The period between 1490 and 1520 was one of great efflorescence in the arts of the north, when men like Dürer, Grünewald and Holbein were active in Germany and the workshops in the Netherlands were still prolific. It was at this time that artists in these countries became aware of the Italian Renaissance and also felt the first tremors of the Reformation.

In the spring of 1494 the young Albrecht Dürer was recalled by his father from the ‘bachelor journey’ which had taken him west to some of the big towns on the Rhine. Obediently, he came home to Nürnberg to marry and set up his own workshop, but a few months later he left again, this time, however, going south to Italy. These two journeys are symptomatic of the crisis which the artists of the north had to face at the turn of the century. Dürer, born in 1471 as the son of a goldsmith in whose workshop he received his first training, had been apprenticed to the leading Nürnberg painter Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519). This master, like most German painters of his generation, had been strongly influenced by Roger van der Weyden (d. 1464) in whose work traditional Gothic design and the new delight in depicting the outward appearance of the world are perfectly merged. During his ‘Wanderjahre’ Dürer tried to meet the painter and engraver Martin Schongauer (1445?–91) who was looked upon almost as a pupil of Roger. But the sudden journey to Italy speaks of very different interests.