In the fifteenth century, Italian bankers living in Bruges shipped altarpieces by their Flemish neighbors home to Florence, where local painters came to study them. Not every panel had a quiet life. A privateer seized one at sea before it reached Italy, and in 1934 a thief carried off a piece of another, half of which has never been found.
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How These Were Chosen
In the 1420s, in the trading towns of the Low Countries, painters began to render the world in minute detail. That detail depended on oil, laid on in thin layers that dried slowly enough to be blended. Most clients wanted devotional pictures set among the rooms and clothes of their own day.
Every picture here was painted north of the Alps between the 1420s and about 1570, soon after Protestant image breakers swept through the churches of the Netherlands in 1566. Each shows a Northern way of working, or changed what buyers elsewhere expected.
Painters who came home from Rome with an Italian manner were left aside, and each painter appears once, with a single exception. One thread runs through several entries: money from the South, paid by Italian bankers and merchants living in Bruges.
12. Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529)
Two armies crash together across the lower half of this panel, and beyond them a whole sea opens out under a vast sky. Albrecht Altdorfer painted the scene in 1529 for William IV, Duke of Bavaria. The battle is Issus, where Alexander the Great routed Darius III, king of Persia, in 333 BC.
The commission cost Altdorfer the highest office in his city. Since 1526 he had sat on the inner council of Regensburg, on the Danube, and served as its architect. When the city chose him as mayor in 1528, he refused, because he had already promised the duke a great work, and this battle was that work.
Of the panel he delivered, Altdorfer handed about two thirds to the landscape. Working from the maps of his day, he spread the eastern Mediterranean out as if seen from a great height, with Cyprus at its center, the Red Sea beyond it and, on the farthest shore, the Nile splitting into seven arms. Art historians call this kind of view a Weltlandschaft, a world landscape that takes in seas, mountains and cities at once.
So much space raised a problem for a battle picture, since Alexander and Darius could easily vanish in the crush of soldiers. Altdorfer hung a tablet high over the armies, its Latin text giving the Persian losses, and from it a red cord drops toward the two kings and leads the eye straight down to them.
At a Glance
Artist: Albrecht Altdorfer (about 1480 to 1538)
Painted: 1529
Medium: Oil on limewood panel
Size: 158.4 × 120.3 cm (62.4 × 47.4 in)
Where to see it: Alte Pinakothek, Munich
11. Hans Memling, The Last Judgment (1467 to 1473)
The archangel Michael stands in golden armor and a brocade cloak at the center of this Last Judgment, and high above him Christ sits in judgment, his feet resting on a golden orb that stands for the whole universe. Hans Memling worked on the triptych in Bruges from 1467 to 1473 for a Florentine banker, and in 1473 the panels were loaded onto a galley bound for Italy. They never reached Florence.