‘Their illusions are enchantments.’ – Andrew Graham-Dixon on the Northern Renaissance

April 13, 2018 at 12:54 pm (Art)

The following is from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Renaissance:

Robert Campin – Jacques Daret; The Virgin and Child in an Interior

The sense of the real in fifteenth-century Northern European painting is so intense  that it becomes uncanny. The liquidity and brilliance of colours suspended in oil lends a particular lustre to details such as the copper ewer and the lights reflected in it. A dappled patch of light conveys the passage of sunshine onto a wall through the small panes of a thickly glazed window with astonishing virtuosity. Such effects would come as a revelation even to the Italians, who had done so much to achieve their own effects of naturalism in the different media of egg tempera and fresco. No wonder, perhaps, that the early Netherlandish artists should have acquired a reputation as necromancers and alchemists. Their illusions are enchantments.