Art in the North

Question 1

Answer 1

Albrecht Dürer

• Became most prolific, inventive, and successful graphic artist of all time
• “the more exact and like a man a picture is, the better the work…Others are of another opinion and speak of how man should be…but in such things I consider nature the master and human imaginings errors”

Death of Orpheus, 1494

Orpheus has the blemishes of a real man, not a god

Question 2

Answer 2

Lucas Cranach

-Rest on the Flight to Egypt, 1504

Joseph and Mary rest in the pine woods, and the grasses and rocks are pictures with a vibrant reality that suggests a loving familiarity with the outdoors

-only later when he was employed by Saxon court and began painting nudes did he adopt an elegantly artificial style

Question 3

Answer 3

Albrecht Altdorfer

• almost singlehandedly formed a school of landscape painting long before it was ever considered a significant subject for an artist
• many of his works had a very diminished human presence and instead the great majesty of the trees and sky stood forth undisturbed
• abandoned figures and Biblical storytelling and painted nature for its own sake
• View of the Danube Valley near Regensburg, 1520-25

Soaring quality of trees against delicately painted skies

One of the first true landscapes in the history of art

Question 4

Art in the Netherlands

Answer 4

• art was the province of the people
• Protestantism was strong in the Netherlands and there was a conviction that religious forms were idolatrous

Question 5

Answer 5

Pieter Aertsen

-Still Life, 1552

Religious scene serves as a background and is completely subordinate to the still life of the foreground (a leg of mutton and fresh loaves of bread)

After Protestant zealots destroyed many of his altarpieces, Aertsen dropped any suggestion of religion from his artworks, thus becoming one of the first still-life painters in European art

Question 6

Answer 6

Pieter Brugel

• worked in Antworp, Europe’s commercial center
• painted the lumpish peasants and rough pleasures of country life
• philosophical overtones

landscapes captured a sense of man’s being inexorably linked to nature; genre paintings showed a compassion and humanity

integrated Italian ideas of harmonious composition and depth