09/01/2020
As celebrated as the artists of the Italian Renaissance have become, they were not the only ones producing great art in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Far to north in the Low Countries, that other pole of the transalpine trade, another revival of the art of painting was also underway. In the period from about 1420 to 1550 artists working in the Burgundian capital of Bruges and the flourishing commercial center of Antwerp produced an uninterrupted series of works that were without equal in their verisimilitude, their technical and coloristic virtuosity, and their heightened expressive power. This gallery presents a representative sample of that achievement.
We begin with 60 works by the van Eyck brothers, Hubert and Jan. Jan (c. 1390-1441), perhaps more than any other artist in the 15th c., extended the boundaries of painting into areas hitherto unimagined, crafting works of a subtlety and nuance that has rarely been matched since. As the eminent critic Robert Hughes has said of him, "he extended detailed information about things far past the ordinary limits of scrutiny; his eye acted 'both as a telescope and as a microscope,' and it left us with too much, not the suggestive too little of other realist art. "
The rest of gallery presents over 250 works by other Flemish artists of the period, including such masters as Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts the Elder, Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, Gérard David, Quentin Metsys, Lucas van Leyden, and Marinus Claeszon van Reymerswaele.
As is the custom with all MWW galleries, the works are presented in chronological order, with many "close-up"/detail images of selected paintings, and the majority are accompanied by commentaries. (Click "See More" to the right of the full-screen image to access these.)
See also these MWW companion galleries:
* Bosch & Breugel -- Landscapes of the Post-Medieval Subconscious
* Going for Baroque: Rubens & 17th c. Flemish Art
