The Northern Renaissance: a new survey of north European art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is admirably ambitious in scope, but ducks some fundamental issues

Apollo, Jan, 2005 by Douglas Brine

PHAIDON

The Northern Renaissance Jeffrey Chipps Smith Phaidon, 14.95 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 0 7148 3867 5

Jeffrey Chipps Smith's The Northern Renaissance is the latest addition to Phaidon's keenly priced Art & Ideas range. The series plan inside the book's cover reveals that in due course it will be joined by two other volumes dealing with same period. Given that these companion texts, The Early Renaissance and The High Renaissance, presumably will be devoted to Italian art, it is a brave author who accepts the challenge of summarising more than two centuries of art produced north of the Alps in one modest volume. Nevertheless Smith rises to this unenviable task with alacrity. Whilst his fellow authors will be able to devote themselves to the output of one small peninsula in the Mediterranean, Smith has to take in a vast geographical span: his book concentrates principally on the Low Countries and Germany, with forays into France and England and the occasional glance to places further afield, such as Sweden and Bohemia. The chronological scope is similarly huge, from the closing decades of the fourteenth century to the latter part of the sixteenth century.

The book is organised thematically but within a broad chronological framework. Thus early chapters, such as 'Court Art and the Ars Nova', deal with late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century works by the likes of Claus Sluter, the Limbourg brothers and Jan van Eyck, whilst later chapters, such as 'Prints and Printmaking' and 'The Reformation's Challenge', focus on mostly sixteenth-century material. These period-specific chapters are interspersed with more general discussions on themes such as 'The Art of Dying Well' and 'Private Devotional Art', which include works from a wider chronological span as well as reflecting recent scholarship in the field.

This structure serves as a fairly effective means of dealing with such a vast range of divergent material, although the priority given to individual artists or works of art within a theme tends to overshadow the enduring importance of urban centres, such as Bruges or Nuremberg. The success of individual chapters varies somewhat. Although the 'Art, Artists and the Marketplace' chapter seems a rather inadequate account of the complexities of techniques and workshop practices, the sections on the Reformation and civic art provide illuminating, succinct analyses of the issues involved.

Smith manages to incorporate an astonishing amount of material into his text. Virtually all the key artists and works of the period feature at one point or another, together with less familiar objects, such as Bernt Notke's remarkable St George and the Dragon sculpture in Stockholm. Nor is the selection limited to sculpture, painting and the graphic arts: discussions of goldsmith work, tapestry and stained glass also feature. Particularly welcome is the inclusion of architecture, so often ignored in discussions of art from this area. Perhaps inevitably, the sheer quantity of material leaves one gasping for breath at times--Smith gallops from one work to the next, allowing each only the briefest of examination. Thus, whilst unsurprisingly Van Eyck and Albrecht Durer feature recurrently, other key practitioners, such as Rogier van der Weyden (arguably the most influential artist of the fifteenth century, north or south of the Alps), receive insufficient emphasis.

One suspects that the decision to entitle Smith's book The Northern Renaissance may have been made by the publisher rather than the author. In his introduction Smith states his belief that there was 'a distinctively northern European Renaissance, but one in which curiosity about the individual and the natural world was valued more than a renewed dialogue with antiquity'. However, the rest of the book presents only a rather half-hearted defence of the use of the term, which, in view of the diversity of material described, fails to convince. Although one can agree that Francois I's enterprises at Fontainebleau or Durer's extraordinary oeuvre can be described as 'renaissance', it is difficult to conceive of Antwerp Cathedral or the Goldene Rossl as belonging to the same category.

This problem is compounded by the book's principal weakness: its reluctance to tackle the relationship between Italy and the north. Although Smith does address the dramatic acceleration of interest in Italy around 1500 he fails to balance it with an account of the phenomenal popularity of Netherlandish art throughout Europe during the preceding century. Moreover, the problems with which the student of northern art is faced are never really considered. Smith takes insufficient account of the appalling effects that destruction--from iconoclasm, warfare or changing tastes--has had on the appreciation of northern art. He also fails to do enough to counteract the Italo-centric prejudices that affect understanding of north European art. One would have thought that any examination of northern art necessitates a consideration of Vasarian art history and the false distinctions it continues to draw between intellectual and idealising Italian art and that of mindless northerners, capable only of slavish imitation.