Northern Renaissance

Northern Renaissance is the art style and term given to the period of painting in Europe that followed the Italian Renaissance. In Northern Europe, the Renaissance style arrived later than in Italy, but was a much more profound and lasting change than the century-long Italian Renaissance. The Northern Renaissance was a period of great artistic achievement and greatly influenced later developments in art in Europe. Northern painters invented new techniques that changed the face of painting. They used oil paint, which was a brilliant blend of pigment with drying oils that acted as an artificial varnish and gave artists greater freedom in their work and created deeper colors than anything seen before. Oil paint had been known since ancient times but not really understood until the Northern Renaissance painters used it. Northern painters also perfected linear perspective, which was a new and important skill allowing artists to create three dimensional illusions using a two-dimensional surface. This was a new and revolutionary way of painting that had never been used before. Northern painters also pioneered the use of light in art. The Northern Renaissance painters were fascinated by light, its power, beauty and unpredictability. They explored ways of adding it to their work by using transparent layers of oil paint on top of each other so they could capture the different effects light had on each layer. Northern Renaissance painters had different intentions than the Italian Renaissance painters. They were less concerned with philosophical and scientific advances, but instead focussed on representing all three dimensions realistically in their paintings. Northern artists wanted people to feel like they could reach out and touch the world in their paintings. One way of doing this was by using linear perspective, which had never been used before in art history. Northern painters also pioneered the use of light in their paintings, which made their work different from any other artist's during the Renaissance or after it. This is because they wanted to capture light as it truly appeared in nature. Some famous Northern Renaissance artists were Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt Van Rijn. These artists accomplished many things in their lives such as painting masterpieces that are still praised today for their realistic detail and use of light.