Golden Age of Flanders
On 24 February 1500, Charles of Ghent was born to Philip the Handsome (son of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I of Austria) and Joanna the Mad (daughter of Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon).
The election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 crowned Charles' dynastic fortunes, giving him sovereignty in Germany and North Italy as a formal successor of Charlemagne.
Given that Charles was a Fleming and that Burgundian chivalric culture formed the basis of his beliefs, Brussels would ascend from capital of the Habsburg Netherlands to main seat of his itinerant court.
[4][5] Charles abdicated in favor of his son Philip the Two Sicilies and the Duchy of Milan in July 1554, the Habsburg Netherlands in October 1555, and the kingdoms of Spain and the Americas in January 1556.
In August 1556, Charles abdicated the throne of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in favor of his younger brother Ferdinand, elected as his designated successor in 1531.
[8] Antwerp's golden age is tightly linked to the fact that it became the financial centre where Spanish precious metals coming from the Americas were exchanged for banking credit of rich German families (namely the Fugger and the Welser).
[9] By 1504, the Portuguese had established Antwerp as one of their main shipping bases, bringing in spices from Asia and trading them for textiles and metal goods.
Jan Mabuse, Maarten van Heemskerck and Frans Floris were all instrumental in adopting Italian models and incorporating them into their own artistic language.
From the mid-century Pieter Aertsen, later followed by his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer, established a type of "monumental still life" featuring large spreads of food with genre figures, and in the background small religious of moral scenes.
Like the world landscapes, these represented a typically "Mannerist inversion" of the normal decorum of the hierarchy of genres, giving the "lower" subject matter more space than the "higher".
[12] Anthonis Mor was the leading portraitist of the mid-century, in demand in courts all over Europe for his reliable portraits in a style that combined Netherlandish precision with the lessons of Titian and other Italian painters.
Hieronymus Bosch is a highly individual artist, whose work is strange and full of seemingly irrational imagery, making it difficult to interpret.
After 1550 the Flemish and Dutch painters begin to show more interest in nature and beauty "in itself", leading to a style that incorporates Renaissance elements, but remains far from the elegant lightness of Italian Renaissance art,[14] and directly leads to the themes of the great Flemish and Dutch Baroque painters: landscapes, still lifes and genre painting - scenes from everyday life.
The Fall of Icarus (now in fact considered a copy of a Brueghel work), although highly atypical in many ways, combines several elements of Northern Renaissance painting.
