the city, professors, theologians and nobility, among the crowd surrounding Catherine, who are being converted by her pious eloquence. The great humanist Schwarzenberg falls from his horse. Frederick the Wise looks puzzled. Friends and patrons, lovingly depicted, are swept into the catastrophe, their souls saved, their bodies about to be destroyed. The colors are light, fresh, dazzling. Flowers, trees, ferns and exotic grasses abound. In the midst of it all, Catherine, beautiful and undismayed, kneels serenely, awaiting her death and sanctification with confidence. She is dressed in her best clothes, as a bride of Christ: a superb gown of scarlet velvet with heavy gold trimmings, exquisite Brussels lace on her wrists, rubies and pearls hanging on her breast, with a gold collar around her shoulders. Her red hair is carefully curled. Her executioner, in the act of drawing his sword, is just as elegant. His handsome blond face is that of Pfeffinger, the king’s counselor. He is tall, slim, riotously dressed in the latest fashion, with striped hose in black, red and white, gold silk ribbons tied just below the knees, and a slashed gold silk jacket embroidered with flowers. His page is equally chic, and in one of the side panels, an enchanting boy, modeled on John Frederick, the king’s son, distributes flowers to three beautiful saints, St. Dorothy, St. Agnes and St. Kunigund, having already decorated himself with a coronet of blossoms. Three equally luscious ladies, St. Barbara, St. Ursula and St. Margaret, stand in the other side panel, accompanied by a domesticated dragon and under the protection of Coburg Castle. This wonderful work, Cranach’s masterpiece, breathes joy and godliness, despite its sensational subject. It is an incongruous but somehow deeply satisfying mixture of medieval, northern values with the thrilling new spirit from the south, a hymn of happiness to the German discovery of the Renaissance. But, produced as it was at the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome, it would have had Italian sophisticates roaring with laughter. It was the kind of painting that Michelangelo dismissed as “external accuracy [but] done without reason or true art, without symmetry or proportion,” a view that was reflected a generation or so later in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.
And if the northerners, Dürer excepted, were largely silent about the spread of the Renaissance, so also were those Italians who carried it north of the Alps. Pietro Torrigiano (c. 1472–1528), the Florentine sculptor, went to England to create, for Henry VIII, the tomb images of his father and mother in Westminster Abbey in 1511–18, but left no record of his visit. We know (from Vasari) that he broke Michelangelo’s nose in a brawl, but not how he took Renaissance sculpture to London. Leonardo’s life in France is fairly well documented, but he did not describe how he carried the Renaissance with him, nor did Rosso Fiorentino or Francesco Primaticcio when they decorated the great gallery at Fontainebleau for François I.
Printing and gunpowder did the work, in all probability, more effectively than anything else. We have already noted the extraordinarily rapid spread of printing in Europe. And printing brought with it comparatively cheap engravings, which disseminated Italian notions of the human form and perspective, and the delights of classical mythology, throughout European society, and especially to the workshops of craftsmen and artists. From the early years of the sixteenth century, Renaissance visual techniques and patterns are to be found in pottery and silverware, in elaborate goldsmiths’ work, in tapestry, silks, rich cloths, even in furniture, all over Europe.
Gunpowder encouraged campaigning over long distances, and in the wake of armies came curious princes eager to collect. The French were in Italy from the mid-1490s, ravaging and looting, but also learning and acquiring. They were followed by the imperial Germans, who marched up and down the peninsula, knocking over duchies and principalities, but also keeping their eyes open for the new.