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unpruned tree.” In Italy, he said, he learned the importance of mathematics in art: the need to measure every part of the human body to get accuracy, the need to apply oneself to perspective scientifically, so that properly drawn bodies could be placed realistically in space. Dürer added that he learned from the writings of Pliny that the masters of the antique age—Apelles, Protogenes, Phidias, Praxiteles and others—had studied the crafts of painting and sculpture systematically and with science, and had even written books about their skills. But these had been lost, and so had what he called “the rational foundations of art.” Hence “art was extinct until it came to light again [in Italy] one century and a half ago.” Dürer, a modest but determined man, said he aimed to show people outside Italy how art ought to be conducted, however limited his own skills and knowledge, and he invited critics to point out “the errors of my present work” so that “even so, I shall have been the cause of the truth coming to light.” We see in Dürer a man who had acquired the true Renaissance perspective: the rejection of medieval art as false; the need to examine the work of antiquity both in practice, by studying its survivals, and in theory, by reading the texts; the concentration on the human form and its exact representation by scientific study; and the mastering of perspective.

It is important to emphasize what Dürer actually said about the influence of Italian standards on northern art, for recent historical scholarship has tended to suggest that artistic interaction north and south of the Alps constituted a two-way process, rather than a simple acquisition of Italian ideas by still-medieval northerners. This was the message of the important Lorenzo Lotto exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, in 1997, the display of Renaissance art in the Netherlands at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 1998, and the exhibition “Renaissance Venice and the North” held at the Palazzo Grassi in 1999–2000. The weighty catalogs that accompanied these exhibitions presented the evidence of a northern contribution to Italian Renaissance art in considerable detail. But Dürer was a practicing artist, alive and traveling on both sides of the Alps at the time, not an academic writing half a millennium later, and he was quite clear about the relationship between north and south in art. For him, a German painter, a visit to Italy was an artistic revelation, what we would call a culture shock.

Dürer was unusually thoughtful and articulate for a painter, and in effect tells us how the Italian Renaissance changed him; we can trace the consequences in his work. But in this as in other respects, he was unique. His contemporary Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528) gives us no hint of the way in which the new perspective ideas, and the rendering of the human form “by science,” influenced his Isenheim altarpiece (1515), as they clearly did. Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) made splendid and highly individualistic use of the Italian revival of classical mythology, but was silent about his aims. But sometimes a work of art itself speaks. In 1506, while Dürer was on his second visit to Italy, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) was painting an altar triptych, The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, using oils on limewood, which is now in Dresden. Catherine, one of the most popular saints among medieval artists, was a highborn lady of fourth-century Alexandria. She declined a marriage proposal from the emperor Maxentius, successfully disputed with fifty pagan philosophers on the merits of Christianity and was condemned to be broken on the wheel. But it was the wheel that was broken by a divine thunderbolt, and many of the pagans were roasted with it. In the end they had to behead the brave lady.

Cranach treats this fantastic story with a mesmeric mélange of realism and extravagance. The scene is set under a threatening German sky, lit by lightning. Wittenberg, shown in brilliant detail, is in the top left-hand corner of the central panel, and Cranach portrays the elite of