From Flanders to Florence

From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting 1400-1500 by Paula Nuttall, 251 pages

By the end of the Renaissance, a narrative was established which has dominated art history ever since, that Italy, and especially Florence, was the undisputed capital of art, and that the new artistic styles of the Renaissance were virtually entirely derived from classical models.  Flemish painting might be beautiful, but its beauty was the product of a mastery of color and technique, inferior "crafts" compared with the "art" of design which was the heart of the Italian achievement.  Northern works might stimulate emotion, but they lacked the intellectual content of Italian art.

Nuttall overturns this conventional wisdom with an in-depth exposition of the trade networks and cultural exchanges which brought Flemish art into fashion in Quattrocento Italy, and the many ways in which the examples of Northern works influenced Italian artists, both in what they imitated and in what they rejected.