ARTH 2000 - Renaissance Art in Northern Europe

This course examines Northern Renaissance art, with a focus on the visual traditions and material culture of Flanders and the Netherlands (`Low Countries’), Germany, Switzerland, and France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The invention of the printing press, impact of the Protestant Reformation, and encounters with the Italian Renaissance art and artists, patrons, and humanists provides an artistic, social, political, and economic framework for interpreting and contextualising the vivid material culture of the Northern Renaissance in reference to innovations in production methods, patronage and collecting activities, and development of novel sacred and secular themes and genres.