In northern Europe, where the break with the medieval past centred not on the revival of Antiquity but on the creation of a new language for representing the natural (and supernatural) world, the most profound changes were bound to come from the most mimetic of media, manuscript and panel painting, and to leave architecture, and to a lesser extent sculpture, unaltered until the mid-six teenth century. Not that architecture in the north lost its vitality — on the contrary, it underwent fundamental changes of function and emphasis, and displayed astonishing virtuosity in the handling of decorative linear patterns, particularly in vaults and window tracery. The fifteenth century saw the demise of the ‘great church’ (with some pretentious exceptions in the Low Countries and Spain) and the promotion of more secular and communal genres: the proliferation of the parish church and the chantry chapel, the transformation of the castle into the palace, and — particularly in urbanised Flanders — the emergence of the town hall as a colossal, ostentatiously decorated accent designed to match, even surpass, the city’s principal churches (e.g. Brussels, 1444—54). It was in these new contexts, not in the old cathedrals, that the flamboyant imagination of late Gothic architects flourished most freely. The two most influential buildings in Germany in the late fifteenth century were both palaces
— the Albrechtsburg in Meissen (begun 1471) and the Vladislav Hall in Prague castle (begun 1490). The high points of Spanish late Gothic are to be found in a distinctly Iberian type of polygonal funerary chapel, combining complex decorative vaulting and sumptuous exhibitions of heraldry (e.g. Constable’s chapel, Burgos cathedral, begun soon after 1482). And in the box-like simplicities of the English Perpendicular parish church, and in the open vistas of the German hall church (plate 1), architects evolved a type of spatially diffuse and decoratively neutral auditorium suitable for sermons, municipal processions and the eye-catching display of a new class of micro-architectural furnishings
— font covers, Easter sepulchres, and sacrament houses. Stylistically, however, northern architects proceeded as if Alberti and Brunelleschi had never existed. None of them deviated essentially from the archetypes laid down for them in the later fourteenth century.
Sculpture, with its inherent three-dimensionality and its classical associations, seems at first sight to be the most promising medium of artistic change in the north, especially since the new century saw two great workshops at either end of Europe — the Parler family in the cathedrals of Prague and Vienna and Claus Sluter’s school centred on the duke of Burgundy’s Charterhouse at Champmol, near Dijon — simultaneously evolve a style of extraordinary solidity and psychological intensity, achieved through penetrating portraiture and virtuoso displays of three-dimensional drapery. Yet stylistically the influence of Sluter (d. 1406) on panel painting was confined to the grisaille ‘imitation sculpture’ on the exteriors of Flemish altarpieces, while his impact on later sculpture was rapidly eclipsed by the physical expansiveness, the spaciousness and the style of narrative, of the Flemish painters themselves. Most late Gothic sculptors — in Germany, Tudor England and particularly Spain (where almost all were Flemish emigres) — were content to elaborate the conventions of Flemish art of the first half of the century. Indeed the practice of polychroming figures and incorporating panel paintings into carved altarpieces meant that sculptors were never to be fully free from a fruitful tension with painters and painting until the very end of the century, when Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss introduced southern Germany to a new mode of monochrome carving. Sluter’s real impact was felt in changes in workshop practice. The overpowering physical presence of his architecture-defying figures prepared the way for the most critical change in northern sculpture during the fifteenth century: its emancipation from architecture. Freed from its old position in church portals, sculpture could now be conceived as a semi-independent work of art, usually in wood rather than stone, and standing in, but not attached to, its architectural setting. Sculptors consequently moved from the mason’s lodge (where they had been grouped with lathomi, cementarii, tailleurs de pierre) to independent workshops in the cities, where (as ymagier tailleurs) they responded to new kinds of patron and commission (usually single devotional figures or altar retables ordered by individual citizens or urban corporations) and developed new professional structures, with their own guild regulations.
The first decisive steps towards an art aimed at a new fidelity to nature were made in the first decades of the century by a triumvirate of panel painters — Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden — working for the burgesses of Bruges, Brussels and Tournai, and for the immensely wealthy dukes of Burgundy in Flanders. Their new style, which marks a shift in political and artistic power from France to the Low Countries, became the lingua franca of northern European painting, metalwork, sculpture and tapestry, and excited the admiration of Italian cognoscenti from Naples to Venice. One of the qualities the Italians most admired — and which humanists like Bartolommeo Fazio found brilliantly exemplified in the art of Jan van Eyck (c. 1390—1441) — was the splendour of Flemish oil painting technique, not, as Vasari thought, invented by van Eyck, but certainly manipulated by him to create seemingly miraculous illusions of reality. Oil permitted the softest transitions of modelling and ensured an astonishing precision of detail. It created the subtlest effects of diffuse light in aerial perspectives and cast shadows, and it illuminated even the darkest passages by its rich but transparent glazes of colour. Jan van Eyck’s semi-magical mastery of the medium (Vasari called him an alchemist) conjured up a new and almost palpable world, where the paint itself — particularly in the rendering of light, textures and materials — acts almost as a constituent element of what it represents. With self-effacing, almost imperceptible mastery the artifice of van Eyck’s art seems to merge with the very laws and substance of nature. To the traditionally ‘northern’ subject matter of portraiture and landscape — themes already handled with exquisite naturalism in fourteenth-century French and Netherlandish book painting — van Eyck brought a minute and pitiless observation. Like his lost Map of the World, praised by Fazio for depicting all regions of the earth accurately and at measurable distances, van Eyck’s landscapes, the first atmospherically convincing panoramas in western art, recede in immaculate detail into a radiant horizon (plate 2), or advance forward as if to envelop the spectator (plate 3). Beside this macroscopic sense of enlargement lies a microscopic fascination for minutely executed details, both polarities (or ‘infinities’ as Panofsky called them) part of a single continuum.
Van Eyck’s magical accumulations of minutiae are, however, as much ‘ideal’ as ‘real’. They not only reduplicate nature, but reconstruct it with a new clarity and meaning. Italian humanists admired Flemish painting not just for its technical brilliance but its peculiar piety; it was pietissimo and devoto; it moved the spectator to empathise with its figures. In other words, it allowed traditional medieval pieties to resurface and regroup within the new medium. Into the illusionistic rendering of sacred materials and objects — the marbled columns, stained glass and bejewelled crown of, for example, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435) (plate 2) — van Eyck compresses the old anagogical resonance of the treasures themselves; the translucency of the oil medium, like the reflections of a mirror, seems to distill the magical luminosity of the gold backgrounds of medieval panel painting and filter it through every aspect of the picture. And by a similar process of diffusion, the formal symbolism that once centred on isolated holy objects is now diversified, unobtrusively but pervasively, into nature as a whole. At the heart of the peculiar unreality of all van Eyck’s (and most Flemish) religious painting is a sense of the holiness of all creation — a quiet and pervasive sanctity much admired by the Italians, and nowhere more apparent than in Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s great altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb (c. 1432) (plate 3), a work already revered in the sixteenth century as the masterpiece of the founders of Flemish art. Here, in a vision of transfigured nature, the vast theological programmes associated hitherto with Gothic cathedral sculpture are infused with the sensuous naturalism and suggestive symbolism of van Eyck’s new conception of humanity.
Van Eyck’s conquest of the ‘outer’ phenomenal world, a largely static and emotionless world built up by detached observation and pervaded in its entirety by an all-inclusive, almost pantheistic significance, is matched by Rogier van der Weyden’s (1399—1464) mastery of the ‘inner’ landscape of intense personal emotion. Van der Weyden concentrates primarily on human action and spiritual insight. The boundaries between painting and audience are dissolved less by van Eyck’s trompe l’oeil naturalism than by a new and engaging language of expression, maintaining van Eyck’s tangibility, but purifying it with a new monumentality and linear energy. Van der Weyden’s innovations directly address the meditative imagination, in the inclusion of half-length donor figures in small diptychs of the Virgin, or the portrayal of contemporaries as dramatis personae in biblical events (Charles the Bold as one of the Magi in the so-called Columba Altarpiece, Munich, Alte Pinakothek). New types of figure composition, allied to an unprecedented mastery in the portrayal of varieties of emotion through gesture or facial expression, give van der Weyden’s paintings an intense and immediate power. The Prado Deposition (c. 1440) — half Descent from the Cross, half Lamentation — compresses, almost painfully, a novel ensemble of grief-stricken and unstable figures into the narrow confines of what is a fictive version of the box or corpus of a contemporary wooden altarpiece. His most ambitious composition, The Last Judgement altarpiece (plate 4), painted for Nicholas Rolin’s hospital at Beaune in about 1445, deploys all van der Weyden’s powers of psychological insight and dramatic expressiveness to prepare the sick for contrition and the Good Death. It presents a vision of apocalyptic contrasts. The narrow spaces below are crowded with the damned, each marked out by vivid and varied expressions of horror, each driven into hell not by demons (van der Weyden’s is one of the first Last Judgements without them) but by a sharpened sense of their own guilt. Towering above them, in almost surreal contrast, are the monumental and schematic figures of the Court of Heaven, situated not in any ‘real’ space, but quietly silhouetted against a supernatural background of blazing gold.
The contrasting sensibilities of van der Weyden and van Eyck established the two poles within which Netherlandish painting operated to the end of the century. Dierec Bouts (c. 1415—75) combined van Eyck’s interest in spatial construction and atmospheric effects with van der Weyden’s feeling for individualised faces and monumental figures (plate 8). Hugo van der Goes (c. 1435—82), the most faithful exponent of van der Weyden’s emotionalism, brought together a mastery of systematic perspective with a highly individual sensitivity to portraiture, and a preference for unexpected dislocations of scale (Portinari Triptych, 1475). Outside the Netherlands — in France, Spain and Germany — in sculpture as well as in painting, van der Weyden’s simple, immediate, and therefore memorable, language found an echo in artists as disparate as Schongauer, Konrad Witz (plate 16) and the anonymous master of the Pieta from Villeneuve-les-Avignon (1454). The relatively conservative nature of northern painting in the second half of the century may owe something to the training and production methods of the guild system, with its emphasis on long apprenticeships, with its system of judging ‘masterpieces’ by existing masters, and with the growth of large workshops composed of journeymen mass-producing their master’s style. Certainly, northern art, with the notable exception of Jean Fouquet (1420—81), remained largely impervious to the contemporary revolution in Italian painting.