The Represented World

The Italian Renaissance is often contrasted with the masters of Northern Europe, such as 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 show a more descriptive attention to the visible world and nature.

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

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