Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [30]
JAN VAN EYCK. Credited with inventing oil painting, the Flemish artist Hubert van Eyck was so idolized for his discovery that his right arm was preserved as a holy relic. His brother, Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441), about whom more is known, used the new medium to achieve a peak of realism.
Trained as a miniaturist and illuminator of manuscripts, Jan van Eyck painted convincingly the most microscopic details in brilliant, glowing color. One of the first masters of the new art of portrait painting, van Eyck included extreme details like the beginning of stubble on his subject’s chin. His “Man in a Red Turban,” which may be a self-portrait (1433), was the earliest known painting in which the sitter looked at the spectator. In one of the most celebrated paintings of the Northern Renaissance, “The Arnolfini Wedding,” van Eyck captures surface appearance and textures precisely and renders effects of both direct and diffused light.
THE GERMAN RENAISSANCE
After lagging behind the innovative Netherlanders, German artists began to lead the Northern School. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Germans suddenly assimilated the pictorial advances of their Southern peers Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Simultaneous with Italy’s peak of artistic creativity was Germany’s own High Renaissance, marked by Grünewald’s searing religious paintings, Dürer’s technically perfect prints, and Holbein’s unsurpassed portraits.
HOLBEIN: PRINCELY PORTRAITS. Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), is known as one of the greatest portraitists ever. Like Dürer, he blended the strengths of North and South, linking the German skill with lines and precise realism to the balanced composition, chiaroscuro, sculptural form, and perspective of Italy.
Although born in Germany, Holbein first worked in Basel. When the Reformation decreed church decoration to be “popery” and his commissions disappeared, Holbein sought his fortune in England. His patron, the humanist scholar Erasmus, recommended him to the English cleric Sir Thomas More with the words, “Here [in Switzerland] the arts are out in the cold.” Holbein’s striking talent won him the position of court painter to Henry VIII, for whom he did portraits of the king and four of his wives.
“The French Ambassadors” (see p. 32) illustrates Holbein’s virtuoso technique, with its linear patterning in the Oriental rug and damask curtain, accurate textures of fur and drapery, faultless perspective of the marble floor, sumptuous enameled color, and minute surface realism. The object in the foreground (a distorted skull) and numerous scholarly implements show the Northern penchant for symbolic knickknacks. Holbein depicted faces with the same accuracy as Dürer but with a neutral expression characteristic of Italy rather than the intensity of Dürer’s portraits. Holbein’s exquisite draftsmanship set the standard for portraits, the most important form of painting in England for the next three centuries.
Dürer, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” c.1497-98, woodcut, MMA, NY. Dürer used fine, engravinglike lines for shading. In this doomsday vision, the final Four Horsemen — war, pestilence, famine, and death — trample humanity.
DÜRER: GRAPHIC ART. The first Northern artist to be also a Renaissance man, Albrecht Dürer (pronounced DEWR er; 1471-1528) combined the Northern gift for realism with the breakthroughs of the Italian Renaissance. Called the “Leonardo of the North” for the diversity of his interests, Dürer was fascinated with nature and did accurate botanical studies of plants. Believing art should be based on careful scientific observation, he wrote, “Art stands firmly fixed in nature, and he who can find it there, he has it.” This curiosity led, unfortunately, to his demise, as he insisted on tramping through a swamp to see the body of a whale and caught a fatal fever.
Dürer took as his mission the enlightenment of his Northern colleagues about the discoveries of the South. He published treatises