Northern vs Southern Renaissance: Quick Notes

Bruges was a center of commerce in the early $15^{\text{th}}$ century; by the mid $15^{\text{th}}$ century Antwerp had supplanted Bruges.
Painting was a major commodity; large quantities of art bought and sold at fairs.
Patronage: in the South, politically powerful families; in the North, a wealthy merchant class that dominates art production and distribution.
The taste of this new business class gradually dominates production and distribution of art.

Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings are minutely detailed and brutally imaginative, casting a dark satiric shadow over the materialistic concerns of the North.
This pessimism derives at least in part from a sense of doom characteristic of the North, linked to medieval sermon tradition stressing the wretchedness of human existence.
Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights provides a striking example of this mood.
The human body is widely regarded as a vehicle and instrument of sin, in contrast to the Southern view of the body as an object of beauty.

The social classes were at least loosely united in their taste for music and dance.
Loris dances were especially popular and were performed at carnivals and festivals and as interludes at more formal dance occasions.
The Madrigal: genre of song inspired in Southern Europe by setting Petrarchan sonnets to music.
In the North, madrigals were often lighter and produced a subgenre called the villanella.

Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece is grimly realistic in its portrayal of death and yet transcendentally emotional.
Grunewald’s Altarpiece is typical of Northern European art in its unswerving attention to the reality of death, represented in the minutest detail.
At the same time, his work is uniquely German in its intense emotionalism and almost mystical sense of transcendence.