The Renaissance outside Italy
France
Francis I,
despite his military reverses in Italy, was enamoured of all things
Italian. He commissioned the celebrated goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini to
execute both tableware and sculpture and prevailed upon friendly rulers
in Italy to send him works by
Titian
and
Bronzino
and casts of sculpture. He also imported Italian artists to design,
build, and decorate his palaces, the Chateau de Madrid and
Fontainebleau, both outside Paris.
Rosso
arrived in France in 1530, followed two years later by his fellow
Italian, the Mannerist
Francesco Primaticcio.
In the gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau,
Rosso initiated a
new and intricate decorative system in which stucco and painting form a
richly luxuriant complex--the plastic realization of the late
Raphaelesque decorative manner.
Primaticcio,
who had been trained by
Giulio Romano
at Mantua and influenced by
Parmigianino,
took over
Rosso's
leading position on the latter's death in 1540. His Ulysses Gallery at
Fontainebleau continued and refined
Rosso's
elaborate system of painted narratives surrounded by convoluted strap
work, elegant figures, and swags in stucco. French artists at the court,
such as the two Jean Cousins and Antoine Caron, quickly adopted aspects
of Italian Mannerism to create a style of painting characterized as the
school of Fontainebleau.
Less of a tendency to mimic the fashion was noticeable in Corneille de
Lyon and Jean and
Francois
Clouet, whose
portraits, while exhibiting some Mannerist qualities, recalled
15th-century court portraiture.
Martin J. Kemp
Spain
During the first decade of the 16th
century, Fernando
Yanez,
who may have assisted
Leonardo da Vinci
on the "Battle of Anghiari" in 1505, executed works showing a good
knowledge of Italian Renaissance developments. Further Italianate
tendencies emerged strongly in the Valencian works of Juan de Macip and
his son Juan de Juanes. Full-fledged Mannerism made its appearance in
the Seville cathedral in the "Descent from the Cross" (1547) by Pedro
Campaсa (Pieter de Kempeneer), an artist from Brussels, and subsequently
in the refined court portraiture of
Anthonis Mor (Sir Anthony More) and Alonso Sanchez Coello, whose
royal portraits possess an elegance reminiscent of
Bronzino's
Florentine style. Although Campaсa's paintings are Mannerist in
composition, they also foreshadow the expressiveness characteristic of
Spanish style in the hands of
Luis de Morales
and
El Greco.
From 1546 until his death in 1586,
Morales
remained almost exclusively in the provincial isolation of Badajoz,
developing a highly individual art of great spiritual intensity,
radically separated from the Mannerist mainstream. El Greco, though born
in Crete, was more fully conversant with Italian painting, having
studied with
Titian
in Venice and later residing in Rome for two years. His Spanish
paintings exploit the anatomical attenuations of Roman
Mannerism, but the vividly emotional qualities of his colour and paint
handling depend almost entirely upon Venetian precedents--Tintoretto
and
Jacopo Bassano
in particular. Under the influence of Counter-Reformation mysticism in
Toledo after 1575, he developed an increasingly personal and
nonrealistic manner, indulging in space and supernatural light effects.
The narrative fervour of his style stands in sharp contrast to the
stylish formalism of international Mannerism.
Germany
Albrecht Durer
was the first important German artist who displayed a profound
understanding of Italian Renaissance art and theory. Trained in Nurnberg
in the late Gothic tradition, he had ambitions even as a youth far
beyond the narrow confines of his native city and the late medieval
style. He traveled to Switzerland and the Rhine Valley and may have been
in the Low Countries. Shortly after his marriage in 1494 he made a brief
trip to Italy, where he studied the works of
Mantegna and the Venetians. In 1505-07 he was again in Italy and was
on intimate terms with
Giovanni Bellini.
Durer
was interested in what he felt to be the "secrets" of Italian art and in
the new humanism carried north by such friends as the German humanist
Willibald Pirkheimer. As a result, his paintings maintain the
northerners' love of detail, rendered meticulously in oil, but he joined
to it the Italian interest in broadly conceived compositions. In "The
Paumgurtner Altarpiece" of 1502-04 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), for
example, the saints in the wings are depicted with the scrolls and a
complexity of composition more reminiscent of a heraldic achievement,
while the broad planes of the architecture and the large, simple figures
of the adoration shown on the central panel suggest an Italianate
conception. The "Four Apostles" (Alte Pinakothek) of 1526 ultimately
derives from the wings of Bellini's Frari altarpiece.
Durer's
close association with the Venetian painter and admiration for his art
can be seen in the broad simple folds of the drapery, the breadth of
handling of the heads, and the quality of the light depicted.
Although he executed a large number
of important paintings,
Durer
is perhaps best known for his woodcuts and engravings, by which he
raised printmaking from a minor to a major art .
Durer's
prints, paintings, and writings had such a profound influence on
16th-century art in Germany that it is sometimes difficult to realize
that he died in 1528.
In the 16th century the Renaissance,
as far as German painting was concerned, tended to follow the lines
established by
Durer.
Two artists of note do emerge, but their styles are so individual that
they do not represent a national school.
Lucas Cranach
the Elder was deeply influenced by
Durer
and the Danube school, an early 16th-century tradition of landscape
painting that was in some ways a transition between the styles of Gothic
and Renaissance painting. By 1505 he had moved to Wittenberg and become
court painter to the electors of Saxony. There his style changed
radically, epitomizing the dichotomy that existed in 16th-century
northern European painting. He developed in Wittenberg the full-length
portrait in which the sitter is rendered with consummate skill and
fidelity.
Cranach
was a personal friend of Martin Luther and is probably best known for
his portraits of the great reformer. At the same time, his "Reclining
River Nymph at the Fountain" of 1518 (Museum of Fine Art, Leipzig)
illustrates his knowledge of
Giorgione
and Venetian painting and points the way to the group of highly erotic
female nudes of his later works.
Hans Holbein
the Younger was trained by his father in Augsburg but took up residence
in Basel, Switz., about 1515. He early developed a portrait style that
was greatly sought after by the burghers of Basel. His portraits of
Burgomaster Meyer and his wife (1516; Kunstmuseum-Offentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel) or of Bonifacius Amerbach (1519;
Kunstmuseum-Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel) show his gift for
characterization. In 1526 he made his first trip to London, where he
painted "Sir Thomas More with His Household" (1527). In 1532 religious
troubles in Basel were so intense that he accepted a position at the
English court and left the city forever. He is perhaps best known for
his portraits of Henry VIII, Henry's bride Anne of Cleves (1539; Louvre),
and Christina of Denmark (1538; National Gallery, London), at one time
considered by the King as a possible bride. "Jean de Dinteville and
Georges de Selve" ("The Ambassadors," 1533; National Gallery, London),
which depicts two French ambassadors to the English court, is probably
the greatest tour de force of his years in England. The two sitters are
rendered faithfully in a well-defined room and are surrounded by the
trappings of 16th-century humanism--e.g., books, globes, musical
instruments.
Holbein's
portraits were all painted with a great understanding of the sitter and
often have a note of Italian elegance. His surfaces tend to be tight and
hard, yet there is a certain expansiveness created by the positioning
within the frame. He established a portrait tradition in England and
also contributed to the popularity of the miniature in that country.
Low Countries
In the Low Countries there emerged early in the 16th century a group of
painters misleadingly lumped together as the Antwerp Mannerists. Their
exaggerated and fanciful compositions descend in great part from the
decorative excesses of late Gothic art, generally with some Italianate
details probably transmitted by architects' and goldsmiths' pattern
books.
The Flemish painter
Jan Gossaert,
called
Mabuse,
visited Rome in 1508. At first he continued his ornate late Gothic
style, but by 1514 he began to adopt the great innovations occurring in
Italian painting. His mythological paintings, such as the “Neptune and
Amphitrite” (Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) of
1516, indicate that he was able to understand only the superficialities
and not the motivation and terribilita of Michelangelo's nudes. Bernard
van Orley remained in Brussels and learned of Italy through Raphael's
cartoons, which were sent to Brussels to be woven into tapestries.
Before the end of the century, painters such as Jan van Scorel, Maerten
van Heemskerck, and Sir Anthony More (a Utrecht-born portraitist
knighted by Queen Mary I of England) were absorbing Italian influences.
Van Scorel demonstrated a specifically Venetian influence, yet all three
created an art that was distinctly their own. Joachim Patinir's
depiction of the world around him, particularly of landscape, parallels
Italian developments in northern terms and greatly influenced
Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
visited Italy in 1551–53 but was more influenced by the Italian and
particularly Alpine landscape than by Italian painting. His
two-dimensional sources are to be found rather in the popular prints of
the time, the landscapes of Patinir, and the fantasies of Bosch. He was
also a great observer of peasant life.
Bruegel spent his
adult life in the company of learned humanists, yet he showed no real
interest in classical mythological subjects or antiquity. His paintings
illustrating Low Countries' proverbs, children's games, or “The Fight
Between Carnival and Lent” (1559; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
reveal an interest in popular themes and common life rather than in the
pedantic Romanizing compositions of some of his contemporaries. This
choice of subject matter, latent from the early 15th century in the Low
Countries, was given new dimensions by
Bruegel. His series of
depictions of the months is at once a revival of the labours of the
months found in the portal sculptures of Gothic cathedrals and medieval
books of hours and at the same time a new treatment of rural landscape
and the peasants who work the land. His “Harvesters” (1565; Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City) displays a remarkable sensitivity to
colour and pattern. The intense golden yellow of the ripe wheat setsup a
bold pattern across the lower half of the picture and contrasts with the
cool greens and blues of the limitless plain stretching off into the
distance. Some figures move across a lane cut through the wheat, while
others cut into what seems a solid space. The sleeping peasants resting
after their noon meal are disposed in patterns and poses that make one
feel the heat and calm of the summer's day. This sympathetic view of
peasant life, with its bold geometric patterns, runs throughout the
series of the months and recurs in “The Wedding Dance” (1566; Detroit
Institute of Arts) and “Peasant Dance” and “Peasant Wedding” (both in
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
Bruegel
brought to an end the 16th century in the north and prepared the way for
the Baroque. His sons and grandsons were important painters who helped
to train some of the leading artists of the 17th century in the Low
Countries. It was the elder
Bruegel, however,
who made landscape and peasant life an accepted subject for painting in
the Renaissance.
John R. Spencer
Encyclopaedia Britannica
|
