Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/451

IV. — Renaissance Painting in the Netherlands, and Germany. In the North of Europe, as in Italy, we find painting attaining to a position of the first importance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but, as we have seen in our account of architecture and sculpture, the art of the North of Europe differed in many essential particulars from that of the South. The Teutonic masters were uninfluenced by the models of antiquity which so strongly biassed Italian taste ; and, unfettered by the trammels of old and sacred traditions, they went straight to nature for their models, and endeavoured to express their spiritual conceptions in familiar forms and homely scenes of every- day life, attaining thereby a truth to nature never sur- passed. It cannot, of course, be denied that the men we have now to consider never attained to the exceptional excellence of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Raphael; but their inferiority was, in a great measure, due to accidental and peculiar circumstances. The development of the Gothic style of architecture, and the preference in the Renaissance period for wood-carvings rather than paintings as altar-pieces, limited the northern painters in the exer- cise of their art to the narrow field of manuscript illumin- ations and easel pictures. Moreover, in the countries under notice, there were no enthusiastic patrons of art ready to recognise and encourage genius : artists were compelled to work their way up to eminence through dif- ficulties of every kind — difficulties in which they often wasted their strength and the best years of their life ; and, above all, the Reformation was occupying the thoughts