Northern Renaissance

• 1. North Of The Alps

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  The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance of Europe north of the Alps. It arrived later than the Italian Renaissance, and in most respects it only began in the last years of the 15th century. The mountains were more than a line on a map. Beyond them, the German, French, English, Low Countries and Polish worlds each built a Renaissance with its own character. This documentary asks why the movement came late and what carried it north. It asks who paid for it and what northern artists and writers kept for themselves while borrowing from Italy. It also asks what the movement set in motion across the continent.

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• 2. Money And Power

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  Feudalism was already in decline when the Renaissance reached the north. Several forces were wearing it down. The plague had left a changed world behind it. Money was replacing land as the usual way to pay and trade. More serfs were living as freemen, and better farming technology and methods raised agricultural productivity. Monarchs building nation-states wanted to shrink the power of feudal lords. Gunpowder and other new military technology made feudal armies increasingly useless. Italy had gone through the same decline, and in both places it cleared the way for cultural, social and economic change.

  Giovanni Caboto, Giovanni da Verrazzano and Columbus were all Italian explorers, and the caravel was first introduced by Italian states and captains like them. This ship combined European and North African shipbuilding technologies. For the first time, it made extensive trade and travel across the Atlantic feasible. Its success also ended Northern Italy's role as the trade crossroads of Europe. Wealth and power shifted west to Portugal, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands. These states traded widely with Africa and Asia and began colonising in the Americas. The era became known as the Age of Discovery, and eventually European power spread around the globe.

  Italy and Germany were dominated by independent city-states. Much of the rest of Europe was instead emerging as nation-states, or even unions of countries. In some areas this centralization of political power set the Northern Renaissance apart from its Italian cousin. A new tool for moving ideas across those growing states was about to change how fast any of this could spread.

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• 3. Printed Pages

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  In the early 16th century the Renaissance reached Scandinavia and Britain, after first moving through France, the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire. Universities and the printed book carried it there. The printing press explains much of the speed. It could spread information widely, and that boosted scientific research and carried political ideas from place to place.

  As in Italy, the press made more books available, including books in vernacular languages. It also produced new editions of classical texts in Greek and Latin. Readers who knew only their own spoken language could now find writing aimed at them, while scholars could hold ancient authors in their hands.

  The Bible also became widely available in translation. This is a factor often given credit for helping the Protestant Reformation spread. The movement is closely tied to the Northern Renaissance, and the long series of conflicts between Protestant groups and the Catholic Church had lasting effects.

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• 4. Netherlandish Realism

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  Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck led a style of detailed realism in the 1420s and 1430s. Today that style is generally seen as the beginning of the early Northern Renaissance in painting. The work of artists like Hubert and Jan van Eyck often carried complicated iconography. Art historians have debated its "hidden symbolism" ever since.

  Italians greatly respected this realism, yet the influence rarely flowed back north until nearly the end of the 15th century. Money helped bring the two regions together. Bruges in the 15th century and Antwerp in the 16th were then Burgundian cities with a rapidly expanding trade. They also had a new class of rich merchant patrons. Cultural exchange between Italy and the Low Countries grew as a result.

  The Antwerp Mannerists, active from 1500-1530, were among the first artists in the Low Countries to clearly reflect Italian formal developments. They overlapped in time with Italian Mannerism but were unrelated to it. In architecture and in art more broadly, late Gothic influences stayed present until the arrival of the Baroque, even as painters increasingly drew on Italian models.

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• 5. Crossing The Alps

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  Albrecht Dürer made two trips to Italy, where he was greatly admired for his prints. He was influenced in turn by the art he saw there. He is agreed to be one of the first Northern High Renaissance painters.

  Hans Holbein the Elder and Jean Fouquet kept a Gothic influence that was still popular in the north. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder were highly individualistic. Their styles were imitated by many later generations of artists.

  Later in the 16th century, northern painters increasingly looked to Rome and travelled there. They became known as the Romanists. The High Renaissance art of Michelangelo and Raphael made a great impact on them, as did the late Renaissance tendencies of Mannerism then in vogue.

  By the end of the 16th century, Karel van Mander and Hendrik Goltzius had gathered in Haarlem. Their brief but intense phase of Northern Mannerism spread on to Flanders.

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• 6. New Subjects

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  Renaissance humanism and a large number of surviving classical artworks and monuments encouraged many Italian painters to explore Greco-Roman themes. Northern artists did so less at first. The famous 15th-century German and Dutch paintings tend to be religious. In the 16th century, mythological and other historical themes became more uniform among northern and Italian artists. Northern painters, however, also brought new subject matter, such as landscape and genre painting.

  As Renaissance styles moved through northern Europe, they were adapted to local customs. In England and the northern Netherlands, the Reformation brought religious painting almost completely to an end. England's Tudor Court had several very talented artists. Even so, portrait painting was slow to spread beyond the elite.

  In France, Rosso Fiorentino and other Italians began the School of Fontainebleau in the latest Mannerist style. It succeeded in establishing a durable national style. That school grew out of the interest of French kings in Italian art.

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• 7. Royal Patrons

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  King Francis I of France imported Italian Renaissance art and commissioned Italian artists, Leonardo da Vinci among them. He built grand palaces at great expense. With this the French Renaissance began.

  In England, the first signs of Renaissance art and architecture came from a small circle of patrons at the royal courts of Henry VII and his son Henry VIII. Nonsuch Palace belongs to this story. So does Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a courtier who built Hampton Court Palace.

  Poland took a more direct route. Artists from Florence and the Low Countries brought the Renaissance there straight from Italy, and so began the Polish Renaissance.

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• 8. Pens And Stage

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  Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard and Desiderius Erasmus were writers and humanists greatly influenced by the Italian Renaissance model. They were part of the same intellectual movement as the Italians who inspired them.

  In England, the English Renaissance overlapped with the Elizabethan era. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe composed works of lasting influence in that setting. Their lasting reach is the clearest sign that a movement which began late in the north did not remain a borrower.

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