Collection: Northern Renaissance

The Northern Renaissance is the parallel revival that flourished in the Low Countries, Germany, and France through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It absorbed Italian discoveries in perspective and anatomy without abandoning the descriptive density and oil glazing technique that gave Northern panel painting its particular force.

The Early Netherlandish school, working in Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, produced the canonical fifteenth-century output. Jan van Eyck refined oil painting from the 1420s onward, with the Ghent Altarpiece and the Arnolfini Portrait among its defining works. Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling continued the idiom. Hieronymus Bosch developed an original imaginative register, extended in the next generation by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Albrecht Dürer is the definitive figure of the German wing. His two Italian journeys translated the Florentine and Venetian achievement into a vocabulary that German workshops could absorb, and his engravings and woodcuts circulated the new visual language across Europe at unprecedented scale.