Pieter Bruegel

in mind that, when using it, we are displaying an ignorance which, for once, is not gothic.

The Low Countries in the 15th Century combined a series of factors that played their part in giving rise to an important school of painting there. The country, originally a patchwork of minor states, gradually fell under the sway of the Duke of Burgundy. One of Europe's most densely-populated areas at the time, it also had a higher-than-average number of city dwellers. Bruges, Ghent, Amsterdam, Tournai, and Brussels were wealthy urban centres blessed with merchants of repute and outstanding craftsmen in many different trades. When Philip the Good inherited the duchy after his father John the Fearless's violent death, he had the capital moved from Dijon in Burgundy up to the Low Countries. Prior to this and from about 1 380 onwards, it now seems clear that a host of artists (painters, miniaturists, sculptors) had not only worked in the Low Countries themselves, but had been busily spreading their influence out to the great northern European centres of Paris and Dijon. With the fall of Paris to the English in the Hundred Years' War however, it ceased to be the great artistic capital it had once been, and a similar fate befell Dijon once the Duke moved his residence up to the northern cities. As a result, those who had once been tempted south stayed put and worked for the dukes and their court, the urban middle class, or for the great European dealers (in the main Spanish or Italian) who were coming to value their style more and more.

At this time Robert Campin was living in Tournai as was Hubert van Eyck in Ghent. Jan van Eyck, Hubert's younger brother, was soon to make his appearance on the scene. It was they more than anyone else who revolutionized the painting of their times by perfecting the use of oils, an advance that had profound and lasting consequences for the finished work by making possible the use of colour tones of such purity and intensity that astonishing light effects, hitherto impossible, became part of their stock in trade. These giant strides in both technique and the uses to which it was put found no equal in the self-absorbed and intellectual nature of what was going on at the same time in Tuscany. Up north, there was no yearning for the models of Antiquity, anymore than there was any questioning of the notion that an artist was, first and foremost, a master craftsman whose output was still to be approached as it had been in its late medieval sense. True, Jan van Eyck had a lively sense of his own importance as a master craftsman and did sign almost all of his paintings while the rest of his European counterparts, including the Tuscans, as yet did not. His art was indeed very conceptual and crammed with symbols at times disguised by a veneer of everyday simplicity but never privately so. His main clients were Philip the Good and those around him although he did work for many others, including Italian merchants who kept a house in Bruges, the place he himself lived in longest.

Another artist who seemed to be a contemporary of the van Eycks and to be in close contact with Roger van der Weyden was long known as the Master of Flemalle. With time, he was gradually identified as Robert Campin, a painter from Tournai and van Weyden's master. Though older than Jan van Eyck, he outlived him by several years. There is no general agreement about his identity even nowadays and his work is still anonymously attributed, mainly because his paintings tie in more with Brussels than Tournai. He chose to paint for the Tournai middle class rather than its great families. The Prado has four of his works, three of which are undoubtedly his and cover the artist's earliest efforts on through to his more mature later paintings which share certain qualities to be found in the work of younger artists such as Eyck and Weyden.

In the next generation, Petrus Christus is to be found living in Brussels and following in van Eyck's footsteps. Tournai lost artistic standing when its best painter, Roger van Weyden, moved on to Brussels. As time went by, this city was quickly to become an important art centre even though Bruges was still the focus of international trade. Weyden was made Official Painter to the city which added much to the prestige of that post. While van Eyck was known for making art symbolic, complex, and intellectual, van Weyden lent it his immediacy, expressivity and feelings. Many of his compositions became models of reference throughout the Low Countries as they later were to do throughout Europe. He was very highly esteemed in Spain where, by the 1440's, the king, Juan III of Castile, already owned one of his major works: the Miraflores Triptych. After his death, his official post went to an obscure artist called Vrancke van der Stockt, some of whose paintings were long mistaken for van de Weydens, which speaks well for their quality.

Bouts, coming down from the north, set up in Louvain, where he was honoured with a post like that given Weyden in Brussels. The Triptych of the Last Supper at St. Peter's Cathedral in Louvain and the paintings for the town hall are amongst his finest works, while the Prado's early Polyptych of Christ's Childhood is yet another.

The last thirty years of the century saw the flourishing of still more artistic centres and the host of artists who worked in them. Few further advances were made on the work of the founding masters (van Eyck, Campin, Weyden), who were still held up as models to revere and even imitate. At best, a few changes in the concept of landscape are worthy of note but even these are not because any more profound effects honed on the feelings, as in van Eyck's work, but rather to different kinds of light becoming used to catch different times of the year or even hours of the day. Memling was by then the most popular artist of his age, choosing Bruges as his workplace and this despite its steadily growing signs of economic decline. His art is simple, warm, and clean toned, not overdramatic and highly attractive but in no wise truly original.

It was not until the turn of the century that artists began to be brushed by the winds of change of the Italian Renaissance which, burgeoning now from Florence and out into Tuscany could by then truly be called Italian. A few from the North (such as Weyden) had already travelled to Italy but had not been over receptive to what they saw there whereas Italian customers and even some painters had been awed by the great skill of these visitors' works. Much else had also undergone great changes. Upon Charles’ the Fearful death, the duchy of Burgundy had been dissolved as such, the Low Countries suddenly found themselves but a part of a Central European empire, due to marriage of the late duke's daughter to Emperor Maximillian I. The marriage of two of the sons of this match to two of Ferdinand and Isabella's children was soon to increase Castilian influence in the Low Countries even further. Apart from the effect this was to have on Spanish painting, it had tremendous consequences for the northern countries.

During the reign of Emperor Charles V, Lutheran reform found willing adepts among a few intellectual circles whose brand of humanism differed sharply from that of the Italians and is best typified by that of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Furthermore, urban development no longer followed the lines of that of the first half of the 14th Century. Antwerp and Brussels had become great cities with their own specific weight in all things, be these political or artistic. This was most patent in the fields of sculpture and tapestry-making, the centre of which had shifted first from Arras to Tournai, and then to Brussels to the virtual exclusion of everywhere else.

The Renaissance was accepted in fits and starts. The great influence of the immediate past made change come about slowly. Artists started to realize the advantages to making a journey to Italy, either at their own expense or as part of the entourage of some important person. Others, less fortunate, learnt of what was happening there through Italian painters (such as Solario and Vincidor) who came north to settle or spend some time in the cities, or through such paintings, tapestries and drawings as were brought back from the Italy by those who had travelled. Nevertheless, some artists whose Italian sketchbooks and notebooks showed their openness to new ideas, still remained faithful in their works to their own rich Flemish tradition and this should never be understood as a failing on their part. Even those artists who spearheaded change never fully gave upon their native craftsmanship nor that taste for fine detail and realism that so often distinguished both their portraits and landscapes.

Gerard David, who was still at Bruges in the first two decades of the 16th century, was still essentially a 15th-century artist. He was a vastly successful and had an ample catalogue of paintings to his name. Hieronymus Bosch was indeed a man apart, but even his vision of the world was beyond question medieval and his technique stayed true to its glorious Flemish traditions.

Another painter who is at times linked with Bosch, and this although he lived in Antwerp and was more a friend of Metsys's than this master's, was Joachim Patinir. Patinir was a highly personal painter and one of the first to specialize in landscapes. While in some ways quite traditional, in others he was an frontrunner in bringing genre paintings into fashion. As an artist, he was both highly refined and poetic.. Some artists carried on in the tradition until well into the 16th century. Adrian Isenbrandt and Ambrose Bensen were two of these who, perhaps for exactly this reason, were highly regarded in Spain where they thus enjoyed very prolific careers.

When change came, perhaps its prime movers were Quentin Metsys or Massys, Jan Gossaert Mabuse, and Berend or Bernard van Orley. Mabuse was the first to paint mythologies. Metsys, who never travelled to Italy, had however seen Solarius's work and knew Erasmus. Van Orley added Flemish mannerism to the brew. All these artists are represented by excellent paintings; albeit some of these are not representative of the genres they are most renowned for (Mabuse). Metsys concentrated on lay subjects which, nevertheless, he loaded with heavy censure. Marinus van Reymerswaele more than anyone, and van Hemesen to a lesser degree, followed on in his wake. Van Reymerswaele's work clearly stands in the late-Gothic tradition with its close attention to precise detail, as it does in his attitude to his craft, he being nothing loath to repeating the same piece over and over again at a patron's request.

As the 16th century wore on, society became split between those who remained true to Roman Orthodoxy and those who were turning towards the Reformation. Their stance in doing so was not only religious, but likewise political, as they were furthermore standing out against Spanish domination. This uneasy state of affairs affected painters as much as anybody else, some even being driven away from their workplaces. The whole nasty business came to a head in a war which brought about the final splitting up of the Northern provinces.

The greatest artist of the second third of the century was Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Though always recognized for his talents, he was perhaps subject to much misunderstanding until only quite recently. The Triumph of Death, perhaps one of h is harshest works, contrasting as it does so bitterly with others of the sort that made him famous, such as his pieces celebrating droll local customs. With Brueghel, Flemish art became highly secularized for all its roots in the past. Meanwhile, Italian mannerism or roman influences in general were going from strength to strength in the work of artists who had made the artistic pilgrimage to Italy. In fact, one of the most outstanding of these was Brueghel's father-in-law, Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Others, such as Scorel and Jan Massys, took the trend even further. Michel Coxcie was one of the period's most successful and prolific painters. His work was readily accepted in Spain. Coxcie spent time in Italy, where he studied Raphael's work with admiring attention. As the years of the century ran on, many artists were able to pick and choose among genres. Adriaen Cronenburgh and Anthonis Mor (known as Antonio Moro in Spain) worked almost exclusively on portraits. Lucas van Valckenborch did landscapes. Mor was especially significant for having been Charles V's court painter as well as for having worked for Philip II. His work was sometimes copied by Alonso Sanchez Coello and was the touchstone of Spanish court portraiture up till Velazquez.

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