History of Art: Gothic Art-Master of the Ortenberg Altar,Filippo Brunelleschi,Joos van Gent

Gothic Era

(Gothic and Early Renaissance)

European Painting from the 13th to the 15 th Century

Gothic Art Map
Exploration: Revelations (Art of the Apocalypse)
Exploration: Gothic Era (Gothic and Early Renaissance)
M. of the Glatz Madonna	Masaccio	Starnina	Taddeo di Bartolo
M. Theodoric	Masolino	M. Westphalian	Marco Zoppo
Torriti Jacopo	Hans Memling	M. of Schloss Altar	Holbein the Younger
Stefan Lochner	Rogier van der Weyden	M. Norwegian	Andrea Mantegna
Bonaventura Berlinghieri	Hugo van der Goes	Derick Baegert	Cosme Tura
M. Bertram of Munden	Gerard David	Lukas Moser	Holbein the Elder
M. of Kaufmann Crucifixion	Antonello da Messina	M. of Albrecht Altar	M. of Book of Hours
M. of Wittingau	Piero della Francesca	Frances Nicolas	M. of Alkmaar
Lippo Memmi	Pedro Berruguete	Master E.S.	M. Francke
M. of Narbonne Parament	M. of Westminster Altar	Martin Schongauer	M. of the Gothic Art
Malouel Jean	M. of Psalter of de Lisle	Israhel van Meckenem	Bernat Martorell
M. of Wilton Dyptych	M. of Cologne Workshop	Bartolome Bermejo	Michael Pacher
Borrassa Lluis	Sassetta	Fernando Gallego	Quentin Massys
Pisanello	Jaume Huguet	Hans Multscher	Nuno Goncalves
Konrad of Soest	Nicolas Froment	Colantonio	Martinus Opifex
M. of the Ortenberg Altar	M. of St. Veronica	Lluis Dalmau	Juan de Levi
Filippo Brunelleschi	M. of the Paradise Garden	Barthelemy d'Eyck	Saxon Workshop
Joos van Gent	Limburg brothers	M. of Life of the Virgin	Lorenzo Monaco
Bartolo di Fredi	Robert Campin	M. of St. Bartholomew	Jean Fouquet
Hubert & Jan van Eyck	Konrad Witz	Dieric Bouts	Jacopo Bellini
Exploration: Albrecht Durer

Master of the Ortenberg Altar

Filippo Brunelleschi

Joos van Gent

See also collection:

Bartolo di Fredi

Hubert & Jan van Eyck

Masaccio

Masolino

Hans Memling

Rogier van der Weyden

Hugo van der Goes

Gerard David

Antonello da Messina

Piero della Francesca

Pedro Berruguete

New departures in Florence and the Netherlands

It was clear by the 1420s at the latest that this rare parallelism would not be a lasting phenomenon. While the Soft Style reached its final flowering in a work such as the Ortenberg Altar — admittedly accompanied by an increasing hardening and stylization of the heads - artists elsewhere had already made a sudden, apparently unexpected break with the past which, like the new departures of Suger and Giotto, would be followed by a period of consolidation and relative quiet. In Florence, Masaccio (1401—1428) and Masolino (1383—after 1435) were laying the foundations of the art of the Renaissance, by infusing Giotto's forgotten compositional formulae with a greater realism and a previously unknown monumentality, derived in turn from a deeper study of antiquity and a closer observation of their own surroundings and the human form. The fragile bodies of the International Gothic are filled with new volume, stances become heavy, profiles broad, shadows deep. In the southern Netherlands, meanwhile, the second great centre of power in western Europe was starting to emerge. Towards the end of the 14th century, Netherlandish artists were already exerting a decisive influence upon developments in Paris, up till then the artistic capital of the North.
Parallel with the new developments in Florence, the brothers Hubert (c. 1370—1426) and Jan van Eyck (c. 1395—1441) - the most important Netherlandish artists of the age - were also turning to the naked human body and lending it a realism unseen since antiquity. The paths they followed to the same goal were very different, however. In the case of Masaccio, it was a highly intellectual process. His image of humankind is concentrated into archetypes. He is more interested in basic form, flow of movement and volumes than in the surface of things. It was the accurate observation of such surfaces, however, which formed the foundation of Eyckian realism, but which also contained its limitations. Jan van Eyck described the effects of movement without actually understanding them. Thanks to this same eye for detail, however, he succeeded in lending his figures an anatomical quality whose impact was felt even in Italy. Only van Eyck discovered the dimple on Adam's hip, only he described the muscles and sinews around Adam's knee.

Master of the Ortenberg Altar
( fl after 1417). German painter. He is named after a small altarpiece from Ortenberg am Vogelsberg (after 1417; Darmstadt, Hess. Landesmus.) depicting the Virgin among Virgins on the middle panel and the Nativity and Adoration of the Magi on the inner faces of the wings. (There is an Annunciation by a later painter on the outer faces of the wings.) The subject-matter chosen for the main panel—the Virgin and her relatives, with female saints—suggests that it was destined for a convent, perhaps that of the Premonstratensian canonesses at St Maria Konradsdorf, near Ortenberg, and was perhaps commissioned to become the main altar after a fire at the convent church in 1417. Evidence for this is the inclusion of St Servatius, a cousin of the Virgin and patron saint of viticulture, which was also practised in Ortenberg. All the historical data suggest that the altar was made in Mainz. Among surviving examples of Middle Rhine panel painting in the ‘Soft style’, the Ortenberg Altar is alone of its type. It is distinctive in the courtliness of its basic attitude, inspired from western book illumination and stained glass, and in its association of the Virgin’s nearest female relatives with three major woman saints, Agnes, Barbara and Dorothy. In conjunction with the gold background of the painted surface, the use of silver leaf as a foil for the robes produces a metallic appearance. Two badly damaged panels from a Marian altar, a Nativity (Lezignan, Aude, parish church) and Adoration of the Magi (Aschaffenburg, Schloss Johannisburg Staatsgal.), may be early works by the same Master.

Master of the Ortenberg Altar
The Holy Kindred
c1425-1430
(central panel of the Ortenberg Altar)

Filippo Brunellesch
Dome of the Cathedral
1420-36
Duomo, Florence

Netherlandish empiricism went an astonishingly long way. While Jan van Eyck's contemporary, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377—1446), was "inventing" centralized perspective in Florence, his own pictures contain no unified vanishing point. If his spatial settings frequently seem highly "realistic", it should not be forgotten that the mathematical principles of perspective employed by the Italians strictly speaking contradict the workings of the human eye, which sooner perceives slightly curved lines as straight rather than ones which really are straight. Perspective employing a consistent vanishing point would only find its way into Netherlandish art in the second half of the 15 th century.
The Netherlandish love of detail could be celebrated to its fullest in portrayals of untamed nature. Although landscapes as a whole were conceived on a less grandiose scale than in Masaccio, the natural kingdom is portrayed with a precision, technical sophistication and exquisiteness which remain unequalled today. However different in other respects, even the Italian painting of the Quattrocento regularly drew fruitful inspiration from this same source. Thus the young Raphael was not shy of siting his figures again and again within a Netherlandish natural idyll. This influence of the North upon the South nevertheless still tends to attract much less attention in the literature than the exchanges in the opposite direction.
It has, however, long been known that northern works were eagerly collected south of the Alps. On closer inspection, it thus emerges that an astonishingly high proportion of the works of Hans Memling (c. 1430/40—1494) were destined for Italian lovers of art. Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1400-1464) and Hugo van der Goes (c. 1440-1482) both dispatched their paintings across the Alps; Joos van Cleve (c. 1485—1540/41) would later send his biggest altars there. Significantly, a large work by Gerard David (c. 1460—1523) for Liguria even modelled itself on the layout of the Italian altarpiece. Down in the far south of Italy, Antonello da Messina (c. 1430-1479) became the champion of Netherlandish ideas possibly without ever having crossed the Alps. Most exciting of all within this process of exchange are the rare personal meetings between artists, such as the work jointly executed at the court of Urbino by the Italian Piero della Francesca (c. 1415/20—1492), the Flemish artist Joos van Gent (active c. 1460-1480) and the Spaniard Pedro Berruguete (c. 1450-1503?). So close and fruitful was their collaboration that trying to identify exactly who painted what continues to cause headaches even today.

The discovery of nature and landscape

The reciprocal influences passing between North and South are illustrated particularly clearly in the backgrounds of the paintings of this era. In England, France and Germany from the final third of the 13th century to the second half of the 14th century, there was a preference for decorative, often very complicated and fussy geometric patterns. They live on even in the work of the otherwise.anything but conservative Theodoric, and continue to find echoes in the 15th and even early 16th century, not least in the ornamental gold grounds of the Cologne painters and in particular Stefan Lochner (c. 1400-1451).

	Filippo Brunelleschi Italian sculptor (b. 1377, Firenze, d. 1446, Firenze)

Filippo Brunellesch Facade 1419-24 Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence

	Filippo Brunellesch Loggia 1419-24 Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence

Filippo Brunellesch The nave of the church begun 1419 San Lorenzo, Florence	Filippo Brunellesch Old Sacristy 1418-28 Church of San Lorenzo, Florence

	Filippo Brunellesch Interior of the church begun 1436 Santo Spirito, Florence

Filippo Brunellesch Sacrifice of Isaac 1401 Bronze relief Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence	Filippo Brunellesch Crucifix 1412-13 Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Justus of Ghent
Giusto da Guanto; Joos van Gent; Juste de Gand; Justus van Gent
Belgium ( fl c. 1460–80).

(Joos van Wassenhove)

South Netherlandish painter, active also in Italy. He is commonly identified with JOOS VAN WASSENHOVE, master at Ghent, who is said to have gone to Rome some time between 1469 and 1475. Many of Justus’s works have been attributed to the Spaniard Pedro Berruguete, and problems remain in this area. Justus is documented between 1473 and 1475 in Urbino, where he ran a workshop, and he was the only major Netherlandish painter working in 15th-century Italy

Joos van Gent
The Crucifixion

Joos van Gent
Portrait of Aristotle.
1475

Joos van Gent
St Augustine
c. 1474
Musee du Louvre, Paris

Joos van Gent
The Institution of the Eucharist
1473-75
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Joos van Gent
Portrait of Solon.
1475

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