List of Slides for Week 1

Slides

1)      Jan and Hubert van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece, (wings open), 1432, Oil on wood, 350 x 461 cm, Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent.

2)      Map of Europe, with trade routes.

3)      Bernt Notke, St George and the Dragon, 1487, Painted wood, Storkyrkan, Stockholm.

4)      Llius Dalmau, Altarpiece of the Councillors, 1445, Tempera on wood, 285 x 310 cm, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

5)      Map of Northern Europe.

6)      Photograph of Johann Huizinga.

7)      Jean Malouel and Henri Bellechose, The Martyrdom of St Denis, 1416, Oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 161 x 210 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

8)      Jean Fouquet, Melun Diptych: Estienne Chevalier with St Stephen, c. 1450, Wood, 93 x 85 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

9)      Jean Fouquet, Melun Diptych: Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, c. 1450, Wood, 93 x 85, cm, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

10)   Hans Memling, Triptych of the Family Moreel (central panel), 1484, oil on wood, 141 x 174 cm, Groeninge Museum, Bruges.

11)   Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross, Prado, c. 1435, Oil on oak panel, 220 x 262 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

12)   Matthias Grunewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1515, Oil on wood, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar.

13)   Claus Sluter, Monument to Philip the Good, 1389-1406, Stone, Charterhouse of Champmol, Dijon.

14)   Hans Holbein the Younger, The Noble Lady from Dance of Death, 1524-26, Woodcut, 65 x 48 mm, Kupferstichkabinett, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel.

15)   Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portraits of Martin Luther and Catherine Bore, 1529, Oil on wood, 37 x 23 cm (each), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

16)   Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther Preaching with the Pope in the Jaws of Hell, c. 1550, Engraving, 286 x 391 mm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

17)   Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526, Engraving, 249 x 193 mm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

18)   Adam Kraft, Self-Portrait, 1493-96, Sandstone with partial painting, life-size
St. Lorenz, Nuremberg.

19)   Tilman Riemenschneider, Noli me tangere, 1490-92, Limewood, Parish Church, Münnerstadt.

20)   Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, Oil on lime panel, 67,1 x 48,7 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

21)   Gerard David, The Virgin among the Virgins, 1509, Oil on canvas, 118 x 212 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.

22)   Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of Philip the Good, Oil on wood, 31 x 23 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.

23)   Gerard Loyet, St Lambert Reliquary, 1467-71, Cathedral of St Paul, Liège old and silver gilt, height 53 cm,

24)   Master of Flémalle, Detail of The Nativity, 1420, Oil on wood, 87 x 70 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.

25)   Pieter Breughel the Younger, Hunters in the Snow, 1556, Oil on panel Dimensions 117 cm × 162 cm (46 in × 63¾ in, KunsthistorischesMuseum, Vienna.

26)   Limburg Brothers, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry: Astrological Man, c. 1416
Illumination on vellum, 290 x 210 mm, Musée Condé, Chantilly.

27)   Hugo van der Goes, The Fall, 1467-68, Oil on oak, 33,8 x 23 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

28)   Pieter Breughel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, Peasant Wedding, c. 1567, Oil on wood, 114 x, 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

29)   Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of Haywain (central panel), 1500-02, Oil on panel, 140 x 100 cm, Monasterio de San Lorenzo, El Escorial.

Click here for a power point of these images.

Themes

After this introductory week, in the second class we identify and follow the art known as the “International Style” in order to compare exponents of it like Jean Malouel and the “Boucicaut Master” with the realism of Van Eyck and Memling.  Week 3 surveys the northern altarpieces from the indispensable painted ones of Van Eyck and his contemporaries to limewood versions such as the German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, and the Austrian painter Michael Pacher. Week 4 takes its title from one of Huizinga’s most visual chapters which surveys the representation of death in the period; works range from Claus Sluter’s monuments to Philip the Good at Dijon to Baldung’s paintings of Death and the Maiden.   Week 5 considers the reformation’s effect on art with particular reference to Lucas Cranach and other representations of Martin Luther and other key players in this tumultuous period. One of the central weeks on this course, week 6 takes you inside the Northern artist’s studio wether it be the German sculptor Adam Kraft, or Flemish painters like Gerard David and Hans Memling. Week 7 focuses on portraits of people at court and shows how chivalry helped to represent a specific class as painted by Jean Fouquet, Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and others; it also asks whether these portraits reveal anything about the personality of such personages as Nicholas Rolin or the owner of the Boucicaut Hours. The natural world, landscape and the seasons is introduced in week 8 in the work of artists such as Patinir, Brueghel and Altdorfer; this week also examines time in relation to art and life of the Northern renaissance. The “Alternative Convention” is a label used by Kenneth Clark to identify a different, non-classical, “Gothic” approach to the body.  Week 9 follows the evolution of the Gothic body using such examples as the Limburg’s “Astrological Man” to the realistically rendered bathers of Dὕrer. The final week’s topic is the inverse of week 7; instead of aristocracy, the spotlight is turned on the peasantry, particularly as depicted by Breughel.

Approaches

Unlike the strictly geographical and chronological filters, ways of studying the art on this course will be many and varied. The course draws on the diverse approaches taken by scholars since the late nineteenth-century. During that period, connoisseurs and museum directors like Max Jacob Friedländer tried to identify who had painted specific paintings. But they were faced with monumental problems.  For example many painters are simply named after works with whom they are associated; thus a beautifully illustrated book is thought to have been created by the “Boucicaut Master” because that was its owner’s name. The task is difficult because not only was much art dispersed from northern Europe, but in the upheavals of the reformation, much documentation about these works was lost. Deploying both connoisseurship and stylistic analysis, in 1953, Panofsky tried to reconstruct the evolution of Franco-Flemish panel painting by tracing its probable origins in the work of book illustration and the sculpture of such artists as Claus Sluter. Thus, according to him the construction of space in some of these little- known genre influenced famous paintings such as Jan Van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church.  Panofsky leavened his stylistic exploration of early Netherlandish art with his own concepts, most famously “disguised symbolism,” his view that everyday objects in Flemish art had symbolic meaning; e.g., a firescreen in the Master of Flémalle’s Virgin before a Firescreen serves as a crafty halo; or, more conspicuously, the mundane objects in the Arnolfini Portrait hold hidden meaning. With the advent of more sophisticated technical examination pioneered by such art institutions as the Courtauld, such views have been challenged. X-rays of the Arnolfini Portrait suggest that Van Eyck had deliberately contrived his configuration of objects rather using them to reflect a real situation. “Realism” has become a salient objection when considering Northern renaissance art; scholars like Nash and Harbison stress that the realism in Van Eyck and his contemporaries was manufactured, rather than a true reflection of the painter’s social milieu, or indeed the natural world. “Realism” is a very slippery term here and can appear in many forms. Compare the “realistic” modes in two panels of a fragmented altarpiece by Jean Fouquet commissioned by Etienne Chevalier, the Chancellor of France: the one contains two starkly life-like figures, Chevalier himself and his patron saint, St Stephen; the other a hallucinatory Madonna crowded by red and blue cherubim and seraphim seems to have its origins in Fouquet’s imagination.

Huizinga and the Waning of the Middle Ages.

“On one such walk along the Damsterdiep or nearby, on a Sunday, I think, the notion came to me that the late Middle Ages were not the herald of something that was to come, but the fading away of something that has already passed. This thought, if one can speak of it as a thought, revolved above all around the art of the Van Eycks and their contemporaries, which considerably occupied my mind at that time. It was just in those years that it was usual to follow in the footsteps of Courajod and to agree with Fierens- Gevaert and Karl Volz in interpreting old Netherlandish art as the dawn of a Northern Renaissance. My perception was directly opposed to this.” 1907.

Johan Huizinga was no art historian, but an historian from the Netherlands.  Unlike museum professional like Friedländer, Huizinga concentrated on the cultural history of the late middle-ages and the northern renaissance. This can be defined as an attempt to capture the “spirit” of the times by writing about its people, customs and art. Huizinga wanted to evoke the sights, sounds and even smells of the period he was writing about. Thus in addition to the paintings of the Van Eycks, Fouquet, Rogier van der Weyden and others, Huizinga examined fairs, religious festivals, sounds (noticeably church bells), jousts, executions- and he spectacularly succeeded in exposing a broad, cultural panorama for his readers to view. Huizinga’s concept of the “waning” or “autumn” of the Middle-Ages was completely original, and flew in the face of contemporary art history scholarship. Unlike the art historians mentioned in the extract who viewed Van Eyck and Memling’s paintings as expressions of a new dawn, Huizinga saw them as signs of decadence. Though acknowledging that this art was truly beautiful and a wonderful achievement, Huizinga was under no illusions as to the nature of the late-middle ages when cruelty and violence coexisted with celebrations of life and love, such explosions of carnival being needed to cope with “violent tenor of the times.” Huizinga spent a lot of time scrutinising the aristocratic class composed of rulers like Philip the Good as well as newly arrived members of the financial middle class like Nicholas Rolin, famous shown praying in Van Eyck’s masterpiece in the Louvre.   It is in the spirit of Huizinga’s cultural history that art history is used on this course to show how paintings, sculpture, books and other media help to reveal the motivations and machinations of the people of the period-from the most highly born aristocrat depicted by Rogier van der Weyden to the humblest peasant in the works of Brueghel.

 

Huizinga on Art & Life

“Art in those times was still wrapped up in life. Its function was to fill with beauty the forms assumed by life. These forms were marked and potent. Life was encompassed and measured by the rich efflorescence of the liturgy: the sacraments, the canonical hours of the day, and the festivals of the ecclesiastical year. All the works and all the joys of life, whether dependent on religion, chivalry, trade, or love, had their marked form. The task of art was to adorn all these concepts with charm and colour; it is not desired for its own sake, but to decorate life with the splendour which it could bestow. Art was not yet a means, as it is now, to step out of the routine of everyday life to pass some moments in contemplation; it had to be enjoyed as an element of life itself, as the expression of life’s significance.”

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages.

Aims of Course

This course looks at the art of Northern Europe from the late Middle Ages (fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) to the flowering of the renaissance in the sixteenth. We focus on the art of France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Low Countries, and finally Portugal and Spain. Expect to encounter many different types of art on this course: painted altarpieces and portraits, tomb sculpture, illustrated books, woodcuts, engravings and drawings. By presenting a comprehensive survey of art we will be able to see the impact that art had on the life that Huizinga describes; and also to establish where the artist stood in relation to his society. Many artists are covered, from the very famous to the downright obscure. The more well-known ones include Bosch, Brueghel, Campin, Cranach, Dürer, Fouquet, Grunewald, Hugo van der Goes, Holbein, Limburg Bros (shown above), Memling, Rogier van der Weyden and the Van Eycks. Weekly topics are intended to present a view of the northern renaissance as seen through the lens of its art. Themes include the impact of the Gothic style on art in N. Europe; art, the printed book and the reformation; the altarpiece in N. Europe; masterpieces and materials in the Northern workshop; landscape, time and the seasons; and chivalry and the court portrait in the north.