Season 1

Professor Scallen introduces the course by explaining the idea of the Renaissance, exploring the kinds of art we will be studying, and taking a first look at the questions of patronage and artistic origin.

The Dukes of Burgundy were among the wealthiest and most influential rulers of their day, and several of them were also important art patrons. This lecture looks at some of the art made for the first Valois Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, including architectural and sculpted monuments and illuminated manuscripts.

This lecture examines the art form of panel painting, including the ways it was affected by changes introduced in both sculpture and manuscript illumination, and introduces the work of Robert Campin, one of the first painters to draw on all these influences.

We devote an entire lecture to the famed polyptych—or many-paneled painting—known as the Ghent Altarpiece, painted by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck for the Church of St. John in the Belgian town of Ghent. Completed in 1432, this complex representation of the Adoration of the Lamb served as a Christian meditation on sin and a celebration of salvation.

We continue to look at the theme of religious painting, in particular, the work of Jan van Eyck, whose paintings, whether for memorial, devotional, or liturgical use, exemplified the pervasive role of religion in Northern Renaissance culture.

An essential development of Renaissance culture is the rise of interest in the individual. One manifestation is the growth of portraiture, and in the work of Jan van Eyck, his scrutiny of every facial detail convinces us that what we see is truth itself, rather than its translation into paint.

We begin our study of Rogier van der Weyden—he and Van Eyck were two of the most influential northern artists of the 15th century—by focusing on his explorations of the psychological and emotional implications of Jesus as a figure both human and divine.

Rogier's devotional paintings and portraits, although smaller in scale and private in function, still had much in common with his larger altarpieces, especially in his emphasis on emotional impact in his religious paintings and his use of sculpture-like compositions, as in the arches used to frame small groupings of subjects in the Miraflores Altarpiece.

The work of Petrus Christus demonstrates how important Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Wyden were to the next generation of artists in the Netherlands. Christus found inspiration in both Van Eyck's serenity and Rogier's ideas of composition, the latter apparent in his Lamentation, which draws from Rogier's Deposition in its emphasis on the use of poses to express emotion.

The haunting yet often lyrical expressiveness of Hugo's religious art set him apart from his contemporaries, and his compositions would provide stimulus for many later painters. His Portinari Altarpiece in Florence had a nearly immediate impact on Florentine artists.

Bouts and Geertgen both worked in interesting ways to synthesize portrait and landscape, integrating, with varying degrees of naturalism, group portraits into biblical and historical scenes and often using landscapes that contributed to the emotional tenor of the scene.

Like his predecessors from Bruges, Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus, Hans Memling was drawn to a town rich with potential patrons; their commissions could provide a good living for an artist as sought after for portraits as for religious subjects.

This lecture considers the artist's workshop, describing the nuts-and-bolts of daily operations and the larger social history of painters, their patrons, and their practices.

By the 15th century, art in the German-speaking lands was moving from an artistic tradition dominated by architecture, sculpture, and manuscript illumination to one of innovation in panel painting, much of it featuring a "sweet style" most evident in its characteristic faces—small, rounded, and almost childlike.

One of the most important developments in European culture in the 15th century was the rise of prints and printmaking. Woodcuts and engravings contributed to the expansion of the arts into a range of European societies and to the development and circulation of secular subjects that had been rarely depicted in painting.

In the first of three lectures on an extraordinary artist, we consider a man who would become the most renowned artist of his northern European generation. Dürer's character and his documentary approach to his work reflected both a Humanist awareness of his status as an individual and artist, and an insistence on the enduring value of his profession.

In the years 1500–1515, Dürer experienced the period of his full maturity as an artist, participating deeply in Humanist as well as artistic culture. During his second trip to Italy, he extended his interest in rationally created art and his international fame.

The final lecture on Dürer considers his trip to the bustling Netherlands, where he met the young Lucas van Leyden, the Humanist Erasmus, and other important patrons. We also consider his later art, which reflects the Protestant Reformation and Dürer's hopes and anxieties concerning it.

Lucas Cranach was a prolific and versatile artist, with a large workshop that was active for nearly half a century. Equally at ease with mythological stories, portraits, and religious subjects—and able to satisfy both Catholic and Lutheran clients—Cranach also dealt with new secular themes and stories that allowed him to emphasize landscape.

The works of Matthias Grünewald and Albrecht Altdorfer portray deeply personal visions. The high point of Grünewald's career, the Isenheim Altarpiece, holds images of a grisly Crucifixion, a beatific Virgin and Christ Child scene, and a Resurrection that seems explosive in its sense of movement.

Dürer's renovation of the woodcut into a more technically and aesthetically sophisticated medium helped spark widespread interest. A number of artists, many of whom were primarily painters such as Cranach and Altdorfer, began employing the form in remarkably inventive ways, such as the chiaroscuro woodcut.

Prints made with metal plates also proved to be a form ripe for artistic innovation. Several artists worked with the etching medium because it allowed greater freedom in line work than engraving and required less exacting technical proficiency in designing the image.

We begin a two-lecture consideration of Hans Holbein the Younger, an artist who attempted to promote his career as a painter of religious history but instead achieved fame as a portraitist, with patrons who included Sir Thomas More, England's Henry VIII and his court, and other important political figures of the time.

Despite the need to change patrons after More's resignation (and execution), Holbein rose to the occasion, producing highly realistic portraits for which he is most remembered, as well as The Ambassadors, a double portrait filled with symbols that is a dazzling display of his talents in illusion and naturalism.

This lecture examines the Bruges career of Gerard David, whose use of landscape and experimentation with sacred and secular images of domesticity closed one era and pointed to another. We also look at one of the most talented illuminators of the era, the Master of the Mary of Burgundy.

Although Bosch is by reputation the most famous Northern Renaissance painter, he is also the most widely misinterpreted. While introducing new secular subjects into the realm of high art, often using fantastic imagery, he did so in contexts entirely in keeping with traditional moral values.

No Netherlandish artist since Jan van Eyck so clearly calls for detailed investigation of his themes and imagery as Bosch. We consider closely the Haywain Triptych and Garden of Earthly Delights to see how Bosch adapted this traditional format to fulfill his own vision of religious art, and how his audiences might have perceived the messages so often misconstrued by college students in the 20th century.

A talented engraver and woodcut artist before taking up painting, Lucas put his hometown of Leiden "on the map," lending freshness of line, vivacity of characterization, and psychological complexity to familiar biblical depictions and scenes from everyday life.

In looking at the careers of three of Antwerp's 16th-century artists, we see the city—already its nation's leading commercial center—begin to emerge as a great art center. Antwerp's artists adapted their careers to an ever-wider range of subjects and markets.

The pioneering changes in Antwerp included larger workshops, collaborations between masters, and a rapidly expanding art market of both foreign and local citizens. Europe's first open art market flourished with ready-made paintings for sale, and the range and variety of popular subjects expanded.

Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, and Antonis Mor were Netherlandish artists who spent time in Italy, then worked as court artists. Gossaert and Van Scorel brought elements of Italian Renaissance and Classical art back with them, while continuing to assert certain Netherlandish traditions of composition and painting.

By spending the balance of his professional life in Haarlem, Van Heemskerck's career epitomizes the rise of new artistic centers. Although Italianate details, from classical architecture to the monumentality of form, appear in his work, he was distinctly Netherlandish in his religious symbolism, his concern with domestic portraiture, and his innovations with prototypical still lifes.

Bruegel is often considered a painter of peasant subjects, often in humorous contexts, but he probably thought of himself differently. This first of three lectures considers his religious art, including his inventive portrayal of The Tower of Babel and the grim and grisly images of Triumph of Death.

Bruegel's 1566 Wedding Dance, like his other peasant scenes, depicts peasant life with quotidian detail and an utterly convincing earthiness. Some scholars suggest that Bruegel and members of his Humanist circle had a judgmental attitude toward the less-educated members of their society; others detect affection and even respect in Bruegel's colorful renderings.

Many of Bruegel's most beloved images concerned the relationship of peasants with the land, as in his monumental series, Seasons. Such works reflected his career-long interest in landscape, which played an ever-more crucial role in northern art.

This final lecture takes a close look at the tumultuous events that would reshape the Low Countries into two nations, and examines the career of an artist who stands as a major transitional figure between the 16th and 17th centuries and between the southern and northern Netherlands. Hendrick Goltzius was a virtuoso engraver and woodcut designer who acknowledged a debt to Dürer and other masters but confidently contributed to the art of a new era in Haarlem.