The Italian Renaissance is often contrasted with the masters of Northern Europe—above all Dürer (conspicuously absent from the collection)—as well as Flemish and Dutch artists. Italian art is associated with idealisation, while Northern artists are said to display a more descriptive attention to the visible world and to nature.

This opposition, however, must be qualified. In Italy, Dürer encountered chiaroscuro, which profoundly transformed his visual language, and he copied Mantegna. Lucas van Leyden synthesised Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi. It was Lucas whom Dürer, impressed by his younger counterpart, sought to meet in Antwerp in 1521.

One of Lucas’s earliest dated engravings (1508) – when he was not yet fifteen -includes a landscape later reused directly by Raimondi in his Climbers (c. 1510), after Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. Exchanges between North and Italy thus operated in both directions.