Northern Renaissance Art (Trade Version)

Customer Reviews:

Art historian must have!.......2007-09-28

Just buy it. You won't be sorry. Great images and lots of informative discussion of imagery.

The Other Half of the Renaissance.......2007-08-25

Books on the Renaissance can be quite confusing to non-specialists. For example, Shakespeare classes in English schools discuss him as a Renaissance writer. Yet art teachers describe his near contemporary, Rubens, as the quintessential Baroque artist!
So exactly what does Northern Renaissance Art cover? Is it an age that can be separated, marked out and surveyed by political or religious activities? And by northern what is meant? Is Switzerland the home of northern art? Can it be made in Italy? And what makes it significant and different from the universally recognized world of Italian Renaissance Art, where the term 'art' is always capitalized?
Well, the truth lies pretty much with all of the above. As Snyder shows, several distinct cultures fall into this very large historical category. If you're buying this book as a student for a class, I can only hope you have more than one semester to give to the material. Northern Renaissance Art covers an enormous time period and many countries. It approaches in diversity the far better known works and ideas of the Italian Renaissance. No one seriously discusses the Italian Renaissance in a single semester - the material is taught in a series of classes. The same limitations and requirements should apply to teaching the Northern Renaissance. Art history today no longer focuses on aesthetic questions of style; as a result a student faces a lifetime's study of a period's culture and history.
However, there are some basics. If one word could define what separates the two worlds of the Italian and Northern Renaissance - that word would have to be naturalism. Northern European artists revel in achievements of realism that far surpass the Italians, who, while perfectly capable of such stylistic work, prefer a more intellectually formalized approach. Indeed, Michelangelo dismissed northern artist's attention to nature and care for photographic details as incidental, and excessively ephemeral, when contrasted to his Italian art which used images for projecting deeper spiritual values. The public, however, was delighted with the landscapes, and their non-abstract openness. Many artists from the north specialized in landscape, and it became a manner so associated with them that it was not uncommon for Italian painters to hire Northern artists to fill in the 'less important' landscape backgrounds of their larger canvases.
The Italian Renaissance differed also in that it was singularly connected to the revival and reappreciation of ancient 'pagan' works of art. These antiquities provided a challenge, as well as a reawakening, for the artists and thinkers of Italy. In the north artists did not have at hand magnificent works of ancient architecture or sculpture: as a result intellectual challenges were quite different; though initially tied to the Italian thinking, the northern artists more and more shifted focus onto their own immediate world. As the fifteenth century closed they became attuned to newer discoveries from the exploration of new (not ancient)worlds by sea, and the individuals emancipation brought about through the beginnings of Protestant thought. For moderns this means that the Northern Renaissance often appears closer to us and our own post photographic record of the world. The artist's sense of intimacy with nature seems little different than what most of us know as landscape art. Their religious works also convey a striking ease with space less contrived than our eyes find the representation of space in most Italian painting of the same era. All made the more attractive for being so accessible. Some of this difference marks profound religious and philosophical differences - northern art has about it some of the fervor of emancipation - there is here a reflection of the Armana naturalism revolting against the old art of a more dogmatic less individualistic Egypt. Eventually Italian artists would adapt to this new naturalism, especially in the north of Italy in Venice, in the works of Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian.
This book introduces the reader to the early Flemish master painters, such as Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the later great German artists, such as Durer and Holbein and Grunewald, and the strange inner universe of Bosch. Topping off the age are the works of one of the grandest of all humanists, Pieter Bruegel the elder. And these are just some of the great painters! There remains a wealth of sculpture and architecture, drawing and craft work. Moreover, the Northern Renaissance is also an artistic universe filled with fresh new theories and a milieu profoundly effected by the great religious upheaval of the Reformation.
Snyder gives as good an overview of so much material as one could hope for - his work replete with an enormous number of images, many of which have for nearly half a millenium been accepted as iconic. The text treats the material with a practised consideration, born of many years study. However; the impetus of the book is to direct the reader further afield, and this is indisputably the author's greatest achievement and the point of such a survey work. The real jewels for readers will be enlarging these discoveries by travel and on site awareness, these efforts made more satisfying through study of specific texts directed at the new artists whose work transforms your view of what the Renaissance was.

The Northern Renaissance.......2006-02-26

I am using this book as a text in school and I am quite impressed. I bought this book (hardcover) for half the price of the paper back version sold at my school. The text in interesting, not dry. The images are good reproductions. The only thing that I don't admire about the book is that some of the images are printed in black and white.

The Northern Renaissance.......2006-02-26

A Truly Superb Book.......2006-02-01

The book truly is superb in both commentary and the reproductions of the paintings accompanying the text. It is stunningly beautiful and truly captures the feeling and depth of the Renaissance in northern Europe.

The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context

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Must have for art historians!
PERFECT!
Good introduction
An exciting survey
Art of the Northern Renaissance in historical context

The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context
Craig Harbison
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0131833227

Customer Reviews:

Must have for art historians!.......2007-09-28

Art historian and art history student must hav. The book contains fabulous images and amazing insight into the period in which the images were created.

PERFECT! .......2007-03-09

THIS BOOK ARRIVED WITH PERFECT TIMING AND CONDITION!
I WAS VERY PLEASED!

Good introduction.......2006-11-04

Overall, this is a good introduction to Northern Renaissance art and the cultural mindset that produced it.

Like many works of revisionist history, this book is a bit heavy-handed at times in its effort to prove that Northern art is as worthy of study as Italian Renaissance art. But overall, the contrast between the two different artistic traditions is effective.

An exciting survey.......2001-07-18

I've loved the art of this period for years, but had little academic grounding in it. This book lets me return to old favorites with new eyes.

This, in common with other volumes in the "Perspectives" series, offers high quality (though small) reproductions of important works, up-to-date analysis and discussion of the art and the contexts in which it was created. Harbison's tone is informative, if ocasionally a little too sententious. But it's a very small price to pay, given the overall excellence of his work in this volume. It's obvious that Harbison loves this period, and he transmits his excitement for these works to the reader in concise language that is accessible to a lay audience.

Of particular interest is the discussion of how the Northern Rennaisance related to and differed from what was going on in Italy at the time. The only major weakness: not enough of a focus on Durer. But it's hard to get sufficient focus on any artist in a book this condensed.

An excellent book for those familiar with the period, or those wanting to get acquainted with a school of art often unjustly overshadowed by its southern contemporary.

Art of the Northern Renaissance in historical context.......2001-01-31

Informative, smart and well-written, Craig Harbison's "The Mirror of the Artist" provides an excellent, brief introduction to the sensibility, historical context, and practice of art in the North. From the attitude toward realism, to patronage among the growing class of government bureaucrats, to the market for art or the influence of the Reformation, the book offers an enhanced understanding of artistic interest and social situations in which the paintings were made -- without ever forgetting their aesthetic dimension. The best tribute I can offer is that I immediately went back to Amazon to order Harbison's "Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism", a $35 large format paperback. Minor quibble: Although well-illustrated for a paperback this size, with the book just about 6.25" x 9.5", more details should have been illustrated when details were discussed in larger works. (I'm still looking for the barely visible figure of the devil above the cow in the "Portinari Altarpiece".) But this is a rare problem.

Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0754605892

The Northern Renaissance A&I (Art and Ideas)

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The Northern Renaissance A&I (Art and Ideas)
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Manufacturer: Phaidon Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0714838675

Book Description

An exploration of a highly innovative and exciting period of art following the careers of artists such as Van Eyck, D++rer and Holbein. Jeffrey Chipps Smith analyses the context of the time, such as the Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the Americas. He offers the reader an insight into domestic, civic and court life illustrated by some of the most exquisite artworks ever created.

Women, Art, And Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520ÃÂ1580: Negotiating Power (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

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Women, Art, And Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520ÃÂ1580: Negotiating Power (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
Katherine A. McIver
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0754654117

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a Baroque pearl
Laborious read!
Traditional painters and Van Eyck fans will love this book!

The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting
Anita Albus
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Northern Renaissance A&I (Art and Ideas)

ASIN: 0520229649

Amazon.com

The lovingly crafted little tome The Art of Arts might become a cult classic if there are enough Jan van Eyck fans out there--or enough readers who can chew their way through 775 footnotes--to make this work of special genius even an underground bestseller. It is filled with delectable details (for example, that an image of a mill in a landscape connotes a wanton woman, complete with a page of explanations why) and myriad perspicacious observations. In discussing such masterworks as van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, author Anita Albus draws the reader into a vanished world of alternative perspectives, painterly depths of color and atmosphere, and the mesmerizing minutiae of late-medieval and Renaissance symbolism. The last chapter of the book, "Of Lost Colors," combines metallurgy, history, meticulous scholarship, and the author's passionate comprehension of colors in a discussion of antique pigments and their physical properties and pictorial uses.

The book's mostly paragraph-long sentences may put off some readers, and the warm, wry, even sly prose--its liveliness, in other words--may raise the hackles of the dowdy art-historical crowd (not the stylish, open-minded one). But this miniaturist's view of the northern Renaissance will copiously reward those who peruse it slowly, especially artists. Although it is possible to become lost in some chapters, as Albus tiptoes unhurriedly toward some arcane, elusive point, in the end it's hard to resist the sort of book that declares of the late 17th century: "Research into arthropods was in the air." This volume is a work of art, complete in itself, meticulously ordered according to the artist's unique vision, and handsomely "framed" by a sensitive designer. --Peggy Moorman

Book Description

In this utterly original book, Anita Albus tells the story--in the birth and triumph of oil painting, the creation of perspective, and the very nature of paint itself--of how, when, and why the eye became king of all the senses.
Albus's subjects are the inventors of easel painting in oils, the van Eyck brothers and their followers. It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern Europe that oil painting radically changed the way we perceived the world: the ear, through which we had previously received all knowledge, was replaced in importance by the eye. A painter of distinction herself, Albus re-creates this revolutionary time in all its intricacies, its familiarity, and its strangeness.
The Art of Arts is thus both a dazzling cultural history and the story of two explosive inventions: the so-called third dimension of deep space through perspective, and the shockingly vivid colors of a new kind of paint. Albus makes abundantly clear how, taken together, these breakthroughs not only created a new art but altered forever our perception of the world.

Customer Reviews:

a Baroque pearl.......2005-02-17

Reed: No question, this is an interesting book for us Eyckians and lovers/conservators of old pigments. But for us non-academics/editorialists, it's tough love. It is laborious because of the over-ornamentation with trivia, digressions, and references that physically intrude on, and insinuate the text. It's hard to tell someone far more-educated than I to take a writing course, but there it is. Maybe the exhaustive Teutonic method, exhausting nonetheless.
The real value for me, ever-trying to portray the ethereal in this dysfunctional digital/photographic world, is the nearly-unique collection of clues and views about how and why the [Flemish Primitives] were able to put us in undiminishing communion with their subjects, to help us backtrack and do the same for ours. As the gangrenous/social/spiritual/artistic wounds of the last century slowly heal, works like Albus's can help artists and artlovers mirror, maybe catalyze, another age of deep empathy for others. So buy this book, put on your best red turban, nibble some Flemish chocolate, and start with your self-portrait, taking the Niederlanders' enormous care to appreciate the beauty of the image, and thus the person, in front of us. This time with just the hint of a smile as the warmth of dawn flows into the studio...

Laborious read!.......2004-10-26

This is a book that is required reading for my Renaissance art history class. As such, I approached the book with enthusiasm after initially thumbing through the pages. Visually, it is beautiful. There are many full page color illustrations and interesting typeface. However, I was soon disappointed by her disjointed writing style and over 700 footnotes. I labored through this one, only to find out in the end that she finds contemporary art soul-less and lacking. Her conclusion is disappointing!

Traditional painters and Van Eyck fans will love this book!.......2001-09-12

I have recommended this book to several people and now it is available in paperback! It contains many nuggests of information a traditional oil painter will treasure. For example, the lapis lazuli-based pigment used by Van Eyck in his paintings contained tiny flecks of stone which added richness and sparkle to the paint. It was also irregularly ground and refracts light differently than the modern homogeneous synthetic "ultramarine blue" pigment available today. It was precious in Van Eyck's time, but today lapis lazuli ultramarine is more costly than gold per ounce. Albus devotes much of the book to historical pigments and shares recipes for making them.
My complaint with the book is that it is a strangely-shaped volume (it is extremely narrow and tall) and is uncomfortable to hold. Still, the early chapters on Van Eyck's paintings and the historical pigments will entice painters interested in effects not possible with modern pigments.

Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance

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Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance
Margaret A. Sullivan
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521441501

Book Description

Bruegel’s Peasants examines the nature of the Northern Renaissance and the criteria used to recognise its humanistic themes. By identifying an audience with professional and personal ties to Bruegel, and analysing the critical reception of several of his most important paintings, Margaret A. Sullivan counters the view of Bruegel’s peasant subjects as a parochial, anti-humanistic phenomenon. The artist’s Northern audience, she argues, ‘saw’ the paintings within a framework that was largely conditioned by a knowledge of the ancients conveyed principally through literature and rhetorical texts. These provided models for the heroic aspects of classicism, as well as its less than idealizing underside – the ungainly and grotesque imagery of everyday life, and ancient genres such as satire in which the didactic and the amusing coexist. As ‘earnest jests’, Bruegel’s depictions of peasants present philosophical problems humorously. They reflect, moreover, the interest and concerns of humanists in the Low Countries in the middle of the sixteenth century, successfully meeting the high expectations of an audience that applied the rigorous standards of the ancients to the art of their own time.

Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Durer, Bellini, and Titian

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Renaissance Crosscurrents

Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Durer, Bellini, and Titian
Bernard Aikema , and Beverly Louise Brown
Manufacturer: Rizzoli
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews:

Renaissance Crosscurrents.......2000-05-27

When I was a kid, getting art books from the public library, there were dozens of books about the Italian Renaissance and only one about the Renaissance in the north. Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, all of them were crammed together in one book and called by the derogatory-sounding name of "Flemish Primitives".

Happily, new books in recent years have begun to give the northern painters their due. Books by Dirk de Vos, Otto Pacht, and a recent catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ("Van Eyck to Bruegel"), among others, have given us the chance to see splendid reproductions of some of the most enchanting, jewel-like paintings in the world. Recent books on Gerard David and Petrus Christus, also from the Metropolitan, have even turned the spotlight on these less well-known painters who can easily come to win a place in your list of favorites.

Still, though, there was a strong sense that North was North and South was South and never the twain would meet. That idea has been eroding under recent scholarship, however, as researchers have begun to make clear the influences and crosscurrents that occurred between Italy and the north countries of Europe. More than some of us might have guessed, there was a lot of exchange going on. Painters from Durer to Bruegel travelled to Italy to learn what they could of the traditions there, and painters as thoroughly Italian as Raphael and Botticelli took ideas from what they knew of the north.

These exchanges have now been very thoroughly spelled out in a new book from Rizzoli that accompanied a recent exhibition in Venice. It is a huge thick block of a book, with 210 color plates and hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of black and white reproductions of drawings, prints, etc., -- anything that sheds light on how artistic ideas travelled up and down over the Alps. The print is small, and comes four columns to a page in some spots, with copious footnotes. In other words, it seems as if the editors of this book have taken on the ambitious task of filling in a fascinating blank in the history of art by pouring everything they know into one gigantic book. If either the Italian or the Northern Renaissance, or how the two rubbed together, is of interest to you, this book will fascinate you with details, comparisons, and unexpected connections.

It's sad to say that sometimes the reproductions are not what they could be. Many are much darker than the original paintings. This is the first time I have seen a reproduction of Giovanni Bellini's Pieta since it was cleaned, and it is looking very good indeed, but the photo of the Van der Weyden Lamentation on the preceding page is badly out of focus. If you are looking for gorgeous lusciousness in an art book, this would not be the one for you. For sheer quantity and historical interest, though, this is a prize.

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Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, & Woodcuts
Susan Dackerman
Manufacturer: Pennsylvania State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Renaissance Print: 1470-1550

Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public

ASIN: 0271022353

Book Description

An old master print with color is almost invariably regarded as a suspect object because the color is presumed to be a cosmetic addition made to compensate for deficiencies of design or condition. Painted Prints challenges this deeply entrenched assumption about the material and aesthetic structure of old master prints by showing that in many cases hand coloring is not a dubious supplement to a print but is instead an integral element augmenting its expressive power, beauty, and meaning.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Baltimore Museum of Art and St. Louis Art Museum, Painted Prints reproduces and discusses a rich variety of hand-colored prints from Northern Europe of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Anonymous woodcuts are juxtaposed with masterworks by such famed artists as Dürer, Holbein, and Goltzius. These prints, secular as well as religious, muted as well as vibrant in tonality, make it clear that hand coloring was a widespread, enduring practice, developed to satisfy the demands of both elite and popular audiences.

Painted Prints presents new research into the men and women who specialized in hand coloring and offers numerous insights into the social and economic organization of Renaissance and Baroque printmaking. It also draws on scientific analyses of the materials and techniques of hand coloring to address important questions of authenticity, chronology, and condition. With a catalogue and color illustrations of all the hand-colored prints in the exhibition, this book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of old master prints and their pivotal place in the visual culture of early modern Europe.

The exhibition, "Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts," will be at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 6, 2002, to January 5, 2003 and St. Louis Art Museum from February 14 to May 18, 2003.

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Renaissance and Mannerism in Northern Europe and Spain (History of Art Series)
Alastair Smart
Manufacturer: Harcourt College Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0155765965

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