commodity second only to cloth

• Especially popular, because they were relatively inexpensive, were oil paintings

Johannes Stradanus, Oil Painting, or Jan van Eyck’s Studio

8” x 10.5”, late 16th century

• This print shows van Eyck’s Bruges studio as a factory where paintings are made as goods for consumption by a rising middle class

• In his Lives of the Painters, Giorgio Vasari wrote that van Eyck had discovered oil painting (in fact it had been known for several centuries, and medieval painters had used oils to decorate stone, metal, and occasional plaster walls)

Robert Campin

• The growing influence of the merchant class pervades the Mérode Altarpiece, painted by Robert Campin, the Master of Flémalle

• The altarpiece is a triptych, or three-part work. The left-hand panel depicts the patrons, Ingelbrecht of Mechlin and his wife—ordinary people. The middle panel shows the Annunciation occurring in the living room of a middle-class Flemish home. On the right-hand panel Joseph works as a carpenter

• One of the most distinctive features is the everyday appearance of the scene. This ordinariness lends the image of Christian miracle a reality never before seen in European painting

Robert Campin, Mérode AltarpieceOil on panel, center 25-5/16” x 24-7/8”, each wing 25-3/8” x 10-7/8”

ca. 1426

Campin’s altarpiece is small, made to be held up close, suggesting its function as a private rather than public devotional object.

The Arnolfini Portrait• The celebration of individual identity that marks Renaissance art in

both the north and south is especially apparent in Jan van Eyck’s double portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini, an Italian merchant representing Medici interests in Bruges, and his wife, Giovanna Cenami

• Most scholars agree that the couple are exchanging marriage vows in a bedroom before two witnesses, one of whom is van Eyck himself, who is reflected in the mirror at the back of the room. Above the mirror is inscribed in Latin “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic” (“Jan van Eyck was here”)

• Abounds with symbolic elements—dog (fidelity), two pair of shoes (couple stand on ground hallowed by the ceremony), finial atop chairback (St. Margaret, patron saint of childbirth, or Saint Martha, patron saint of housewives), and so on

Jan van Eyck, Giovanni

Arnolfini and His Wife

Giovanna CenamiOil on panel, 32¼” x 23½”

ca. 1434

Jan van Eyck, Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenami

Detail

• Each of the ten small circles around the mirror contains a scene of Christ’s passion

• Van Eyck presents his love of detail, the hallmark that distinguishes Northern Renaissance painting most from painting in the South, through a smooth surface that does not show brushstrokes

Hieronymus Bosch• Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) was born, lived, and worked in the

town of 's-Hertogenbosch, in southern Holland, which owed its prosperity to wool and cloth

• His paintings, at once minutely detailed and highly imaginative, manifest the Northern pessimism

• Bosch’s most ambitious painting, the Garden of Earthly Delights, is a triptych with closing doors

• Never intended for a religious setting, it hung in a palace in Brussels as a conversation piece, a work designed to invite discussion of its meaning. Bosch provides an enigmatic essay on what the world might be like if the fall of Adam and Eve had never happened

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights

Oil on panel, closed, each wing 7’2½” x 38”, ca. 1505-10

• When closed, the triptych reveals the world at the moment of creation

• At the top left-hand corner, God floats on a cloud and looks down at the earth devoid of people

• Inscribed across the top are words in Latin from Psalm 33:9: “He himself spoke, and they were made; he himself commanded, and they were created”

• The irony of what is hidden behind these exterior panels could not be greater

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights

Open, center 7’2½” x 6’4¾”; each wing 7’2½” x 38”, ca. 1505-10

• Above, in this detail from the left panel, we see the Garden of Eden populated with strange creatures

• Even as God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen, 1:26), death is imminent. A cat walks off with a mouse in its teeth, and a raven perches on the Fountain of Life

• Below, here are the results of God’s command to Adam and Eve

• The world has gone awry. Illicit lust replaces love of God, wanton seduction replaces beauty, and Bosch’s own wild imagination replaces reason

• All of the Seven Deadly Sins are here—Pride, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, Sloth, and, above all, Lust

• The center panel’s focus is this pool surrounded by the four so-called Castles of Vanity

• Horns, a symbol of cuckoldry, decorate the central fountain, the Tower of Adulteresses. Circling the lower pool, the Bath of Venus, are young men riding animals, apparently intent on “riding” the young women as well

• The right panel suggests life after the fall

• The head of this strange creature that presides over hell has an astonishingly realistic face and is topped by a disk with a bagpipe (a traditional symbol of lust)

Matthias Grünewald• Caught between north and south, between the rich detail of a van Eyck

and the classical idealized style of a Raphael, German painters at the dawn of the sixteenth century exhibited instances of each

• Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528), architect, engineer, and painter to the court of the archbishops of Mainz, created his most famous work, the Isenheim Altarpiece, for the hospital of the Abbey of Saint Anthony near Strasbourg, dedicated to the treatment of people with skin diseases—syphilis, leprosy, and ergotism, caused by ingesting contaminated grain

• Physical illness was viewed as a function of spiritual illness. The altarpiece was designed to move these sinners to repentance and to remind them that Christ had suffered like them

Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, closed

Oil on wood, center: 9’9½” x 10’9”; each wing 8’2½” x 3½”, ca. 1510-15

The Crucifixion on the monumentally large polytych is among the grimmest ever painted. Grünewald’s palette of purple-green and yellow-brown almost reeks of rotten flesh.

Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, first opening

Oil on wood, center: 9’9½” x 10’9”; each wing 9’½” x 5’4½”, ca. 1510-15

On holy days and possibly Sundays, the altarpiece was opened to reveal inside the brightly lit scenes of the Annunciation, the Virgin and Child with Angels, and the Resurrection.

Albrecht Dürer

• Dürer (1471-1528), one of the leading painters of the Renaissance, successfully wedded his Germanic-Netherlandish Gothic heritage with the Renaissance interest in perspective, empirical observation, and the rules of ideal beauty for representing the human figure

• After visiting Italy in 1505-06, he was determined to introduce a more scientific approach to painting to Germany

• For Dürer, creating art was a sacred act; it made manifest God’s work, from the Creation to Christ’s Passion

Albrecht Dürer, The Large TurfWatercolor, 16¼” x 12-1/8”, 1503

This landscape study displays not only the Northern interest in the minutest details of nature but also Dürer’s scientific mind and his humanist interest in the phenomena of the natural world.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-PortraitOil on panel, 26¼” x 19¼”, 1500

• Like other Northern artists, Dürer was a master of oil painting

• His frontal pose, bearded face, and intense gaze recall traditional images of Christ. The highly textured surface glows with a light that seems to emanate from within the artist himself

• Dürer inscribed the painting as follows: “Thus I, Albrecht Dürer from Nuremburg, painted myself with undying colors at the age of 28 years”

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia IEngraving, 9-7/8” x 7-3/8”, 1514

• A fully humanist image, a complex depiction of failed inspiration and genius, informed by a wealth of classical allusion

• Dürer himself suffered from melancholy, or depression, and Melancholia can be understood as an image of his own muse

• She strikes the traditional pose of a melancholic personality. (Raphael had portrayed Michelangelo as Heraclitus in a similar position in his School of Athens)

Martin Luther

• Luther (1483-1546) entered the monastery at age 22 when, during a severe lightning storm, he had promised to become a monk if he survived

• Earning a doctorate of theology in 1512, in the winter semester of 1513-14, he began lecturing at the university in Wittenberg

• Between 1513 and 1517, Luther experienced a crisis in belief that led to an almost total rejection of traditional Church doctrine. He began to preach the doctrine of salvation by faith rather than by works and to denounce the Church’s practices of selling indulgences, remissions of penalties to be suffered in purgatory, the proceeds of which were being used to cover Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz’s debts and to fund Pope Leo X’s rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome

Lucas Cranach, Martin LutherOil on panel, 15” x 9”, ca. 1526

Martin Luther’s Reformation

• Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517

• On August 7, 1518, Luther was summoned to appear in Rome within 60 days to answer a charge of heresy

• On January 3, 1521, the Church excommunicated Luther. All his writings were declared heretical and ordered burned

• By 1526, the German emperor granted each German territory and city discretion in choosing whether or not to follow Luther’s example

• Three years later, he rescinded the order, resulting in 18 German states signing a protestatio, the act of protest that actually gave rise to the term “Protestant”

Spread of the Reformation:Thomas Müntzer and the

Peasant War

• To many townspeople and peasants, freedom from the pope’s authority seemed to justify their own independence from authoritarian rule

• In 1524 Thomas Müntzer, a German cleric, raised an army and led the peasants against the princes in the so-called Peasant War (1524-26). In the ensuing battle, the princes lost 6 men, Müntzer 6,000. Ten days later Müntzer was executed

• In the two years of the conflict, nearly 100,000 peasants were killed across Germany

Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich

• The Great Minster Church in Zurich, Switzerland, had been granted permission by the Church to select its own clergy. In 1519 Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), who challenged the celibacy issue by living openly with a woman and fathering six children, was elected as people’s priest

• By the late 1520s, civil war broke out between Protestant and Catholic cantons, or states, in Switzerland. During the second battle, Zwingli was wounded by his Catholic adversaries, then executed, and his remains scattered so that no relics would survive his death

• The compromise that resulted from this civil war was that each Swiss canton was now free to choose its own religion

John Calvin in Geneva

• John Calvin (1509-64), a French religious reformer who had undergone a religious conversion of extreme intensity, believed that men were “elected” by God to salvation or damnation. Although in life one would never know with certainty one’s election, one must live in a way that pleased God

• Under Calvin, in some ways Geneva came to resemble a police state. The city prohibited dancing and singing, drunkenness, and blasphemy. Women were prohibited from wearing rouge, lace, and jewelry; men from gambling and playing cards

• Calvin was extremely popular. Before his death in 1564, nearly 7,000 religious refugees arrived in Geneva seeking protection for their own religious practices. So austere was the life they learned in Geneva that, in England, they soon became known by the name of “Puritans”

Calvinist Austerity

Interior of a Calvinist Church, 17th Century

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican, Rome, 17th Century

King Henry VIII and the Anglican Church

• The English crown’s decision to align itself with Protestant reformers was driven much more by political expediency than religious doctrine

• When his first wife, Katharine of Aragon, failed to produce a male heir, Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547), a devout Catholic who had attacked Luther in a tract delivered to Pope Leo X in 1521, sought annulment of the marriage

• Although a Catholic at heart, Henry split with the Church when the annulment was denied and aligned himself with Protestant reformers, creating the Church of England

The Printing Press

• Sometime between 1435 and 1455, in the German city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1390-1468) discovered a process for casting individual letterforms by using an alloy of lead and antimony

• In 1455 Gutenberg produced his first major work, the Forty-Two Line Bible, so named because each column of type contains 42 lines

• By the end of the century, printing presses were churning out a wide variety of books in at least 60 German cities and in 200 others throughout Europe

• It is debatable whether the Reformation would have occurred without the invention of the printing press

Page from the Gutenberg BibleJohannes Gutenberg: Mainz, 1455-56

Luther’s Popular Appeal

• Excommunicated, Luther spent the next year translating Erasmus’s Latin Bible into vernacular German so as to make the Bible available to ordinary people

• Luther’s vernacular New Testament was published in 1522. The entire printing of 3,000 sold out within three months, an incredible achievement

• He was the Continent’s best-selling author. It is estimated that between 1518 and 1525, one-third of all texts published in Germany were by him

• Luther also sought to change Church liturgy, especially the use of music. He composed chorales, hymns sung by the entire congregation, in vernacular German, the most famous of which is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”

"Congregational Music"

From Revolution of Conscience: The Life, Convictions, and Legacy of Martin Luther (length: 2:57). Item #32477 © 2003

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Thomas More and Utopia

• By the time Utopia was published in 1516, Thomas More (1478-1535) was Henry VIII’s unofficial secretary. In 1529, More was appointed Lord Chancellor, the presiding officer of the House of Lords

• In Greek, eu means “good” and topos “place,” hence “good place,” but also the root might be ou meaning “not,” hence “no place”—and thus a profound critique of the English political system

• In 1535 Henry had More, an ardent Catholic, executed for suggesting that Henry’s first wife’s, Katharine of Aragon’s, daughter Mary was the legitimate heir to the throne, not Anne Boleyn’s child, Elizabeth

William Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare even in his own time was the acknowledged master of playwrighting

• He wrote 37 plays: great cycles narrating English history; romantic comedies that deal with popular themes such as mistaken identity, the battle of the sexes, lovers’ errors in judgment, and so on; romances that treat serious themes but in unrealistic, almost magical settings; and 11 tragedies

• Fellow actors prepared the first edition of his collected plays and published them in 1623, after his death

Martin Droeshout,

William Shakespeare

frontispiece of the first folio edition, London,

1623

The Elizabethan Stage

• Until 1576 no permanent theater existed in England. In the spring of 1576 James Burbage opened Theatre of Shoreditch just outside the walls of London

• Basic price of admission to Burbage’s Theatre was one penny, which in 1600 could buy one chicken or two tankards of ale. A laborer’s wage was three or four pence, or pennies, a day, thus making Burbage’s Theatre affordable

• In a dispute over a lease, Burbage’s company, now headed by James’s son Richard, tore down the Shoreditch Theatre and rebuilt it across the river in Southward at Bankside, renaming it the Globe

The GlobeReconstruction and cross-section

The English Portrait Tradition

• Hans Holbein was one of the most important portraitists of wealthy society in Europe and the favorite painter of Henry VIII. During his two extended visits to England (1526-28, 1532-43) he painted hundreds of works, including many of Henry and four of his six wives

• Each portrait conveyed the sitter’s status and captured something of the sitter’s identity, expressing the English culture’s general humanist emphasis on individualism

• As in Northern Renaissance painting as a whole, Holbein’s portraits are richly detailed

Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII in Wedding Dress

Oil on panel, 32½” x 29”, 1540

• Henry, age 49 when this portrait was painted, was six foot two inches tall and had an imposing 54-inch waist

• Henry is in the clothes he wore when he married Anne of Cleves in 1540. He had six wives, and ordered the beheading of two. These marriages produced three children: Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward

Attributed to Federigo Zuccaro, The Darnley Portrait of Elizabeth I

Oil on panel, 44½” x 31”, ca. 1575

• Like her father, Elizabeth was the subject of many portraits

• Many portraits of Elizabeth tend to concentrate on elaborate decorative effects

• No other portrait of Elizabeth conveys her steadfast determination, even toughness, while still capturing something of her beauty