Northern Renaissance and its characteristics

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The very term "Renaissance" ("rinascita") belongs to the art historian Giorgio Vasari. Later, the word was picked up by the French and transformed into Renaissance (Renaissance) - this is also the name of this period. Its time frame is difficult to determine: it is believed that it began with the great plague of 1347 and ended with the advent of the New Time, with the first bourgeois revolution. What exactly did this period revive? Vasari believed that the spirit of antiquity, the wisdom of Greek philosophers and ancient Roman culture. All this flourished in Italy after the "Dark Ages" - this is how the historian dubbed the period of the Middle Ages. The Transalpine or Northern Renaissance came much later than the Italian, and has its own unique features.

North of the Alps on the territory of Western and Central Europe for a long time in the culture reigns Gothic, which has reached its highestheyday in the XIV century ("Flaming Gothic"). However, at the turn of the XIV and XV centuries in Burgundy, painters and sculptors begin to appear, who depart from the canons of refined Gothic. These are, first of all, the Limburg brothers and the sculptor K. Sluter. At that time, the Duchy of Burgundy extended far beyond the current French province and encompassed Belgium and the Netherlands. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Northern Renaissance manifested itself most clearly in these countries.

If scientists associate the beginning of the Italian Renaissance with the fall of Constantinople and the arrival in Italy of a large number of refugees from Byzantium who brought Greek culture with them, then the countries in which the Northern Renaissance began a century later are the Netherlands, Germany, France, England and others for a long time it was precisely the medieval worldview that was preserved. If in Italy the philosophy of the masses was anthropocentrism, then in the north of the Alps it was pantheism.

Pantheism claims that God is poured into nature, and therefore the surrounding landscape is worthy of being immortalized on canvas as God's attribute. In the Italian Renaissance, nature is idealized, deprived of specifically realistic details, and often serves only as a background for a portrait. The Northern Renaissance, in an effort to capture real views, gives rise to an independent genre in painting - the landscape. Especially this direction in the fine arts flourished under the brush of the German masters A. Durer, L. Cranach A. Altdorfer, the Frenchman J. Fouquet, the Dutchman I. Patinir.

Portrait - moreone genre where the Northern Renaissance manifested itself most clearly. The artists G. Holbein Jr. and Durer in Germany, Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck in the Netherlands, J. Clouet and F. Clouet, J. Fouquet in France are trying to convey not the physical beauty of the face, but the psychology of the person depicted on the canvas, they achieve great emotional expressiveness of the image. Following the medieval aesthetics of the “ugly”, the masters often use the grotesque, in which Hieronymus Bosch excelled the most.

The second genre that spawned the Northern Renaissance is everyday scenes. In Italy, a major customer of art objects was the Church, which wanted to see paintings on biblical subjects. In the Netherlands, the bourgeois class, which is increasingly entering the political arena, is taking over the baton: merchant guilds and craft workshops order portraits from artists against the backdrop of their native city, which, combined with the flourishing of the landscape, gives rise to genre scenes. The largest master of everyday scenes is Pieter Brueghel the Elder, also called "Peasant", because he liked to depict scenes from peasant life. He and other "Little Dutch" are characterized by extraordinary virtuosity and careful drawing of details.