Renaissance in the Low Countries

Culture in the Low Countries at the end of the 15th century was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, through trade via Bruges, which made Flanders wealthy.

In art, Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting went from the strange work of Hieronymus Bosch to the everyday life of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

In 1500, the Seventeen Provinces were in a personal union under the Burgundian Dukes, and with the Flemish cities as centers of gravity, culturally and economically formed one of the richest parts of Europe.

Devotio Moderna practices, for example, were particularly strong in the region, while the 16th-century criticisms of the Catholic Church that spread throughout Europe also reached the Low Countries.

The Reformation, particularly the ideas of John Calvin, gained significant support in the Low Countries, and following the 1566 iconoclastic outbreaks Spain attempted to quell the tide and maintain the authority of the post-Tridentine Church through force by installing Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba.

Trade in the port of Bruges and the textile industry, mostly in Ghent, turned Flanders into the wealthiest part of Northern Europe at the end of the 15th century.

The nobles and rich traders were able to commission artists, creating a class of highly skilled painters and musicians who were admired and requested around the continent.

Examples are Italian architects Tommaso Vincidor and Alessandro Pasqualini, who worked in the Low Countries for most of their careers, Flemish painter Jan Gossaert, whose visit to Italy in 1508 in the company of Philip of Burgundy left a deep impression,[1] musician Adrian Willaert who made Venice into the most important musical centre of its time[3] (see Venetian School) and Giambologna, a Flemish sculptor who spent his most productive years in Florence.

[1] Most of all it seems surprisingly modern, introducing a world of dreams that highly contrasts with the traditional style of the Flemish masters of his day.

After 1550, the Flemish and Dutch painters begin to show more interest in nature and in beauty an sich, leading to a style that incorporates Renaissance elements, but remains very far from the elegant lightness of Italian Renaissance art,[3] and directly leads to the themes of the great Flemish and Dutch Baroque painters: landscapes, still lifes and genre painting – scenes from everyday life.

An architect directly influenced by the Italian masters was Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, who designed the city hall of Antwerp, finished in 1564.

In sculpture, however, 15th-century Netherlandish artists, while adhering to Christian subjects, developed techniques and a naturalistic style which compares favorably to the work of early-Renaissance Italian contemporaries such as Donatello.

[1] Other important composers from the Low Countries were Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Clemens non Papa and Adrian Willaert.

Orlande de Lassus, a Fleming who had lived in Italy as a youth and spent most of his career in Munich, was the leading composer of the late Renaissance.

In the middle of the 16th century, a group of rhetoricians (see Medieval Dutch literature) in Brabant and Flanders attempted to put new life into the stereotyped forms of the preceding age by introducing in original composition the new-found branches of Latin and Greek poetry.