The New Cambridge Modern History

The period between 1490 and 1520 was one of great efflorescence in the arts of the Northern Europe, when men like Dürer, Grunewald and Holbein were active in Germany and the Netherlands were still prolific. Fifteenth-century artists of the north had been well aware of the world around them, but their pursuit of visual beauty had been purely empirical. The Italians, having studied nature, applied mathematics to picture-making. Architecture in northern Europe was hardly affected by what had happened in Italy during the fifteenth century. During the first two decades of the sixteenth century architects as a rule were content to borrow decorative motifs from the south and put a thin Renaissance veneer over an essentially Gothic structure. Many of the German artists provided Luther with powerful pictorial weapons in his fight, but it was given to Dürer to find a perfect fusion between Renaissance and Reformation, the two great forces which overshadowed artistic creation in the north about 1520.