Old Masters and the Renaissance

Above a convex mirror on the back wall of a Bruges interior, Jan van Eyck painted his signature in looping Latin script: “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434.” The Arnolfini Portrait, now in the National Gallery in London, is oil on an oak panel 82 centimetres high, and few earlier European pictures show so clearly what oil paint could do with fur, brass, glass and skin. The man is most likely Giovanni di Nicolao di Arnolfini, an Italian merchant based in Bruges; the woman beside him is his wife, whose name has not survived. The mirror shows two more men stepping into the room. One of them may be the painter.

That small panel holds much of what this section covers. Here “Old Masters” means European painters from roughly the fourteenth century to the eighteenth: Italians who argued with the classical past, Netherlandish painters who refined oil on panel, and court artists who served the great dynasties. We treat them as working professionals with patrons and rivals, not as marble busts.

Florence and the Italian line

The Uffizi fills the first and second floors of a building designed by Giorgio Vasari and built between 1560 and 1580. Its rooms of fourteenth century and Renaissance painting read like a roll call: Giotto, Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Ancient statues and busts collected by the Medici, Roman copies of lost Greek originals, still line the corridors.

In Paris the Italian tradition hangs in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, which Henri IV began in 1595 to link the Louvre with the Tuileries palace. At 460 metres it was then the longest gallery of its kind in Europe. Mantegna, Raphael, Arcimboldo and Caravaggio are there, and the Louvre holds the largest group of paintings by Leonardo anywhere, because François I invited the Florentine to the French court. The Mona Lisa hangs a few steps away.

North of the Alps

Van Eyck did not invent oil painting, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna says so in its own collection notes. What he did was carry the precision of manuscript illumination into the larger format of the panel. Vienna is one of the best places to follow what came after. Its Picture Gallery holds twelve panels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, among them The Tower of Babel of 1563, crowded with masons, cranes and scaffolds. Dürer, Rubens and Rembrandt hang nearby, with Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, in which a model posed as Clio, the Muse of history, stands before a painter at his easel.

Courts, inventories and long travels

Much of this art survives because rulers kept it. The Habsburgs assembled the Vienna collection over centuries, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who lived from 1614 to 1662, gathered more than 1,400 pictures on his own, most of them now in the museum. Diego Velázquez painted Infanta Margarita in a Blue Dress in 1659, the year before his death; the portrait went to Emperor Leopold I, who married her in 1666.

The Arnolfini panel shows how far such objects can wander. Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, listed it in an inventory of her paintings in 1516. It passed into the Spanish royal collection, surfaced with James Hay, a Scottish soldier who had served in the Peninsular War, and was bought by the National Gallery in 1842 for 600 guineas. It was the Gallery’s first Netherlandish painting.

Where to look closely

Start with details the painters never had to include. In the Bruges room, a brass chandelier holds one lit candle and one snuffed out, and a small dog stares straight out at the viewer, every hair rendered in oil. In Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow in Vienna, painted in 1505 or 1506, the figures settle into a pyramid against pasture that fades toward a far horizon. In Arcimboldo’s Summer, also in Vienna, the face is built entirely from fruit and plants, with the signature and date woven into the straw. The articles collected below take up single painters, single pictures and the collections that shaped how we see them.