In the next chapter we will try to gain a few
glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders,
and our own country.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH
The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world
which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as
now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars
were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders
to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes
of thought stirred in the south.
In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the
awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the
art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent;
so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember
how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent
portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events
in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose
painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously
minute and veracious.
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