How Italian was the Renaissance?

The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherland- ish Painting 1430-1530. Edited by Till-Holder Borchert (Bruges, Ludion, 2002) 280pp. 35 cloth 25 paper

It has been a standard assumption of Renaissance scholarship for more than a century that the dramatic cultural changes that swept through Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began in Mediterranean lands and migrated northward. In education, scholarship, and philosophy, the pioneers were Petrarch and the Italian humanists and neoplatonists. In the visual arts, the engine of change was set in motion in Tuscany under the inspiration of antiquity.

When the Dutch scholar Huizinga issued a famous challenge to this view in 1924, arguing that the fifteenth century was a time of decline as well as revival, the ironic effect was to underscore the importance of the South as the source of innovation.¹ According to Huizinga, in the Netherlands and France, as opposed to Italy, the prevailing concerns had little to do with the hopes and ambitions that historians associated with the Renaissance. Death, hierarchy, fascination with detail, and a morbid religious sensibility were the major features. It was misleading, he felt, to focus solely on the quest for new standards of morality and beauty that preoccupied the Italians. To do so was to misrepresent the age, which was no less embodied in northern chivalric traditions than in southern efforts to rethink values and aesthetics. To the extent that his critique struck home, however, it merely reemphasized the leadership of the Mediterranean lands in the cultural change that eventually, unmistakably, engulfed all of Europe.

Symptomatic of this approach, at least in the history of painting, was the remarkable exhibition mounted at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1999, Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian. The catalog, issued under that title and edited by Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, paid tribute to the admiration aroused by some of the northerners (notably Albrecht Dürer) who visited the Queen of the Adriatic, and identified a number of specific debts that were owed to the example of such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. In the end, however, there was no doubt about the principal direction in which the major influences flowed. Moreover, the time in question was not the early budding of the Renaissance, but its full flowering from the late fifteenth through the mid-sixteenth centuries. In other words, not only in origin but also throughout its development, Renaissance culture expanded primarily from South to North.

Because the most vivid evidence documenting and sustaining this argument has long come from the visual arts, it is particularly telling that the first major attempt to temper its conclusions is, once again, an exhibition. Mounted in Bruges in 2002, The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting 1430-1530 neatly reverses the priorities of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition that preceded it by three years. As the catalog, edited by Till-Holger Borchert, makes clear, the innovations that arose independently in the North, and the influence they had, force a rethinking of the notion of a one-way street that has so long prevailed in the field. That the case is made in this fashion, through painting, not only underscores the importance of interdisciplinary research, but also throws into relief the limitations of attempts to understand an age through its written texts alone. The pioneers who gave us our picture of Renaissance Europe—such as Burckhardt, not to mention Huizinga—did so by drawing on a cornucopia of visual as well as written sources. Those who followed have been most successful when, as in the case of John Hale, they have drawn on an equally extensive armory.² It is a lesson that other fields of research might well wish to ponder.

Not until the last essay in the catalog does the editor himself, together with Paul...