An up-to-date survey of this dynamic period of artistic innovation.

"In this volume, the work of the German, Dutch, Flemish, French, and English masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is explored in more than one hundred reproductions. In addition to such well-known masterpieces as Van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgment, Memling's Tommaso Portinari and Maria Baroncelli, Bruegel's Harvesters, Durer's woodcut The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Cranach's Judgment of Paris, and Holbein's Erasmus of Rotterdam, this volume includes many lesser-known works in oil and on paper, as well as sculpture, decorative arts, and armor from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art."--Page [2] of cover.

This book offers a wide-ranging introduction to the way that art was made, valued, and viewed in northern Europe in the age of the Renaissance, from the late fourteenth to the early years of the sixteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations to poetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces.While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception. Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands,dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy. Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

This updated version of Humanism and the Northern Renaissance now includes over 60 documents exploring humanist and Renaissance ideals, the zeal of religion, and the wealth of the new world. Together, the sources illuminate the chaos and brilliance of the historical period—as well as its failures and inconsistencies. The reader has been thoroughly revised to meet the needs of the undergraduate classroom. Over 30 historical documents have been added, including material by Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, William Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Galileo Galilei. In the introduction, Bartlett and McGlynn identify humanism as the central expression of the European Renaissance and explain how this idea migrated from Italy to northern Europe. The editors also emphasize the role of the church and Christianity in northern Europe and detail the events leading up to the Reformation. A short essay on how to read historical documents is included. Each reading is preceded by a short introduction and ancillary materials can be found on UTP's History Matters website (www.utphistorymatters.com).

In this lucid account, Stephanie Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe during the Renaissance period (ca. 1400–1570). She explains how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic, and religious change, while redefining the status of art. Porras discusses not only paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry, and armor. Each chapter presents works from a roughly 20-year period and also focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and artworks. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centers of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products. This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety, and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

Building the Italian Renaissance focuses on the competition to select a team to execute the final architectural challenge of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore--the erection of its dome. Although the model for the dome was widely known, the question of how this was to be accomplished was the great challenge of the age. This dome would be the largest ever built. This is foremost a technical challenge but it is also a philosophical one. The project takes place at an important time for Florence. The city is transitioning from a High Medieval world view into the new dynamics and ideas and will lead to the full flowering of what we know as the Renaissance. Thus the competition at the heart of this game plays out against the background of new ideas about citizenship, aesthetics, history (and its application to the present), and new technology. The central challenge is to expose players to complex and multifaceted situations and to individuals that animated life in Florence in the early 1400s. Humanism as a guiding philosophy is taking root and scholars are looking for ways to link the mercantile city to the glories of Rome and to the wisdom of the ancients across many fields. The aesthetics of the classical world (buildings, plastic arts and intellectual pursuits) inspired wonder, perhaps even envy, but the new approaches to the past by scholars such as Petrarch suggested that perhaps the creative classes are not simply crafts people, but men of ideas. Three teams compete for the honor to construct the dome, a project overseen by the Arte Della Lana (wool workers guild) and judged by them and a group of Florentine citizens who are merchants, aristocrats, learned men, and laborers. Their goal is to make the case for the building to live up to the ideals of Florence. The game gives students a chance to enter into the world of Florence in the early 1400s to develop an understanding of the challenges and complexity of such a major artistic and technical undertaking while providing an opportunity to grasp the interdisciplinary nature of major public works.