1
FA 47b Renaissance Art in Northern Europe
Mandel Center G-12
Block E M,W,Th 12:00 PM–12:50
Professor Jonathan Unglaub
Office: 211 Mandel Center for the Humanities x6-2665 unglaub@brandeis.edu
Office hours: Tuesdays 3:00-5:00pm and by appointment
Overview:
This course offers an introduction to the art produced in Northern Europe, principally the Low Countries
and Germany, during the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods, approximately 1400-1600. We will
focus on painting, and, to some extent, on graphic arts and sculpture. While the era was fundamentally
religious and mystical in outlook, this interior vision came to be expressed through an unprecedented
realism and specificity of detail in painting, in part due to mastering the oil medium. This almost magical
power to imitate surfaces and textures invested the artist with an ever-higher status in society. A new
consciousness of individual style and artistic identity emerged, as different masters channeled their
ingenuity into dazzling illusionistic effects, poignant expressions of emotions, or untrammeled flights of
fantasy. And some artists, realizing that their handiwork was the mirror of nature, came to identify
themselves with the ultimate Creator. Their works, like the world around them, were the concrete
manifestation of an intellect, of a spiritual power. The artist was the means through which the spiritual
became the physical, the abstract and eternal the here and now. Art was Incarnation.
During the second century, the Protestant Reformation brought into question the very validity of
images, at least as instruments of religious veneration, which had hitherto been their primary public and
private function. Did believing with the eyes deceive, or corrupt, believing with the heart, mind, and
soul? The Reformers privileged the absolute sanctity of the scripture, as divine revelation, over the
Catholic Eucharist, and its doctrine of Christ’s bodily presence in physical ritual. Consequently, they
mistrusted, and even proscribed, images as idols. At the same time, the revolution of printing, the very
technical means that allowed the Reformers to proselytize Europe with unprecedented speed and efficacy,
also generated a new visual medium of persuasion. Prints -- woodcuts and engravings -- had the
reproducibility and portability of text. No longer were images solely physical surrogates for divine or
human presence, but vehicles of ideas and learning to be disseminated and contested. With the stifling of
large-scale religious works under the weight of Reform, painting itself became increasingly secular and
private in orientation -- objects of individual interest and taste, rather than public adoration. By the end of
our period, in the midst of religious upheaval, many masters came to specialize in portraiture, landscape,
and scenes from everyday life, void of the sacred, but often inflected with a moral message.
The course has three chronological and geographical points of focus: Flanders under the Dukes of
Burgundy in the fifteenth century; Germany before and during the Protestant Reformation beginning
around 1520; and the Netherlands under the Spanish Hapsburgs in the later sixteenth century, when
Catholic rule and Protestant resolve collided. The major artists to be discussed include Robert Campin,
Jan Van Eyck, Rogier Van Der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hugo Van der Goes, Hieronymous Bosch,
Albrecht Dürer, Mätthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein, Albrecht Altdörfer, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The class is a slide lecture. I will often prompt discussion, and will happily respond to questions
during my presentations. The readings will also generate discussion. They include primary source
material, contemporary criticism, and scholarly essays, providing essential cultural and historical
background, and more probing analysis of the artworks covered in class.
Four-Credit Course (with three hours of class-time per week)
Success in this 4 credit hour course is based on the expectation that students will spend a minimum of
9 hours of study time per week on average in preparation for class (readings, papers, discussion
sections, preparation for exams, etc.).
Required Text:
2
James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, second edition, revised by Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2005) ISBN: 0-13-189564-8.
Additional Readings on LATTE:
Additional, more in depth, readings are assigned for each week, are posted on LATTE under the readings
module, listed in the order they appear on the syllabus. These should be read carefully, and reflectively,
since they have been selected to stimulate class discussion.
Study Guides and LATTE site:
Study guides will be distributed concurrent with the presentation of material in class. These will list the
images, names, and terms you are required to know for the exams and be posted on the course LATTE
site, along with paper assignments and the syllabus. A catch-up day has been built in if we get behind.
Images and ARTSTOR:
Images correlated to the Study guides will be posted under a separate module on LATTE. These files will
be ARTSTOR “off-line image viewer” (OIV) presentations. To open and view these files you will have
to download the free OIV software. Instructions are posted on LATTE.
Requirements:
There will be a midterm quiz and final exams on the dates indicated in the schedule. Their format will
include slide identifications with short-answer questions, and longer essays based on slide comparisons.
In the first half of the semester, there will a readings report (5-6 pages) that evaluates several articles
offering different interpretations of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. There will also be a questionnaire
on the visual analysis of one of the greatest paintings of this period, Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Saint Luke
Painting the Virgin, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, that also responds to scholarship on the
painting. You will need to visit the Museum on your own to complete the questionnaire.
In the second part of the semester, the class will visit the study center of the Harvard Art Museums to
examine works on paper by Dürer and his contemporaries, which will form the basis of the research paper
(tentative date either Friday March 18th or March 25th at 2:45 pm -- via 2:00pm Brandeis shuttle).
Students will choose to write on one of several thematic groups of prints and drawings that will be made
available there. Additional research material will be placed on reserve. 7-8 pages. I plan to coordinate
this class visit with a viewing of the special exhibition at Harvard: “Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a
Renaissance Master in Print”. There may also be an optional trip to look at Northern Renaissance
paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts on a Thursday evening.
Grade distribution:
Van Eyck Reading Report
20% Monday, February 1st
Van Der Weyden questionnaire
10% Thursday, February 11th
Midterm Quiz
20% Monday, February 29th
Graphic Arts Museum Paper
25% Thursday, April 21st
Final Exam
25% Wednesday, May 11th, 9:15-12:15
Attendance
(After 2 unexcused absences, 2 points will be deducted from one’s overall
average for each additional absence, religious holidays excepted)
If you are a student who needs academic accommodations because of a documented disability you should
contact me, and present your letter of accommodation as soon as possible. If you have questions about
documenting a disability or requesting academic accommodations you should contact Assistant Beth Rodgers
Kay in Undergraduate Affairs at 6-3470. Letters of accommodations should be presented at the start of the
semester to ensure provision of accommodations. Accommodations cannot be granted retroactively.
3
Learning Goals:
 Visual literacy: be able to analyze works of art based on their formal elements such as space, line,
color, light/ dark, and composition.
 Visual rhetoric: understand how works of art were conceived and designed to tell stories and
convey messages, through expression, dramatic action, allegory, and/or symbolism.
 Understand the historical progression of painting during the period; and the conventions and
innovations that mark different genres such as devotional imagery, historical narrative, portraiture
and landscape.
 Understand the social, religious, and political contexts that give rise to major works of art in the
Netherlands and Germany between 1400 and 1600.
 Be able to write compellingly about works of art, analyzing their formal and rhetorical properties.
 Be able to draw insightfully on the scholarship of the period in short essays and in a research
paper.
4
Schedule of Weekly Topics and Readings:
The background readings from Snyder should be done at the beginning of the week. The additional
LATTE readings will be addressed in the order they are listed. I will announce if readings are to be
completed for a particular class meeting. Topics might not align precisely to weeks as listed, but we will
proceed in order unless otherwise announced.
Week of January 11th (W, Th)
Introduction
House of Burgundy and Later Manuscript illumination
Snyder, 17-23, 30-44.
Week of January 18th (M no class MLK, W, Th)
Later Medieval Sculpture and Claus Sluter
Snyder, 44-54.
God is in the Details? Domestic Realism and Sacred Significance in Robert Campin
Snyder, 111-117.
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (New York, 1971), Chapter V, “Reality and Symbol,” 140148.
Meyer Schapiro, “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ The Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 27
(1945), 182-187.
Week of January 25th (M, W, Th)
Public Splendor and Private Confessions: The Altarpieces of Jan Van Eyck
Snyder, 87-103, 106-109.
Bartolomeo Fazio and Giorgio Vasari on Van Eyck, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art
1400-1600: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 3-8.
Susie Nash, “Materials, Methods and Technical Virtuosity,” in Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford, 2008),
197-209.
Otto Pächt, Van Eyck (London, 1994), Chapter IV, “The Ghent Altarpiece,” 119-170.
Craig Harbison, Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism (London, 1991), Chapter 11, “The Confession of
Chancellor Nicolas Rolin,” 100-118.
Week of February 1st (M, W, Th)
Van Eyck and Eye-Witness Portraiture
Snyder, 95, 103-106.
Due in class Monday, February 1st: Reading Report on Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait
Panofsky, Erwin, “Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait,” The Burlington Magazine 64 (1934): 117-119,
122-127.
Seidel, Linda, “Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Business as Usual?” Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 55-86.
Margaret Carroll, “The Merchant’s Mirror: Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” in Painting and Politics in
Northern Europe (University Park: Penn State Press, 2010), 2-27, 185-96.
Margaret Koester, “The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Simple Solution?” Apollo 158 (2003): 3-14.
Week of February 8th (M, W, Th)
Piety, Passion, and Profession: The Art of Rogier Van Der Weyden
Snyder, 118-133.
Otto G. von Simpson, “Compassio and Co-redemptio in Roger van der Weyden's Descent from the
Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35 (1953), 9-16.
Alfred Acres, “Luke, Rolin, and Seeing Relationships,” in Rogier van der Weyden, 'St. Luke Drawing the
Virgin and Child': Selected Essays in Context , ed. C. Purtle (Turnhout, 1997), 23-37.
Paul Van Calster, “Of Beardless Painters and Red Chaperons: A Fifteenth-Century Whodunit,”
5
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 66 (2003): 465-492.
Due in class Thursday February 11th, Questionnaire on Van Der Weyden’s Saint Luke Painting the
Virgin in the MFA.
6
Week of February 15th Winter Break
Week of February 22nd (M, W, Th)
Judgment, Adoration, and the Italian taste for Flemish Art: Christus, Bouts, Van der Goes,
Memling
Snyder, 132-54, 163-170, 196-202
Gaspar Ofhuys on Hugo Van der Goes, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art
1400-1600: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 15-18.
Julia I. Miller, “Miraculous Childbirth and the Portinari Altarpiece,” The Art Bulletin 77(1995), 249-261.
Barbara G. Lane, “The Patron and the Pirate: The Mystery of Memling's Gdansk Last Judgment,” The Art
Bulletin 73 (1991), 623-640.
Week of February 29th (M, W, Th)
Monday, February 29th in class midterm Quiz
Earthly Delights and Infernal Temptation: Hieronymous Bosch
Snyder, 394-409.
Carel Van Mander and José de Sigüenza on Bosch, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art
1400-1600: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 19-24.
Joseph Leo Koerner, “Bosch's Emnity,” in Tributes in honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Painting and
Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. by Jeffrey F.
Hamburger and Anne S. Korteweg (London: Miller, 2006), 285-300.
Laurinda Dixon, Bosch (London, 2003), Chapter 8, “Science and Salvation: The Garden of Earthly
Delights Triptych,” 227-278.
Week of March 7th (M, W, Th)
Disease and Redemption: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece
Snyder, 289-295.
Andrée Hayum “The Meaning and Function of the Isenheim Altarpiece: The Hospital Context Revisited,”
The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 501-517.
Dürer and the Revolution in Graphic Arts
Snyder, 250-65, 303-317, 322-30.
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Mass Communication: Prints and Print Making,” in Northern Renaissance Art
(London: Phaidon, 2004), 240-272.
Dürer, Four Books on Human Proportions, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 115-121.
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1971), 44-65, 84-87, 151-171.
Week of March 14th (M, W, Th)
Art and the Reformation in Germany: Dürer, Cranach, Holbein
Snyder, 317-21, 330-3, 337-351, 375-381.
Dürer, “Letters”; Erasmus on Dürer, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 94-108, 122-3.
Eugene F. Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe 1460-1559 (New York, 1970),
Chapter 5, “Revolution and Reformation in the Church: The Problem of Authority,” 122-139;
Chapter 6, “Revolution and Reformation in the Church: The Problem of Conversion,”147-165.
David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith
(Ann Arbor, 2003), Chapter 9, “The Reformation and the Bible,” 249-75.
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago, 1994), Chapter 20, “Religion and Art: The Crisis of the
Image at the Beginning of the Modern Age,” 458-470 (notes, 601-2), 545-551 (excerpts from
Karlstadt, Luther, Zwingli, Erasmus, and Calvin on images).
7
<<Friday March 18th or 25th (tentative): 2:00pm Brandeis shuttle for visit to Harvard Art Museums, to
consult works for research paper>>
8
Week of March 21st (M, W, Th)
Portraiture and Identity in Germany and England: Dürer and Holbein
Snyder, 382-393.
Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: 1993) 63-85,
139-42.
Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (Princeton, 1997), Chapter 6 “The Portrait,
Time and Death,” 149-193.
Week of March 28th (M no class, W, Th no class, Professor U away)
Art in Cosmopolitan Antwerp: Massys and Joos Van Cleve
Snyder, 433-445, 449-451.
Week of April 4th (M, W, Th)
Remaking Rome: Jan Gossaert
Snyder, 453-62.
Marisa Bass, “Jan Gossaert's 'Neptune and Amphitrite' Reconsidered,” Simiolus 35 (2011), 61-83.
From Sublime to Ridiculous to Apocalyptic: Altdorfer, Patinir, and the Idea of Landscape
Snyder, 351-360, 446-449.
Christopher Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago, 1993), Chapter 1, “The
Independent Landscape,” 9-65.
Thursday, April 19th, Dürer Paper due
Week of April 11th (M, W, Th)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Landscape, Peasants, and Proverbs.
Snyder, 503-6, 511-23.
Ortelius and Van Mander on Bruegel, in Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), 36-41.
Ethan Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge, 1999), Chapter 2,
“The Fall of Icarus and the Natural Order,” 57-76.
Margaret Carroll, “Marriage and Community in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and Carnival and
Lent,” in Painting and Politics in Northern Europe (University Park: Penn State Press, 2010),
28-63.
Week of April 18th (M,W)
Late Bruegel and Social Upheaval in the Netherlands
Snyder, 506-11.
Svetlana Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” Simiolus 6 (1972-3): 163-176.
Graphic Arts Paper due by Thursday, April 21st at 5:00pm (or earlier in the week)
Week of May 2nd (M)
Catch-up class, exam review, or new topic TBA.
FINAL EXAM: Tentative Wednesday, May 11th, 9:15-12:15 (will not require entire scheduled
period)