Real or Vision? The Northern Renaissance

Art Historian Dr Matthew Whyte offers a new lecture series, which takes the audience on an art-filled journey through the often beautiful, sometimes scandalous, and always fascinating moments in the development of Western civilisation.

5. Real or Vision? The Northern Renaissance

In Northern Europe during the fifteenth century, we encounter the meeting point of the radically real with the vibrantly visionary, as artists push the boundaries of oil paint to convince prayerful viewers that theirs was a world where the spiritual was at their fingertips. We explore the photo-realism of Jan Van Eyck, whose Ghent Altarpiece still mystifies viewers through its rendition of real textures and profusion of lifelike characters, as well as the frightening hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch, whose nightmarish hybrid demons recall Salvador Dalí at his most surreal. We also see how the rise of printmaking was a force for the development of new imagery and ideas, Albrecht Dürer harnessing the technology in the service of humanistic self-expression, while the early expressions of Protestant reform embraced the medium as a means to spread urgent messages.