The Northern Renaissance is one of the most thrilling and underappreciated chapters in the history of Western art. While the artists of Renaissance Italy have long commanded the spotlight, an equally extraordinary story was unfolding north of the Alps — artists doing something altogether stranger, more intimate and, in many ways more revolutionary. Oil paint, the Protestant Reformation, the printing press, the politics of royal power: all of it collides in the work of six extraordinary artists. This series traces that story from the jewel-like panels of Jan van Eyck in fifteenth-century Bruges to the magnetic court portraits of Hans Holbein in the London of Henry VIII — a journey of two centuries, half a continent and some of the most astonishing paintings ever made.
