The Northern Renaissance

It begins in the 1420s and 1430s in the cities of Flanders, then ruled by the rich Dukes of Burgundy. Jan van Eyck, court painter to Duke Philip the Good, finished the Ghent Altarpiece with his brother Hubert in 1432 and painted the Arnolfini Portrait in Bruges in 1434. On the wall above the mirror he wrote, in Latin, "Jan van Eyck was here."

Around 1500 the north and the south met. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg crossed the Alps to Venice twice and brought back Italian proportion and perspective, while Italian painters studied Flemish oil technique. From 1517 Martin Luther's Reformation changed what painters were asked for in Germany and the Netherlands: fewer altarpieces, more portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life. Bruegel's death in 1569 closed its great age, and by 1600 northern painters were turning to the Baroque.

The Italians worked from rules: perspective, anatomy and the proportions of ancient statues, often in fresco on church walls. The northern painters worked from observation, mostly on wooden panels in oil, a medium Jan van Eyck mastered so completely that Giorgio Vasari, a century later, credited him with inventing it. He didn't, but no one before him had used it so well.

Their patrons were different too: dukes, bankers and merchants who wanted portraits and altarpieces for their own chapels, with themselves kneeling in them. Rogier van der Weyden's The Descent from the Cross, painted for the crossbowmen's guild of Leuven, is all grief, with its figures pressed into a shallow golden box like carved and painted sculpture.

Hieronymus Bosch, in the Dutch town of 's-Hertogenbosch, painted heaven, earth and hell crowded with strange creatures, most famously in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Albrecht Dürer, who drew and painted himself more often than any artist before him, faced the viewer head-on in his Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe of 1500, posed like an image of Christ. Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII, hid a stretched skull across the floor of The Ambassadors, visible only from the side.

In Antwerp, Joachim Patinir made landscape a subject of its own, and Dürer called him a good landscape painter. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted peasants, proverbs and the seasons for Antwerp's merchants. His The Hunters in the Snow of 1565 is one of a series on the months of the year, and his Netherlandish Proverbs packs more than a hundred sayings into one village.

When the Netherlands split in the 1580s, its art split too. In the Catholic south, Peter Paul Rubens carried Flemish painting into the Baroque. In the Protestant north, the new Dutch Republic turned the northern love of detail, light and daily life into the Dutch Golden Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.