The Art of the Early Renaissance

This is Siena, a wonderfully preserved medieval city in central Italy. At its heyday, around 1300, it was one of the most civilized and prosperous places in Europe. Siena and the other Italian city-states of its time, like Florence, can stand as a new beginning in our story of Western art. Hitherto, the old medieval worldview had, put simply, divided the classes of society into the aristocracy at the top, the church, and the laboring peasantry at the bottom. But in places like this, we see for the first time in European history, a new class, conscious of its own identity, the merchants. These cities were no longer controlled by feudal lords. They were republics. Here in Siena, several thousand citizens were eligible for election to the governing bodies, which met down there in the Palazzo Pubblico. And in the Palazzo, there is a fresco painted in the 1340s, which encapsulates their faith in the secular arts of government, in the moderating power of reason in human society. It's called The Effects of Good Government. This marvelous fresco, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, was the first panoramic landscape on this scale in Western art. The peasants bringing their produce from the countryside, the merchants going about their business, the elegant ladies of leisure, all are fused into an idealized image of the well-governed city-state. Eight years later, the Black Death devastated Siena. It killed the artist Lorenzetti and half the population of Europe. It was the greatest catastrophe in the modern history of the West. But surprisingly, for some regions, the plague was a springboard for economic growth. For the survivors, there were new opportunities. Florence recovered particularly quickly. By 1400, this was the city-state that dominated central Italy. But bankers and textile merchants were expanding their trading empires all over Europe. Over the next hundred years, an extraordinary interaction took place in Florence. The innovations of artists and architects, the excitement of rediscovering classical achievements, and the patronage of a wealthy commercial class, these key elements brought about a series of artistic and intellectual breakthroughs that came to be known as the Renaissance, literally the rebirth of learning and culture. In the church of Santa Croce, a series of frescoes painted around 1320 were to have a revolutionary effect on Florentine painting. Here, the great merchant families competed with one another to commission the leading artists to decorate their chapels. In the chapel of the Bardi family, Professor John White of University College London describes how these medieval images came to life. This is a Franciscan church, and the Franciscans were the passionate preachers of the late medieval world. They used their words to target the emotions of the faithful, rich and poor alike. And at the same time, the painters increasingly tried to bring the gospels and the stories of the saints to life before their very eyes. At first, as you can see in this late 13th century St. Francis altarpiece, they did it with stiff, imposing figures, and with bright, doll-like symbolic scenes and images. And here next door, in a much-ruined fresco, I'm afraid, painted probably only 30 or 40 years later, you can see the revolution represented by the art of Giotto, the great contemporary of the poet Dante. Here is a new, soft, warm reality, a new humanity and pathos, a new ability to take the faithful back and make them feel that they were actually there and filled with love for this loving saint whose love of Christ and love of life and of the beauties of the world brought a transformation in the spiritual life of Europe. Giotto's frescoes gave a new sense of weight to the human body, a new sense of urgency to narrative painting. They became an academy for later Italian artists. Raphael and Michelangelo came here to learn from such dramatic images as this, in which St. Francis receives the wounds of Christ upon his hands and feet. Giotto's frescoes brought him immortality and undying fame to the chapel of the Bardi. They and families like them were moneylenders to the popes and kings of Europe. They were the pioneers of the new world of international finance, and the coinage of Florence, the gold florin, became the common currency of Christendom. Even John the Baptist, the saint of the desert and the enemy of luxury, is depicted surrounded by gold florins on the cover of a book containing the rules of the coin makers. But if the prosperity of Florence was owed to the bankers, the rebirth of its intellectual energy came from a rediscovery of classical culture. Without ever leaving Santa Croce, we can move into the world of the Renaissance with this tomb of Leonardo Bruni, longtime chancellor of Florence, who died in 1444. This was the Florence of the humanists, the students of the classics, of the knowledge and the wisdom of the ancient world. They went right back to the origins of Western thought in the great Greek philosophers. He also wrote a history of Florence, starting with Roman times. And in this great work, he put historical writing also onto a new footing, both in terms of its literary content and its scholarly underpinning. And there he lies, his history on his breast, surrounded by a wealth of classical detail, his beer supported by the Roman eagles, and his hope of heaven in the roundel of the Virgin and Child above his head. This monument in itself is a wordless combination of the Christian and the classical. This is the Pantheon, the most perfectly preserved temple of ancient Rome. Scholars like Bruni and the artists of Renaissance Florence had a passionate love affair with antiquity. The humanists recovered and translated the texts. The artists studied the statues and the frescoes. But they were not simply copying the achievements of the ancient world. They were transforming them. This Renaissance design for an ideal city uses classical architecture to create a perfect environment based upon reason and order. And in perhaps the most famous image of man by a Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci is illustrating the Roman author Vitruvius. Man, in his ideal proportions, is the measure of all things. Out of their preoccupation with classical harmony and proportion, Renaissance artists created these new images of man. Inside the Palazzo Vecchio, the 5,000 or so Florentines who had the right to vote would meet, summoned by the bell in times of crisis. They were the members of the influential guilds and represented the craftsmen and the most economically important activities. Sculptors and stone workers, textiles, metal workers, masons and builders, lawyers and solicitors. The engine driving the art of Florence at the beginning of the 15th century was competition between the guilds and competition between the artists commissioned by them. The armorers guild paid for this powerful, alert image of their patron saint, Saint George by Donatello. Roman art transformed into a vision of Christian courage. The bankers guild paid for Ghiberti's expensive bronze statue of Saint Matthew, the patron saint of money changers. These reliefs are the two front runners for the most famous of all Florentine competitions held in 1401 to decide the commission for new bronze doors for the baptistry. The subject is the prophet Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac and this entry by the young Brunelleschi emphasizes the violence of the act. Abraham holds Isaac by the throat to plunge the knife in. The angel seizes Abraham's wrist in a dramatic last-minute intervention. But Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition with this relief, immediately acknowledged as an exhibition of unrivaled craftsmanship. The nude figure of Isaac is based on classical models. This is a triumph of the goldsmith's craft, embodying lessons learned from antique statuary and combining that with a gothic grace learned from the art of northern Europe. Florence is still a thriving center for the goldsmith's art. This is the studio of Signor Giorgio Chileri at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio and he works here as a master with his apprentice craftsman. Our whole generation of famous Florentine artists, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello began work in studios not unlike this, working on just such meticulous and minute creations before moving on in their careers to their monumental works of art. In such an environment where the skill of the craftsman is so highly prized, it was inevitable perhaps that their status should rise. Inevitable too that the most brilliant of them, men like Brunelleschi and Donatello, should resent the restrictions which the craft guilds could place on them and resent too the implication that somehow their work was menial, a mechanical craft. And so increasingly during this century, such artists came to see themselves as the equals of their patrons, no longer humble, anonymous craftsmen, but self-confident, ambitious, intellectual practitioners of the liberal arts, famous beyond their own city. Brunelleschi visited Rome after his unsuccessful submission for the baptistery doors competition. There he saw a great city in a state of decay. The sheer scale of the Roman ruins and the building techniques he analysed provided inspiration for the greatest problem of structural engineering in Italy, how to complete the cathedral being built in Florence. In this great space, we are surrounded by a Gothic architecture ripe for the Renaissance. The flat surfaces of the walls, the crisp planar detailing of the piers with their sharp angles, not a curve, not a rounded form in sight. It all looks so precise and so completely pre-planned. And yet if we had stood here half a century after they began to build this building, we would have seen something very different. Behind me there, you would still have seen the medieval houses within the existing foundations. And then as the piers went up, they were still arguing about how high they should be. When they came to those capitals, they had a competition about their precise form. They had plaster, wooden, stone models. And when all that was done, and they were still arguing about the precise dimensions of the building, they went on for 50 years and not a man in Italy or Europe let alone in Florence, would have had the foggiest idea of how they could ever put a dome over that great crossing that you see behind me there. In 1417, a conference of architects was summoned from all over Italy to discuss the problem of how to construct the dome. And eventually, Brunelleschi was entrusted with the commission. Standing here and looking down into the space, this 150-foot-wide octagonal crossing, we can get some idea, at least, of what it was for Brunelleschi to be faced by the greatest architectural and engineering challenge which had confronted any Italian architect since the distant days of antiquity. It was quite impossible to fill this space with a forest of timber. And even if it had been, it would never have supported itself, let alone the weight of the cupola during its construction. So Brunelleschi's primary problem and his first triumph was to devise a form of scaffolding which started not at the ground but 40 feet above our heads at the top of the drum. And then his second was to build the cupola in such a way that it was self-supporting in the course of its construction. And this is an important part of Brunelleschi's structural solution. Herringbone brickwork. Instead of simply laying rows of bricks horizontally, some of them were laid vertically to provide a kind of internal skeleton locking the horizontal rings of brickwork into place whilst the mortar was setting. Enormous scale involves enormous weight. And Brunelleschi's master stroke in building his cupola was to devise a double shell built first of stone and then of brick to lighten it still further. We're standing in one of the passageways between these two shells. And that, of course, solved his whole problem of access for his building materials and, of course, for subsequent maintenance. Whilst the great ribs which bind the inner and the outer shelves together ensure its strength and structural stability. When we come out into the light, out of the dark passages and tunnels of the dome, we are surrounded by the classic forms of Brunelleschi's lantern. As we look down, we can immediately understand exactly what his great contemporary and fellow architect Alberti meant when he spoke of this magnificent cupola rising above the skies ample enough to encompass in its shadow all the people of Tuscany. Not only did Brunelleschi's dome dominate the skyline of Florence, he also systematized the science of perspective which was to dominate Western pictorial space until the 20th century. In Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity, probably constructed with Brunelleschi's advice on architecture, classical columns and a monumental barrel vault frame the figures of Christ and God the Father. Here is the interaction of painting, architecture and the mathematical analysis of space that was unique to the Florentine Renaissance. In 1419, Brunelleschi had begun the Hospital of the Innocenti. It was the first orphanage in Europe to be funded by public donations and the architecture is a delicate blending of the Roman and the Romanesque. It was Brunelleschi's architecture which the painter Fra Angelico depicted in his fresco of the Annunciation which awaits you at the top of the stairs of the Monastery of San Marco. Fra Angelico lived and worked here decorating the monastery with scenes from the New Testament scenes striking for their simplicity and serenity. Inside the cells, the world seems to retreat leaving a single image suspended like a spiritual vision. The buildings and frescoes of San Marco were paid for by one of the wealthiest Florentine bankers, Cosimo de' Medici whose family symbol adorns the walls. Saint Cosmas was the patron saint of the Medici family and in Fra Angelico's fresco, he kneels at the foot of the cross. This painting was at the entrance to the personal cell of Cosimo de' Medici who would retreat from the pressures of business into this setting of intense spiritual devotion. The moment in the story of Christ that these patrician bankers identified with was the adoration of the Magi the wise and wealthy paying homage to the baby Jesus and this is the image that Fra Angelico painted inside Cosimo's cell. 30 years later, Botticelli painted the same scene for the same patrons but now the powerful patrician families have taken over the religious stage. Cosimo the Elder is portrayed kneeling before the Madonna while his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent swaggers on one side. Every face in this painting is a portrait from the Medici court circle including Botticelli himself. In another Botticelli portrait, a medallion of Cosimo the Elder is held by a fashionable young man. Botticelli's painting epitomises the shift in patronage during the second part of the 15th century away from the world of public competition into the private space of the Florentine palazzo. The patrician families of Florence erected monuments to their own prestige in the Palazzi of the 15th century. Palazzo Ruccellai by the architect Alberti was admired for its classical detail and the elegance of its proportions. More magnificent was the palace designed for Cosimo de' Medici. This was not simply a home but the centre of a vast and magnificent palace. Massive doors and rough rusticated masonry on the ground floor increasingly smoother stonework above created a style that was to be imitated by palaces and banks in Europe and America for the next 500 years. De' Medici created an elegant society where artists and scholars studied astrology and mythology reviving antiquity for their private pleasure. Cosimo commissioned the humanist Vicino to translate the works of Plato and out of this intellectual climate came the paintings of Botticelli combining the sensuality of pagan mythology with themes and images from Christian art. In his painting of the Primavera Zephyrus, the wind god, enters the scene and seizes the wood nymph Cloris whose mouth issues flowers as she is transformed into Flora, the goddess of spring. In the centre stands a figure who resembles both the Christian Madonna and Venus the goddess of love and who directs the dance of the three graces. Naked Venus seen here in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus symbolised divine love. This was a nude based on classical forms which also suggests a baptism and a rebirth. In Renaissance Florence the nude again became the focus of artistic effort. Donatello's David, probably commissioned by the Medici with its obvious reflection of the Roman past is a masterpiece of technical virtuosity and erotic suggestion. But it was more than that. It was also a brilliantly inventive symbol of the Christian faithful armoured only in the word of God. Finally, in Brunelleschi's Church of San Lorenzo we find the two bronze pulpits that Donatello left unfinished at his death in 1466. Here, for the first time in Western art we find a true late style that leads on to the work of Titian and of Rembrandt. Leaving behind the technical perfection of his early work Donatello now engages with his material in a rougher, more direct manner biting into the bronze with his chisel to convey a more emotionally charged message. Here, in the harrowing of hell Christ's urgent figure reaches through the crowding souls to seize the arm of Abraham and pull him to salvation. And when Christ's heavy figure surges from the tomb it is not a joyous resurrection but a battle won against the odds. Below, the soldiers sleep as the old order passes. Christ's face seems burdened with the sins of all mankind as he climbs up from darkness into light. The fleeing devil of the harrowing has become a scorpion on a Roman shield. Then, finally, the drama of salvation is resolved as the ascending Christ looks down in love and takes his leave with his apostles. Looking over the rooftops and domes of the city we can try to take an overview of that extraordinary period of artistic outpouring. It was, after all, a city whose population never even reached a hundred thousand continually riven by faction and strife and yet which produced some of the greatest figures in the history of Western culture from Giotto and Dante to Michelangelo and Leonardo. It was, for example, a Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci with Florentine maps and instruments who named the continent discovered by Columbus. The founder of modern science, Galileo, worked in this city. With all of them, it is the freshness of their thought their willingness to experiment their modernity which impresses us today. But there is another side to the story. Civilized human life depends not only on modernity but on a healthy assimilation of the past both critical and imaginative. The Middle Ages had proved incapable of doing that but here in the Florentine Renaissance we can see the reintegration of the classical worldview into modern life. Not merely their learning but their pagan humanism and their pantheism with its incomparably rich mythological themes which as we now understand contain such profound psychological insights. What we see here in Florence is what they made of that tradition just as this is what we are making of them but its continued reinterpretation is a necessity for the West if it is to understand its own cultural tradition. The art of Renaissance Florence came out of the city-states of central Italy. By contrast, our story of art in northern Europe begins in the late medieval courts of France. It was a time of violent contrasts. In the luxury of the court, the duke enjoys his banquet while the peasants shelter from the snow. In their hovel, they bear themselves by the fire. These illuminations were painted around 1414 by three brothers from the Netherlands, the Limburgs at the French court of the Duke of Berry. The detailed realism of these faces and landscapes was to be a key feature of northern art in this period. The Limburg brothers began their career working for the brother of the Duke of Berry, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. The Valois Dukes of Burgundy established one of the strangest and most extravagant courts of late medieval Europe. From their base in Burgundy, by marriage and diplomacy, they acquired large areas of the Netherlands to build an extensive though fragmented state of vast wealth. In 1404, Duke Philip the Bold died at the Stag Inn near Brussels. 20 years earlier, his royal sculptors had begun work on Philip's tomb. One of them carved these images of the funeral procession which transported his body back to Burgundy. Clothed in the habit of a Carthusian monk, Philip's embalmed body was sealed in a great lead coffin and then carried in a funeral cortege which took nearly seven weeks to wind the 250 miles from Brussels to Dijon. Accompanied by his sons, his chaplains, and members of his royal court, the hearse was drawn by six horses comparisoned in black with the blue banners of Burgundy fluttering at its corners. At Dijon, it was received not only by the weeping clergy but by 100 chosen townspeople and 100 poor also clad in black at the Duke's expense. And so, as with the other great royal and ducal rituals of the later Middle Ages, death itself could be turned into an act of public theater. Philip's tomb itself lay just outside Dijon at the Carthusian monastery of Champmal. It took nearly 30 years to complete and was finished after his death in 1414. Three sculptors worked on it, but among them was a forgotten genius of European art. The man who conceived this remarkable evocation of that funeral procession, Klaus Sluter. He came from Haarlem in the Netherlands and worked for the Duke of Burgundy for 20 years in Dijon. Sluter's most impressive carving was a life-size monument known as the Well of Moses with prophets from the Old Testament around its base. The well was placed at the center of the monastery of Champmal where the Dukes of Burgundy were buried. In Italy, Donatello was only 10 years old when Sluter began to carve these figures which display an intense realism never seen before in European sculpture. As this reconstructed model shows, the Well of Moses was originally brilliantly painted. The prophets deliver their prophecies like figures from a medieval mystery play. The whole piece was intensely theatrical, linking the prophecies of the Old Testament to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. And originally, the well was surmounted by a life-sized crucifixion group. This crucifix was smashed to pieces during the French Revolution and the largest fragment that remains is the head of Christ. Somehow, Sluter's carving conveys both the agony of Christ on the cross and the release from suffering which death has brought. But the Burgundian court was not always dominated by thoughts of God and death. The Dukes of Burgundy were famous for their tournaments, their banquets, and their extravagance. They placed great importance on all the arts so their court could be seen and heard as one of the grandest in Europe. Because this was a traveling court, moving between the palaces of their scattered duchy, many of their artistic treasures were portable. Tapestries, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts. All this medieval extravagance was principally paid for by the Burgundian Netherlands, the most highly urbanized area of Europe. During the 15th century, Bruges became the busiest port in northern Europe, while Brussels and Ghent became two of its largest industrial cities. We can catch a realistic glimpse of Flemish urban life through the window of religious paintings such as this Madonna by Robert Campin. In Italy, 15th century artists used perspective and the study of antiquity to depict a suitable setting for their religious paintings. By contrast, a northern painter such as Campin in his Merode altarpiece saw no great divide between the distant past and the present, between the look of antiquity and the late medieval world. Joseph in his carpenter's workshop is depicted with detailed realism. Both the tools of his trade and the townscape visible through the window. One sign of the success of Bruges as a trading center was its wealthy community of Italian merchants and bankers. Out of this community came the most famous wedding portrait in Western art. Here in 1434, Jan van Eyck shows Giovanni Arnolfini, a hugely wealthy Italian money lender and tapestry dealer to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. He is about to marry an equally wealthy young Italian, Giovanna Cenami, whose family lived in France. And here you see the shifty, rabbity banker, one hand raised and the other joined to that of his new bride. The artist proclaims his witnessing presence in a bold Gothic legal inscription in Latin. This reads, Jan van Eyck was here. While Italians were developing their illusionistic art with the assistance of mathematically reasoned perspective, northern painters led by Jan van Eyck used many translucent layers of pigments and quick-drying oils to produce uniquely convincing pictorialism. Among Jan's most compelling portraits, this man's features may be the artist's own. They have some of that fixed, almost hypnotic quality that sometimes results from staring into a mirror for self-portrayal. We also know that artists in the 15th century often wore such flamboyant red turbans, which is another reason for suspecting that the identity of the sitter is Jan van Eyck himself. The most famous European painter of his day, Jan van Eyck was also a diplomat, mapmaker, and chemist. Enormously learned, he was concerned with Latin and Greek and studied Hebrew mysticism. Here Jan van Eyck depicts the most powerful figure at the Burgundian court, Chancellor Roland kneeling before the Madonna. In such works, a saint usually presented the donor, the person paying for the painting, to the virgin and child. But Roland decided to appear before the Madonna without benefit of introduction. So van Eyck linked the figures with Romanesque architecture and a view of the heavenly city and landscape beyond, realized by the almost magical glow of the oil medium. Nicolas Roland was the chief minister of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy for nearly 40 years. He became one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Europe. And at the height of his career, he made a spectacular donation to charity. The Hotel Dieu, or God's Hostel, a hospital for the poor, was founded by Chancellor Roland in Beaune, close to the Duke's capital at Dijon. The initials of Nicolas Roland and of his wife, and their coats of arms appear in the stained glass and the floor tiles of the buildings, making it clear that the hospital was a gigantic memorial to the donors. On this Sunday, the 4th of August, 1443, neglecting all human cares and in the interests of my salvation, in recognition of the goodness of our saviour from whom all benefits proceed, I found and donate irrevocably in the town of Beaune, a hospital for the poor and the sick. Such acts of piety were often performed by the rich in the Middle Ages for the good of their souls, but seldom on this massive scale. In this case, contemporaries viewed Roland's wealth with hatred and his professions of charity and spirituality with cynicism. And it's one of the mysteries of the time that such men seem to combine an austere, rigid piety with excesses of cruelty, of calculating greed, and of, to us, sickening ostentation. King Louis XI himself said of Roland, he made enough people poor to make a pauper's hospital necessary. And the hospital was where the poor came to die. Here in the Middle Ages were two rows of 31 beds where the poor lay two or three to a bed. The 15th century was a time of terrible famine, war, and plague. And in a bad year, thousands of people could die in a place like this. And so, thoughtfully, the chancellor had provided that each of his patients could look from his or her bed to the wall above the high altar where they hung a tremendous vision of the end, the last judgment of Roger van der Weyden. On the day of judgment, the dead rise from the earth to be judged by their savior. Christ sits enthroned in glory above the archangel Michael, who holds the scales which will weigh the vices and virtues of all who are to be judged on the day of reckoning. Saint John the Baptist, Mary, the 12 apostles, and other holy figures intercede on behalf of the sinners. And the lucky few are ushered through a bland Gothic gateway into the kingdom of heaven. This painting was done with bright colors, so it could be seen by the sick even from their deathbeds. Van der Weyden excelled at depicting the inner emotions of his characters. And on Christ's left, we see the damned in a state of frenzy, drawn inexorably towards the flames of hell. There are no demons to drag them down. In the words of a local theologian, the weight of sin upon the conscience is sufficient to make the damned fall into hell as heavy as lead. As the year 1500 approached, many were convinced they were living through the last days of mankind. While the Turks threatened Christendom from the outside, Europe was tormented by political and religious tensions. In the Netherlands, Hieronymus Bosch painted this strange vision of hell, composed of images suggesting the psychological disintegration of the late medieval world and the tensions of his time. Industrial furnaces, armies on the march, artillery bombardments at night. The German printmaker who took the apocalypse as described in the revelation of St. John the Divine and transformed it into his own pictorial territory was Albrecht Dürer, the first major artist to publish his work in the form of a book. Dürer exploited contemporary interest in the revelations of St. John by designing and carving 15 woodcut block prints, which reduced the 22 chapters of St. John's text into an extraordinarily action-packed visual adventure which swept Western Europe. It made him the most famous graphic artist of his day and the series itself was of enduring fame used by artists, sculptors, painters, graphic designers for the next 500 years. Albrecht Dürer was clearly a precocious artist. He was the son of a Nuremberg goldsmith and drew this portrait of himself at the age of 13. He became the first artist in Western art to make a detailed series of self-portraits throughout his life, analysing his changes of mood and image. Dürer studied nature with the same incisive vision with which he analysed himself. He was one of the first artists to go into the open to paint watercolours from direct observation. He wrote, we German artists have grown up like wild trees in the forest, knowing nothing of the rules of proportion and perspective. These watercolours were painted while Dürer was travelling from Nuremberg to Venice. He wished to learn from Italian art and to have his own status as an artist acknowledged in the land of the Renaissance. Venetian paintings from around 1500 show the city that Dürer visited, the wealthiest trading centre in Europe. Giovanni Bellini, who painted this portrait of the Doge of Venice, was described by Dürer as very old but still the best of the Renaissance. The young German was gratified that this Italian master should ask him for one of his works. Bellini and his contemporaries had been influenced by northern art, its realism, its sensitivity to light and landscape and Bellini had become a master of the northern technique of oil painting. In his depiction of Saint Francis, the whole landscape seems to convey the ecstasy of the saint's vision. After Dürer's second Venetian journey, he engraved some of his most intricate, complex plates. In Night, Death and the Devil, the artist takes the equestrian statue he had seen in Italy and rides it into a northern forest. Here is the man of action, the warrior, blind to the perils that surround him, death at his side, the devil and devastation in his wake. Dürer's radiant engraving of Saint Jerome is a hymn to the contemplative life, showing his favorite saint in sacred study. Subtlety of light and the detailed depiction of the interior all recall van Eyck's art. For his figure of brooding melancholy, Dürer may have used a Michelangelo Sybil as his model. Melancholy is the dark side of genius. The discarded tools, a plane and saw, instruments and inkwell all convey the frustrated artist, his creativity blocked. Albrecht Dürer was a northern genius who succeeded in assimilating the lessons of the South. The last and boldest statement of northern religious art can be found in the Isenheim Altarpiece, the work of a German master. This massive altar in three stages is by the artist we know as Matthias Grunewald. In many ways, it is the ultimate painting in Christian art. Never again would a painter feel quite so free to express the mysteries of Christian faith ranging from agony to ecstasy. This altarpiece was painted around 1515 for an Antonite monastery which specialized in the care of skin diseases. The crucifixion is shown with unprecedented impact in horrific immediacy, like a monstrous affliction, the last word in Teutonic torture. Mary swoons in the arms of Saint John the Evangelist as the kneeling Magdalene twists her hands in impotent grief. In the wings, two healing saints, Sebastian and Antony, stand like living statues. Because the panels of this altarpiece had to be separated, we need to look at a model to understand how it unfolded. Mary reads the prophecy of Isaiah, behold, a virgin shall conceive as she is interrupted by the Archangel Gabriel's Annunciation. An angelic orchestra in the Temple of Solomon celebrates this mystical union of heaven and earth by its harmonious celestial music. These happy sounds may also refer to musical therapy practiced in medieval hospitals. Shown as if defined by light alone, this is the most convincing resurrection ever painted. Prophet of the atomic age, Grunewald conveys a sense of weightlessness as Christ rises. For the final opening, painted wings contrast with a sculpted centerpiece. Saint Antony is enthroned in triumph at the center and shown again at the left, meeting Paul the Hermit in his forest retreat. But this scene of Saint Antony's torment and trial in the wilderness, the artist brings back all the irrational, the images of monsters that he saw in medieval art and that of the 15th century. He gives them an amazing quality of reality, a sense of immediacy. Half human, a fearfully diseased demon clutches his prayer book in a bag. An inscription in the corner could apply to him as well as to the patients at the Hospital of Saint Antony. Where are you, good Jesus? Where are you? Why haven't you come to heal my wounds? New classical idealism from Renaissance Italy ended the spontaneous realism and imagination of Grunewald's art. Two new views of Christianity also finished the free inquiry found in his painting. Both Protestantism and Catholicism had their own rigorous ideas of just how religious subjects ought to be shown. And these rather narrow concepts really ended the wild fantasies, the quality of individuality, which is so extraordinarily powerful in the monument that we have just seen. Five years after Grunewald painted the Isenheim altarpiece, Albrecht Durer made the last of his journeys. Not southwards to Italy this time, but westwards to the Netherlands, to Brussels and to Antwerp. And there comes one of those electric moments when the life of art and the current of history come together. For there, Durer was astonished by the beauty of looted Aztec gold, which had been unloaded in ships from Mexico. Wonderful works of art, he called them, the like of which he had never seen in his life. It was also a vision of the future, for the center of gravity of the West was beginning to shift from the Mediterranean to the Western seaboard and to towns like Antwerp and London, which would finance the domination of the West up to the present day. But that lay in the future. In the story of art, the powerhouse was still Italy. And the time of Durer in the north was in the south, the time of Michelangelo. And in Rome, the Renaissance was about to reach its climax.