Tuesday Lectures
THE ARTS OF NORTHERN EUROPE 1300-1600
We are used to thinking of the Renaissance as something defined by the Italian experience: above all its stream of great painters, sculptors and architects. We look at the North and, leaving aside such household names as Breughel, Dürer and Holbein, what we look for are the signs of growing Italian/classical influence: the tondos on the entrance of Hampton Court, the great staircase at Blois, the Mauritshuis in the Hague.
But Northern Europe was, of course, far more than a backwater waiting for the illumination of Italy. It had strong, marvellous traditions of its own in all the arts. Part of the reason for the superficiality of the initial applications of the Italian Renaissance in architecture or painting is precisely because it was a confrontation that needed not adoption but assimilation into a strong, vibrant culture. In the great works of Dürer we see not a German become a decent Italian painter, but a forger of a magnificent new style.
In the other arts the relationship is even more complex. In music, for example, France, then England and above all the Netherlands, provided the basis for European composition and practice. In the drama, there is nothing more Renaissance in artistry or spirit than Shakespeare; while the whole enterprise of the Renaissance as a broad influence was only possible because of the Northern invention of printing.
Finally, just as ‘Renaissance’ was something that both North and South developed, so too ‘Reformation’ was a central concern across Europe.
The word is usually applied to the North (as Counter-Reformation is to the South), but both are part of the same enterprise. What we shall see is that the spirit that forged a particular kind of Reform in the North grew out of both a religious impulse and a humanistic vision as profound as anything that existed in Florence. ‘Reformation’ was more than a theological movement: like ‘Renaissance’ it was a redefinition of the human spirit and understanding of the world.
This course is a journey into the arts, history and politics of an era we all know well - it is the beginning of modern Europe - but often from indirect national or artistic points of view. It does so in a way that uncovers and makes sense of a wide range of artists, musicians, writers, thinkers and scientists who did not sit on the side-lines of European cultural history - but forged their own.
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