The Other Renaissance E-Book

Paul Strathern

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 635

Beschreibung

'Enlightening and fascinating' John Banville, Wall Street Journal Through the lives of major figures from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, including Copernicus, Gutenberg, Luther, Catherine de Medici, Rabelais, van Eyck and Shakespeare, Paul Strathern tells the fascinating story of the northern European Renaissance, which rivalled its Italian counterpart. There is no denying that many of the first developments of the Renaissance took place in Italy. However, a revolution of similar magnitude was also occurring across northern Europe, which would forever alter European culture in its own unique fashion. Initially centred on the city of Bruges, its influence was soon felt in France, the German states, England and even in Italy itself. By vividly bringing to life the key players of the northern Renaissance, Paul Strathern explores some of the most significant advances of the whole era, revealing how they not only introduced new ways of thinking in art, literature, science, philosophy, mathematics and medicine, but also allowed for the evolution of an entirely different concept of life. In this compelling and original history, Strathern shows how the 'Other Renaissance' would play a role at least as significant as the Italian Renaissance in shattering the constraints of medieval life and bringing our modern world into being.

Leseprobe

THE OTHER RENAISSANCE

Paul Strathern studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and has lectured in philosophy and mathematics. He is a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novelist, and is author of two series of books – Philosophers in 90 Minutes and The Big Idea: Scientists who Changed the World – as well as several works of non-fiction, including The Borgias and The Florentines.

‘Lively... Strathern’s entertaining cast of often garrulous northerners, their origins ranging from Paris to rainy London, discovered things that made us what we are today... He describes their contributions in clear-sighted and effective prose, making complex ideas instantly intelligible... Full of pleasing anecdotes, and myths are duly dispatched along the way’ The Times

‘Enlightening and fascinating... Mr. Strathern’s canvas is immense, yet the picture he paints is never less than pellucid, and packed with lively detail and fascinating facts.’ John Banville, Wall Street Journal

‘From art and astronomy to medicine and exploration, The Other Renaissance covers a lot of ground, and the author’s biographical style is invariably engaging... Lively and wide-ranging’ Financial Times

‘Entertaining... A rich and varied depiction of the extraordinary culture of northern Europe in the early modern period. Strathern has a good eye for striking details and arresting anecdotes... Vivid and interesting’ Literary Review

‘The lives portrayed are deeply fascinating… A docent-style stroll through the pantheon of Renaissance thinkers of Northern Europe.’ Kirkus Reviews

‘Following the great minds of the period in insightful biographical chapters, Strathern’s book sets the record straight on this second revival.’ The New Criterion

‘A remarkable work’ The Week

Also by Paul Strathern

The Florentines

The Borgias

Death in Florence

Spirit of Venice

The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior

Napoleon in Egypt

The Medici

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2024 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Paul Strathern, 2023

The moral right of Paul Strathern to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-518-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-517-5

Map artwork by Keith Chaffer

Printed in Great Britain

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ToMy Brother Mark

CONTENTS

Map

Timeline of Significant Events during the Northern Renaissance

Prologue: Lifting the Lid

  1 Gutenberg

  2 Jan van Eyck

  3 Nicholas of Cusa

  4 Francis I and the French Renaissance

  5 A New Literature: Rabelais

  6 Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation

  7 The Rise of England

  8 The Rise and Rise of the Fuggers

  9 Copernicus

10 Erasmus

11 Dürer

12 Straddling Two Ages: Paracelsus and Bruegel the Elder

13 Versions of the True: Mercator and Viète

14 Vesalius

15 Catherine de’ Medici

16 Montaigne

17 Elizabethan England

18 Brahe and Kepler

19 Europe Expands

Conclusion: A Last Legacy

Acknowledgements

Notes and Further Reading

List of Illustrations

Index

TIMELINE OF SIGNIFICANT EVENTSDURING THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE

1415

Jan Hus, founder of the Hussites, burned at the stake

1432

Van Eyck completes the Ghent Altarpiece

1464

Death of Nicholas of Cusa

1470s

Regiomontanus oversees the building at Nuremberg of possibly the first modern observatory in Europe

1474

Technique of painting in oils spreads from the Netherlands to Italy

1494

Signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas: Pope Alexander VI draws a line down the Atlantic Ocean, dividing the globe between Spain and Portugal

1497

John Cabot sails from Bristol and reaches North America

1509

Erasmus writes In Praise of Folly

1512

Torrigiano is commissioned by Henry VIII to create a Renaissance tomb for Henry VII

1514

Dürer produces Melencolia I

1515

Francis I ascends to the throne of France

1517

Martin Luther nails his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church

1519

The death of Leonardo da Vinci in France

1519

Charles V is crowned Holy Roman Emperor

1525

Death of Jacob Fugger the Rich

1529

The Colloquy of Marburg fails to unite Protestants

1533

Henry VIII breaks with Rome

1536

John Calvin arrives in Geneva; Calvinist missionaries soon begin to spread over northern Europe

1536

French explorer Jacques Cartier brings Chief Donnacona from the New World to see Francis I

1541

Death of Paracelsus

1543

Copernicus is shown the first published edition of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, describing the solar system, while on his deathbed

1543

Vesalius publishes De Fabrica, describing human anatomy

1547

The completion of the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley

1547

The death of Francis I of France

1553

The death of Rabelais

1553

English explorer Richard Chancellor visits the court of Ivan the Terrible

1558

The death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V

1569

Mercator publishes his Atlas, containing his cylindrical projection map of the world

1572

The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in France

1588

The Spanish Armada fails to invade Elizabethan England

1589

The death of Catherine de’ Medici, mother of French kings and ruler of France

1596

Johannes Kepler publishes his laws describing the elliptical orbit of planets

1600

The founding of the East India Company in London

1601

Tycho Brahe dies in Prague

1608

Invention of the perspicillium in Holland

1616

The death of Shakespeare

1642

Cardinal Richelieu dies in France

1648

The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War

PROLOGUE

LIFTING THE LID

PARACELSUS’S REPUTATION HAD SPREAD before him. His grand inaugural lecture in 1526 as professor of medicine at the University of Basel, the oldest and most prestigious in Switzerland, had attracted a large crowd. The front rows of the hall were filled with the city worthies in their robes of office; alongside them were the university professors bedecked in their black gowns with coloured sashes; and amongst them were the city’s fashionably attired leading physicians. Ordinary townsfolk, the merely curious, and many students were crammed into the back rows, squatting in the aisles, or spilling out through the open door into the main square.

Enter Paracelsus in his ragged leather alchemist’s apron, bearing aloft a covered platter. He began his lecture by announcing to the assembled company that he would now reveal to them the greatest secret of medical science. Whereupon, with a flourish, he lifted the lid from the platter. To reveal a pile of fresh human excrement.

The first rows of the audience, close enough for their nostrils to detect the odour of what lay before them, rose to their feet. Muttering angrily amongst themselves, they began making their way back up the aisles, their scowling faces forcing a path through the squatting students cluttering the exit.

Amidst the rising hubbub, Paracelsus’s voice could be heard calling out after them: ‘If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefaction, you are unworthy of the name of physicians.’ Paracelsus had long understood that fermentation was the most important chemical process to take place in the laboratory of the human body. Here lay the secret of life itself: how the human body functioned, gaining its nourishment and expelling extraneous, often toxic, matter. The students and other townsfolk who had come along for the show were not disappointed, and began applauding and cheering him to the rafters.

When order was finally restored, with intent students now occupying the front seats of the auditorium, Paracelsus resumed his lecture. He informed his audience that these were times of drastic change. That for the good of humanity our view of ourselves and our place in the world had to be transformed.* Elixirs of life, propitious alignments of the signs of the zodiac, and fallacious systems which prescribed a holistic internal balance of ‘humours’ as the key to human health were all now outmoded – mere things of the past. The world did not ultimately consist of earth, air, fire and water; and the time was over when the physician’s task was to relate these elements to the four humours, whose balance was said to control our health – namely, black bile (earth), blood (air), yellow bile (fire) and phlegm (water). The earth contained all manner of chemicals and plants, just as the body suffered from all manner of ailments and diseases. The task of the physician was to learn which of these chemicals and plants were appropriate for curing particular infirmities. Likewise, it was necessary to learn through experience the required dosages necessary to eliminate such illnesses. Suitably diluted quantities, regularly administered, might cure the patient; excessive doses were liable to be lethal. Here, Paracelsus was laying the foundations of modern pharmacology.

Thus spoke the man whom many regard as the father of modern medicine. Others, by contrast, continue to regard him as no more than a bombastic self-advertising quack. The Renaissance was in many ways a schizophrenic era. A number of its finest pioneering thinkers would frequently retain incongruous remnants of earlier medieval preconceptions, even as their discoveries opened up entirely new fields of knowledge which superseded such ideas. The upheaval in European thought which today we call the Renaissance was also divided in another sense. While many elements of the Renaissance originated in Florence and the city-states of Italy, a quasi-independent ‘Other Renaissance’ was coming into being north of the Alps. The Swiss physician Paracelsus was a prime, if somewhat uncouth, exemplar of both these processes.

The man we now know as Paracelsus was born on 1 May 1493 in the village of Egg in northern Switzerland, his given name being Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.* Later in life he would style himself as Paracelsus – meaning ‘greater than Celsus’, the first-century physician considered at the time to have been the greatest medical practitioner of the Ancient Roman era. For over a millennium, the works of Aulus Cornelius Celsus had been considered lost, their existence only known from admiring references which appeared in the manuscripts of his contemporaries and a number of later sources. Then, in the mid-1400s, a copy of Celsus’s De Medicina (On Medicine) was discovered by Pope Nicholas V in the Vatican archives. In 1478, Celsus’s treatise became one of the first medical works to be printed, immediately gaining a wide circulation and the high reputation it deserved.

Celsus’s medical expertise was largely grounded in the knowledge he had absorbed during the practice of his profession, and was for the most part unadulterated by the holistic theory, erroneous beliefs and sheer superstition which had accumulated around this subject during the many centuries since his death. Paracelsus was deeply struck by what he read of the Roman Celsus’s works, and decided to begin as he would go on – rejecting the orthodox traditional teachings of his era as inferior rubbish. This attitude, roundly proclaimed, meant that as a student he found it prudent to absent himself from a succession of German universities, including Heidelberg, Tübingen and Leipzig. Consequently he decided on a course of self-education, and set out to see for himself what he could discover. ‘Knowledge is experience,’ he proclaimed, an adage to which he would for the most part adhere throughout his controversial career. It would also become one of the central tenets of Renaissance scientific thought.

In the course of Paracelsus’s quest for self-education, he claimed to have tramped the highways and byways of Europe from Scandinavia to Constantinople, from Scotland to Sicily. Later, he would even assert that he had gained a medical doctorate at the University of Ferrara in 1515 or 1516 (accounts vary). However, the university records for this period had been lost, a fact of which he was almost certainly aware. During Paracelsus’s wanderings through the length and breadth of Europe (and possibly even as far afield as Egypt), he accumulated a vast compendium of medical knowledge, including many old wives’ tales, local superstitions and witches’ cures. He also sought out alchemists, consulting them on their various laboratory techniques.

Paracelsus became experienced at sorting the wheat from the chaff amongst these ‘cures’, discovering many genuinely efficacious herbs, plants and other ‘elixirs’. Likewise, he learned a number of fundamental principles from the alchemists’ experimental methods and materials, arriving at the conclusion that the human body itself operated in the manner of a chemical laboratory. He began developing a form of what became known as iatrochemistry, a medical chemistry using minerals to combat illness or malfunctions in the body’s internal workings. Here again, he insisted that practice was the way to knowledge: ‘The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.’

On occasion, his successful treatment of a local worthy would result in him being appointed to a post at a nearby university. But his wilful eccentricity would soon become apparent. For a start, he insisted upon delivering his lectures dressed in an alchemist’s rough leather apron rather than formal academic robes. Rather than the customary Latin, he chose to lecture in German, so that he would be understood by all the local barber-surgeons, alchemists and itinerant quacks whom he publicly invited to hear him speak. His lectures tended to ridicule orthodox medical learning, in favour of his own revolutionary theories.

As a result, Paracelsus became hugely popular with his students and would frequently be carried off by them to the town’s taverns. Here he cut a curious figure amongst his roistering young admirers. His travels had given him the tanned visage of a vagabond. Yet his coarse, curiously hermaphroditic features were beardless. One report describes him as dressed in ‘beggar’s garb’, and he was in the habit of wearing the same scruffy clothes for months on end, not even bothering to remove them before he fell onto his bed in a drunken stupor. Bodily hygiene was evidently not part of his medical practice.

Another habit he developed, unusual for a physician, was to carry around with him at all times a large, ornately carved broadsword. This he claimed had been presented to him by the Grand Vizier of Constantinople, or had been discovered by chance atop a peak in the Alps, or… When enacting his outlandish traveller’s tales, he was liable to leap onto a tavern table, enthusiastically brandishing his sword above his head. He even gave it a name: Azoth, the alchemists’ term for the creative force of nature. It is said that he took his sword to bed with him. This was his constant and sole sleeping companion, for he is not known to have slept with any human companions, male or female. Impotence was the likely cause of his chastity. But despite this involuntary virtue, his general demeanour meant that his university faculty appointments seem to have lasted little longer than his time as a student at any particular university.

The high point in Paracelsus’s career came in 1527, when he arrived in the Swiss city of Basel. At the time, the celebrated Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus was residing there. Although Erasmus was generally regarded as the greatest scholar in Europe, he was renowned for the fact that his mind was always open to new ideas.

Erasmus invited Paracelsus to visit him, and was so intrigued by the eccentric physician’s novel ideas that he enquired if he knew of any remedy to cure him of his kidney complaint, along with the painful gout from which he had begun to suffer. Paracelsus duly prescribed a course of treatment, and Erasmus was cured of these ailments which had defied the finest medical minds in Europe.

Erasmus was so impressed that he used his considerable influence to get Paracelsus appointed as the city’s medical officer, along with a post as professor of medicine at the local university. At the age of thirty-four, Paracelsus stood on the threshold of a great career – as long as he behaved himself. It was now that he delivered his inaugural lecture, in which he lifted the lid on modern medicine.

It comes as little surprise that Paracelsus gained himself many enemies, both within the medical community and beyond. His detractors maintained that he simply stole many of his ideas and mythological ‘cures’ from others, to say nothing of plagiarizing the works of Celsus himself. Paracelsus claimed that he was merely putting into practice much of the knowledge which had come to light in the recently discovered work of Celsus, at the same time improving upon this with discoveries and remedies of his own. There was method in his hubris of naming himself Paracelsus.

Here was the beginning of modern medicine. So why is Paracelsus not universally acclaimed as ‘the father of modern medicine’? Though highly regarded as a Renaissance man in Germany to this day, in Italy many continue to see him as an unscrupulous and opportunistic buffoon. There is more than a grain of truth in this latter assessment. Paracelsus’s genuine achievements remain undermined by his occasional recourse to hermetic practices and other esoteric pursuits when the mood took him. To say nothing of his resort to downright fraudulence. As ever, Paracelsus was his own worst enemy. When he found himself in need of cash he was as capable as any quack of cooking up his own bogus ‘elixir of life’, and then selling bottles of this for a suitably inflated price – before quickly removing himself from the local jurisdiction. In some cases, flakes of gold were introduced to the mixture, in order to impress the gullible and justify the inflated price of a particular elixir. The wonder is not that he spent so much of his time travelling, but that he got away with continuing to do so.

Paracelsus also developed (or purloined) a number of classic medieval remedies. Typical of these was the popular old wives’ tale known as the doctrine of signatures. Each plant was deemed to have its own signature, which indicated the disease that it cured. For example, an orchid resembled a testicle, and was thus ideal for curing venereal diseases; heart-shaped lilacs were perfect for the relief of heart complaints; yellow celandine flowers provided a remedy for jaundice; and so forth…

Paracelsus was a man whose practice, and probably his beliefs too, straddled two ages. He combined the superstitious knowledge of the medieval era with the empirical science of the new age of the Renaissance. Yet it must be stressed that he was far from being alone in such aberration. Lingering strands of medieval waywardness would continue to contaminate scientific practice for centuries to come. And prime examples of this schizophrenic approach were not unique to the Renaissance, either. No less than Galileo Galilei himself, widely regarded as a founder of the modern scientific age – and certainly the finest astronomer of his time – was not above casting the occasional astrological chart for some wealthy dignitary willing to pay off his debts. A century later, Robert Boyle, the Irish ‘father of modern chemistry’, remained an avid (and convinced) alchemist on the side. But perhaps the most notorious of all was his contemporary Isaac Newton, who lived well into the 1700s and was known to have devoted more of his time and energy to numerology, alchemy, and obscure biblical prophecies concerning the location and proportions of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, than he did on the physical science and mathematical calculus which would revolutionize our knowledge of how the world works.

When Paracelsus lifted the lid on his pile of excrement, he was revealing a profound truth which would prove of lasting benefit to humanity. Yet his dabbling in the ‘signatures’ of plants, bogus elixirs, and other metaphysical matters was possessed of the same physical quality as the steaming pile on his platter. There can be no denying that originality and ordure coexisted to a remarkable extent in the life of Paracelsus. We shall hear more of him later. Some of it edifying; some of it less so.

Not all great thinkers of this era were prone to such gross lapses as Paracelsus. Indeed, one might be forgiven for overlooking the odd misstep by some pioneer Renaissance scholar exploring unknown regions ahead of his contemporaries. Yet this was definitely not the case with the exemplary science carried out by Dietrich of Freiberg, whose combination of empirical and deductive thinking remains as clear and perceptive today as it was seven centuries ago.

Sometime during the early 1300s, this middle-aged Dominican friar found himself gazing up at a rainbow in the sky. For centuries the rainbow had presented an insoluble conundrum. It was visible, it contained all colours, and there was no denying its existence. Yet on closer examination it didn’t appear to exist at all. It arose from no exact spot on earth and arched down to no precise location; similarly illusionistic was its appearance at different places in the sky when seen from different viewpoints.

Friar Dietrich was well aware that, according to the Bible, the rainbow represented God’s promise to Noah that he would never again unleash a cataclysmic flood capable of destroying all life on earth. This multicoloured arch in the sky embodied the divine bridge between Heaven and earth. It illustrated God’s grace and his pledge that humanity could gain redemption from life on earth and pass over this bridge into Paradise.

Dietrich had recently been reading a commentary by the tenth-century Arabic scholar Alhazen on the optics of the Ancient Greek geometer Euclid. Writing around the third century BC, Euclid had proposed that the eye gained its sight by emitting rays of light. Alhazen agreed with the gist of Euclid’s thesis, but proposed a vital modification. Instead of the eye emitting rays, it was in fact receiving light rays ‘from each point of every coloured body… every straight line that can be drawn from that point’. Friar Dietrich noticed how the rainbow only occurred during a concatenation of sunlight and rainstorm, suggesting that these effects were somehow responsible for this seemingly immaterial manifestation – which had all the appearance of being caused by rays emanating from it into the human eye. Evidently Euclid had got it wrong, and Alhazen’s modification was correct.

Dietrich surmised that the sun’s rays passed into the drops of rain falling through the sky, and that the water of these droplets somehow refracted and reflected these rays, causing them to emerge as the colours of the rainbow. But how on earth could he discover whether this conjecture was in fact true?

He realized that he could not possibly study the individual droplets of rain. For a start, the rainbow effect always seemed to retreat the closer one tried to approach it. So Dietrich conceived of an experiment that was as ingenious as it was novel. And this is all the more remarkable when one takes into account that, during this period, the whole idea of practical experimentation was for the most part confined to the dubious fume-filled realms of the alchemist’s den. More orthodox knowledge was confirmed by appeal to authority – usually a pronouncement in the works of Aristotle, or some similarly acceptable classical scholar, whose interpretation had been sanctified by the teachings of the Church. Such was the learning propagated in the schools and universities of the time: this body of knowledge became known as Scholasticism.

However, Dietrich would take a different approach; one which inspired an utterly original insight. He conceived of one single raindrop, magnified to the size of a volume of water contained in a round glass flask. This would act as a droplet of water falling through the sky. He held his flask up to the sunlight. The light was refracted as it passed through the magnified droplet (the flask of water), producing an exact imitation of the rainbow effect.

Continuing with his experiments, Dietrich of Freiberg was able to demonstrate how the rainbow always produced precisely the same colours, in precisely the same order. He managed to show why the rainbow formed an arc, and sometimes produced a second, fainter arc with its colours reversed, just as he had on occasion observed during an actual rainbow. He was also able to show how two people standing beside each other did not in fact see the same rainbow, and that this had nothing to do with any rays emanating from their different pairs of eyes. It was because the eyes of each observer received different refracted rays from the rainbow itself. Not surprisingly, Dietrich of Freiberg’s accomplishment has been hailed as ‘probably the most dramatic development of 14th- and 15th-century optics’.

This account of Dietrich’s impressive discovery contains many of the characteristic ingredients of the Renaissance. The word renaissance literally means ‘rebirth’ and refers to the rebirth of ancient classical knowledge – much of which had been lost, forgotten or overlooked in Europe during the many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. Dietrich of Freiberg had taken as his starting point the classical legacy of Euclid, as re-interpreted by the Arab scholar Alhazen. Also characteristic of the Renaissance was Dietrich’s enquiring mind, which was attempting to seek beyond the inadequate description given by medieval ‘authority’. Finally, he was willing to conduct an experiment, so that he could discover an explanation which matched his actual experience and did not depend upon divine or metaphysical interpretation.

The only untoward element of this story is that, like the medical revolution which would later be pioneered by Paracelsus, it took place in the German-speaking lands of northern Europe – rather than south of the Alps, the traditional locus of the early Renaissance. There is no denying that many of the first developments of what became known as the Renaissance took place in Italy. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the comparative stasis of medieval learning was increasingly disturbed by new knowledge arriving in Italy via trading links with the Arabic world of the Middle East. There, many Ancient Greek and Roman texts lost to Europe had been preserved. These had been read by Arabic scholars, whose understanding of such works had inspired them to create a golden age of learning. This had led to new scientific discoveries, original interpretations of classical philosophy, and some of the finest Arab literature.

Over the centuries, this knowledge would filter back to Italy, largely through trade links with the Arab world. Yet this sense of new knowledge – and a renaissance of ideas – was not unique to Italy. Innovative ideas, new learning, original art and revolutionary science also began to appear across northern Europe. In some cases this was undeniably influenced by the Renaissance taking place in Italy – yet to a large extent this Other Renaissance would transform European culture in its own unique fashion. Our modern world owes at least as much to the Other Renaissance as it does to our traditional conception of the Renaissance which originated in Italy.

Indeed, arguably, three of the most significant events of the entire Renaissance era would take place north of the Alps. These were the invention of a moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, the instigation of Protestantism by Martin Luther, and the proposal by Nicolaus Copernicus that the earth was part of a solar system. Printing would result in the widespread dissemination of learning, encouraging original interpretations of what had previously been regarded as authoritative texts. Protestantism would shatter the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, splitting Europe. And Copernicus would dislodge humanity from its central place in the universe, an event which would provoke a subtle but profound psychological effect on the human psyche.

Admittedly, all three of these developments would contain elements of the very controversy and unoriginality to which Paracelsus was prone. Printing had in fact been invented in China some centuries prior to Gutenberg’s invention (though he almost certainly remained ignorant of this fact). Likewise, Christendom had split once before, when in 1054 the Orthodox Church of Constantinople rejected the authority of the Papal Church in Rome. And finally, Copernicus’s heliocentric idea had been anticipated well over 1,500 years previously, by the Ancient Greeks – most notably Aristarchus – only to be disavowed and forgotten during the ensuing centuries.

But the crucial point is that these innovations proposed by Gutenberg, Luther and Copernicus would, often after considerable opposition, come to be recognized by the Renaissance world as accepted fact. As such, these three events would play a major role in undermining forever what had previously been the fundamental certainties of western human existence, and would in doing so give birth to a new modern humanity that inhabited an utterly transformed world.

* Although Paracelsus was here referring to purely medical matters, such feelings were becoming more widespread in many spheres. It is no coincidence that, almost ten years previously, Martin Luther had nailed his Protestant theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church; and even as Paracelsus was delivering his lecture at Basel, in faraway Poland, Copernicus was piecing together his idea of the solar system.

* Contrary to popular misconception, the word ‘bombastic’ does not in fact derive from his name, though it would have been most apt had it done so.

CHAPTER 1

GUTENBERG

SOMETIME AROUND THE YEAR 1450, an event took place in the Franco-German city of Strasbourg which would have repercussions far beyond its formative influence on the early Renaissance. The German inventor Johannes Gutenberg began issuing the first works produced on his newly invented moveable type printing press. Unfortunately, behind this simple fact lurks a complex tangle of devious machinations, financial chicanery, bankruptcy, and all manner of commercial double-dealing. This in no way detracts from the technical ingenuity, beauty and efficacy of Gutenberg’s printing press, though it does suggest that others were quick to see its ultimate value. As is so often the case, the human element detracts from the technical purity of our greatest achievements.

Many throughout the ages have boasted of their willingness to lose everything in a Faustian bargain which would render their name immortal. Gutenberg was one of the few who achieved this feat – though without the aid of any Faustian bargain. On the contrary, Gutenberg fought long and hard to receive just recompense for his ingenious invention. He died in 1468 in his late sixties, in the town of his birth. He had never married, and thus had no family to support him. Always a modest man, few people even knew of his existence – let alone of his era-transforming achievement, which had by then spread across Europe and was making fortunes for a new type of profession known as a ‘publisher’. All that Gutenberg’s neighbours knew was that he was an old man with a gushing grey beard, who lived on a small stipend provided by the ruling archbishop-elector and was looked after by his servant. He received few visitors and his funeral would be a simple affair. The church where it was held has long since been destroyed; the graveyard where he was buried has vanished, and with it the location of his tomb. This is the man named by Time magazine in 1997 as being responsible for the most important invention of the second millennium – an assessment which remains widely held to this day.

Johannes Gutenberg was born around 1400 in Mainz, on the River Rhine. This small city was an important harbour for barges trading on the Rhine between northern and southern Germany. At this time Germany was divided into dozens of small city-states. Mainz was of some importance, being ruled by an archbishop-elector – one of the seven electors who between them chose the Holy Roman Emperor.* This election was of immense significance, for the Holy Roman Empire claimed titular rule over much of central Europe, including the German states, eastern France, northern Italy, Austria and the Czech lands (Bohemia). Only France rivalled its power, though not its territorial claims.

Johannes’s father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, was a goldsmith by trade, and is thought to have held an important post in the ecclesiastical mint of Johann II von Nassau, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. Johannes’s mother was probably the daughter of a local merchant. Young Johannes followed his father into the mint, where he gained his first knowledge of metallurgy, which would play a crucial role in his later life. During this period the major trading cities of Europe all minted their own currencies, most of which had no official exchange rates with each other. This naturally led to widespread discrepancies of accepted value, in what many have seen as a classic example of muddled medieval practice. However, this very imprecision served a useful commercial purpose (other than simple overcharging). At the time, the Church forbade the sin of usury – the loan of money at a rate of interest. The imprecise exchange rates between the multiple currencies of Europe used at the annual international trade fairs enabled merchants, bankers and traders to extract a covert profit from their loans without attracting the attention of the local religious authorities.* This vital fact enabled trade to thrive throughout the length and breadth of Europe.

In 1411, the citizens of Mainz rose up against the archbishop-elector and his ruling elite. This caused the Gutenberg family to flee some hundred miles up the Rhine to the Franco-German city of Strasbourg. They almost certainly remained in the minting business – or at least some branch of expert metallurgy – which enabled the young Johannes to remain abreast of the latest developments. Sometime in his early thirties, Johannes Gutenberg had a moment of inspiration when all the elements of his metallurgic expertise came together. According to the prolific twentieth-century science writer Isaac Asimov, ‘although the concept of printing probably took no more than an instant of time to enter Gutenberg’s head, the practical development took at least twenty years’.

As with all such revolutionary inventions, printing relied upon the seemingly fortuitous coming-together of a number of apparently unrelated objects. These included serviceable paper or vellum (made of soft, thin calfskin); moulds that could easily be adapted for the mass production of precise metal type; and a strong pressing machine. One of Gutenberg’s vital contributions to printing resulted from his knowledge of metallurgy. It led him to understand that an alloy of tin, lead and antimony would be required for the metal type, rendering it strong enough to retain its precision yet soft enough not to damage the paper of the page that was being printed. His second crucial contribution was the invention of an oil-based ink capable of printing clearly. Existing water-based inks were liable to bleed across the page.

A further stroke of inspiration was to understand that if he cast entire alphabets of smaller metal blocks, and even common words, such moveable metal type could be laid out in a tray to produce an entire line of words. Lines of such trays could be laid out to form pages of coherent sentences. Paper could then be placed over them and pressed hard against the type by a machine which could be wound tight, much like an olive press. This process could be repeated, until such time as the letters needed to be inked once more. Such moveable type could also be rearranged to print an entirely different page of text, until all the separate paper pages of a work were piled up, ready to be placed in order and sewn or bound together as a book. This could then be inserted into a stamped or decorated leather cover for protection.

The only hindrance to this truly original plan was Gutenberg’s unique blend of commercial naivety, simple bad luck and general ineptitude. It is difficult to decide which of these was responsible for his first mention in the city records of Strasbourg, when in 1437 he appeared in court charged with breaking his promise to marry a local woman.

By this stage, the details of a moveable type printing press were evidently beginning to come together in his mind. It was time to move from the drawing board to practical construction, which would require a considerable sum of money. In order to achieve this aim, Gutenberg decided in 1439 to invest his modest savings in a commercial venture. This involved a scheme to manufacture polished metal mirrors, for sale at the great exhibition of the emperor Charlemagne’s relics that was due to take place at the nearby city of Aachen. The event was expected to attract large numbers of visitors from all over Germany and France, many of whom would doubtless wish for a souvenir. But the mirrors manufactured by Gutenberg and his business partners were to be more than just simple mementoes. According to the accompanying publicity, the mirrors were designed to enable the pilgrims to ‘capture holy light radiating from religious relics’.

That summer, the rains were such that the nearby river burst its banks and Aachen was inundated with serious floods. This caused the Charlemagne celebrations to be postponed until the following year. In one fell swoop, Gutenberg’s business partners, the few mirrors which had so far been produced, and all of his investment suddenly disappeared. He was forced to return home penniless. The great secret invention which he had hatched in his mind some half a dozen years earlier seemed more unrealizable than ever.

However, Gutenberg was not given to despair. During the following years he is known to have undertaken a number of preliminary trials of his printing idea. One of these produced a pamphlet containing a short work named Aventur und Kunst (Adventure and Art). In this he outlined his nascent idea – probably with the aim of attracting a financial backer. He also began work on copper engravings, in partnership with an artist who styled himself ‘The Master of Playing Cards’. These engravings and Gutenberg’s pamphlet caught the eye of a rich moneylender-cum-entrepreneur named Johann Fust, with whom Gutenberg struck a Fustian bargain. Fust was so impressed with Gutenberg’s idea that he loaned him 800 guilders.* Fust also persuaded his future son-in-law Peter Schöffer to join the project. Schöffer was a scribe who had worked in Paris, where he had learned to design typefaces.

By 1452, Gutenberg had set up a workshop in Mainz. At this stage, he either decided – or was persuaded by Fust – to lessen the risk of his enterprise by using his printing press for two separate purposes. Gutenberg’s initial idea had been to print meticulously produced high-quality bibles. These would require much time and effort. Each page would contain two columns of forty-two lines each (with wide additional margins to accommodate engraved or hand-drawn artistic decorations). In all, each bible would consist of 1,282 pages. They would be more than just holy books; they would be nothing less than divine art. Properly marketed to wealthy religious institutions, they would take on the status and rarity of sacred relics, and could well achieve prices similar to those of such rare items. Gutenberg’s original aim was to produce 300 such bibles, which would take a matter of years to produce.

But Fust was interested in a more rapid return on his investment. He quickly grasped that Gutenberg’s moveable type printing machine could be employed for a diversity of tasks. Fust insisted that in between printing pages of the bibles, the machine could be set to work producing cheaper, more readily saleable items. These included Latin grammars, which were always in demand. On top of this, the Church was now in the market for thousands of printed documents which, after they had been authenticated by the papal authorities, could be sold as indulgences.*

By 1455, Johannes Gutenberg had finished printing his first batch of bibles. It is estimated that he completed some 180 copies of these forty-two-line editions – most printed on paper, others on vellum. In order to continue production, he found that he needed further investment and was loaned a further 800 guilders by Fust. However, within a year Gutenberg and Fust had fallen out, with Fust accusing Gutenberg of siphoning off funds for his own private purposes. In fact, Gutenberg’s lack of efficient business practice was the more likely explanation for the losses.

Fust now demanded the immediate and complete repayment of his 1,600 guilders, plus 6 per cent interest, amounting to a grand total of 2,026 guilders. Of course, this would not have been expressed as such, on account of the ban on usury. (More likely, the extra money would have been charged as ‘late fees’. If money was repaid at once, or within a very short period, no fee was incurred. However, as the length of the loan increased, so did the ‘late fees’. This was usury, plain and simple, transmogrified into another form of transaction by the use of different legal terminology.)†A trial took place at the archbishop-elector’s court in Mainz. The verdict went in Fust’s favour, awarding him control of Gutenberg’s workshop, as well as the stock of more than half of the bibles, complete or otherwise, that Gutenberg had printed. Consequently, Gutenberg was declared bankrupt.

In 1459, Gutenberg left Mainz with the aim of setting up a new business some 100 miles away, in the different jurisdiction of Bamberg. Here he began using some of the moveable type he had retained in order to print some more bibles. How many, and how complete these were, remains debatable. Gutenberg never printed his name or the name of the press on any of his bibles.

Back in Mainz, the new enterprise established by Fust and Schöffer began printing what became known as the Mainz Psalter (a Book of Psalms), a commercially successful work whose frontispiece included the name of the publisher, date of publication and owner of the printing press. No mention of Gutenberg’s name.

By 1462 Gutenberg had returned to Mainz, but was soon forced to flee when the latest archbishop-elector, Adolf II von Nassau, was overthrown in a popular uprising. However, within three years Adolf II was reinstated and the ageing Gutenberg was invited to return. By now, Adolf II had been informed of the honour which Gutenberg had brought to Mainz with his new invention (though there was no inkling of its unprecedented importance). Adolf II awarded Gutenberg the minor title Hofmann (gentleman of the court), which came with an annual stipend, a ceremonial uniform for him to wear when attending state functions, and a tax-free allowance of 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of local wine. Gutenberg would have little time to enjoy these benefits. He died three years later, at the age of sixty-eight.

Despite the modest honour bestowed upon Gutenberg by Adolf II, it would be more than thirty years before Johannes Gutenberg was officially recognized as the inventor of the moveable type printing press. By this time, his invention had come into its own. As many as 9 million copies of 30,000 separate titles had been printed on moveable type machines and were in circulation around Europe. They were issued not only in Latin, the language of scholarship, but also in languages ranging from Italian to Flemish, German to Spanish, even English – their information thus being available to all citizens who could read. In this manner, the printed dissemination of knowledge – for anyone who was literate – became arguably the most significant extension of democracy in Europe since the establishment of democracy itself, in Ancient Greece some 1,500 years previously.

* The other six German electors were the Archbishops of Trier and Cologne, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony and the Margrave of Brandenburg.

* In modern parlance, this practice is known as arbitrage.

* Equivalent values are notoriously difficult to gauge over the centuries, but contemporary records indicate that an artisan, or skilled worker, could expect to earn around forty guilders a year.

* The buying of an indulgence granted the purchaser a reduction of the time they would spend in Purgatory after their death. In Purgatory, the dead sinner underwent painful and appropriate torture for the sins they had committed during their earthly life. Only then could their ‘purged’ soul arise to take its place in Paradise.

† Modern examples of such financial art can be seen in legal distinctions between ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘tax evasion’; or ‘investment’ and ‘gambling’.

CHAPTER 2

JAN VAN EYCK

WHEN PRINTING SPREAD SOUTH across the Alps, it first reached Venice in 1469. By this time the city was well established as a major trading centre, with commercial links extending throughout the Aegean and the Middle East. It was accustomed to the arrival of novelties, and its entrepreneurial merchants were quick to spot the commercial possibilities provided by such innovations. Consequently, within just a few years, Venice had established itself as the publishing capital of Renaissance Italy, and soon developed from the printed word to more accomplished representations. The following is but one example.

In 1500, Leonardo da Vinci and his mathematician friend Luca Pacioli travelled to Venice in order to publish Pacioli’s work on geometry, Divina Proportione, for which Leonardo had provided a number of etchings of regular three-dimensional solids. These are not quite so simple as they might sound, and they provide a fine example of the ‘rebirth’ of classical knowledge that was taking place in Italy.

In the third century BC, the Greek mathematician Archimedes had made a list of regular solids, known as polyhedra (meaning ‘many faces’). An icosahedron (ikosi, ‘twenty’) has twenty faces that are all equilateral triangles. Cutting off the triangle points on this three-dimensional figure creates twelve new pentagon faces (five sides), and the twenty triangle faces become hexagons (six sides). This is what is known as a truncated icosahedron.

A simple visualization of a truncated icosahedron is an inflated soccer ball with twelve black pentagons and twenty white hexagons. Leonardo’s drawing did not contain an inflated truncated icosahedron, but it was given a convincing three-dimensional appearance by having its sides depicted as strips of wood. This had the effect of rendering a surprising visual simplicity to the geometric complexity of the objects he drew. As we shall see, this would have a transformative effect upon one of the finest artists of the northern Renaissance.

The main purpose of Pacioli’s work was to demonstrate aesthetic and geometric proportion with particular reference to architecture and painting. By this time, Leonardo was already renowned throughout Italy as one of the finest masters of oil painting. (Three years later he would begin painting the Mona Lisa.) Indeed, it is the revolution in art brought about by the new medium of oil painting which is most readily associated with the Italian Renaissance.

Yet, ironically, this new method of painting with oils – which would transform Renaissance art – was not invented in Italy. Like printing, it originated in the Other Renaissance, and would not travel south across the Alps until 1474, some five years after the arrival in Italy of Gutenberg’s printing press. But, as with the printing press, the Italians were quick to discover and exploit the multiple complexities of the medium.

Such facts do not denigrate the achievements of the northern Renaissance; they merely indicate an evolving pattern that took place in a number of fields and which came to the fore in the Renaissance. A discovery originally made in the north of Europe would often undergo a dramatic development when it reached Italy, which caused many to mistake the development for the actual discovery itself.

The classic example of this is Galileo’s ‘invention’ of the telescope. Galileo had never seen a telescope, but he had heard of the invention of a device known as a perspicillum in the Netherlands, and had been told how it worked. Magnification of an image could be produced by placing two simple lenses in a tube, and the effect could enlarge a distant object by up to ten times. In the Netherlands, the perspicillum was regarded as a mere novelty, and treated as little more than a toy. However, Galileo quickly understood the huge potential of such a device. He set to work at once, experimenting with various versions of this original idea: different lenses, placed at varying lengths apart in the tube. He quickly managed to construct a perspicillum far superior to the Dutch device – one which was capable of magnifying images over thirty times their original size as seen by the naked eye. Galileo decided that his instrument was so much more effective than the Dutch perspicillum that he gave his own device a new name: ‘telescope’ (from the Greek, ‘see at a distance’). Galileo was soon producing even more powerful telescopes, which were capable of examining the night sky. In this way, Galileo’s ‘invention’ launched modern astronomy, enabling the discovery and identification of phenomena which had never before been observed – such as the craters on the surface of the moon and the rings around the planet Saturn. But while the original perspicillum may have been improved almost beyond recognition, it still remained a northern European invention – despite Galileo’s claims (and attempts to patent ‘his’ new device).

Prior to the arrival of oil painting in Italy, most of the early Renaissance artists used tempera or fresco. In tempera, the ground pigment (colour) is mixed with a water-soluble substance such as egg yolk, and sometimes vinegar as well as water. As the mixture dries, it binds the pigment to the painting surface, such as planed wood or dry plaster. This method can be overpainted, and it was typically used, along with gold leaf, to create Greek icons. However, the method can be slow, as layer upon layer of translucent paint is applied to build up effects such as volume, and the richness of colour which emerges as the painting ages.

With fresco, on the other hand, the ground pigment is mixed with water and applied directly to fresh (fresco) damp plaster. This enables the artist to spread the paint over the surface more easily. As the plaster dries, the pigment is absorbed to become part of the plaster, and thus part of the wall itself – achieving a remarkable vividness, typified by Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The disadvantage of this method is that the paint soon dries, and cannot then be altered. This means that the artist can only paint a patch of the surface each day, and the method requires a precisely pre-conceived idea that can be painted with relative speed.

The pigment used in oil paint, on the other hand, is blended with linseed oil, poppyseed oil, walnut oil or some such. This ensures that it does not dry so quickly, and thus enables the artist to blend his colours on the canvas (or board). This achieves both a richness and a depth of colour, as well as a far greater range of light, shade and nuanced blends. It also allows the artist to stand back and assess the effect of his brushwork, which can, if necessary, be overpainted. The finished work can be preserved with a transparent glaze, which adds its own radiant effect.

It is now known that the earliest use of oil paint was by Buddhist monks sometime during the mid-600s AD, in central Afghanistan. The monks painted images of the Buddha on mountainsides or cave walls, and these were preserved from wind, sand and rain by the use of glazes. Over the centuries, this method eventually became known in Europe, but it was little used. And when it was, its more subtle qualities were seldom employed. Not until the advent of the Dutch artist Jan van Eyck were the qualities of oil painting fully exploited. For this reason, some continue to credit van Eyck as the inventor of oil painting, and in many ways his numerous innovations and sheer skill lend more than a little truth to this claim.

Jan van Eyck seems to have been born some years before 1390, in the Flemish town of Maaseik. It stands on the eastern border of Belgium, on the banks of the River Maas (Meuse), and the artist took his name from an alternative spelling of the town’s second syllable, which means ‘oak’. Little is known of his early life, apart from the fact that he quickly mastered the art of painting – especially in oils, which were very much the coming fashion in Flanders during the early 1400s. He was taken on as a court artist by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, the Habsburg ruler of Flanders and the Netherlands. Philip, who spent much of his time in Bruges, had helped develop the city port which lay some ten miles inland, with a canal stretching from the coast to the city’s own network of canals. Philip’s court at Bruges was one of the most lavish in Europe, largely due to the economic prosperity of the city.

The strategic location of Bruges would establish it as the major commercial city of northern Europe. The sea trade to the east was controlled by the Hanseatic League, an economic and defensive alliance of coastal cities whose ports stretched from Hamburg and thence to the Baltic and as far east as Novgorod in Russia. The extensive and profitable wool trade from England passed through Bruges on its way south to northern Italy. From the early 1300s this trade was also carried from Bruges by Genoese and Florentine galleys, around the Iberian coast to the Mediterranean ports of Italy. At the time, Florence was the main commercial centre for the wool trade and increasingly under the influence of the Medici banking family, who had an extensive network of agents all over Europe and their main northern offices in Bruges.

At the same time, a similarly wealthy German family – the Fuggers of Augsburg in Bavaria – owned mining interests from Hungary to Bohemia and Silesia. In particular, they held a monopoly on the copper trade. Although their business was centred in Augsburg, it had a network of agents throughout eastern Europe, and was strongly represented in Bruges. This concentration of international trade and political interests meant that Bruges soon had representatives from all major European trading nations, a thriving port, and the major bourse (or stock exchange) on the continent.

The original bourse, where merchants met to buy and sell ‘shares’ to finance joint enterprises, was established as early as 1307 at the tavern run by the Van der Beurze family, hence its name. Similar institutions would soon spring up all over Europe, wherever an enterprise was too costly, or risky, to be undertaken by one owner. The original model for such commercial activity had developed in Venice, well before it became institutionalized in Bruges. However, it was the bourse model that soon spread to major ports and the big annual trade fairs held at such cities as Lyon, Frankfurt and Geneva. There appear to have been certain elements common to all these early capitalistic exchanges: a thriving commercially minded bourgeoisie, an entrepreneurial ethos willing to take risks in order to achieve gain, and a form of loosely democratic city governance (often corrupt, but giving its citizens a degree of belief in their own liberty).*

The wealth generated by the merchants of Bruges enabled many of them to become patrons of the arts. Originally, paintings were commissioned of religious subjects; but merchants, much like their rulers, soon began employing artists to paint their portraits. Unlike in the Italian Renaissance, where portraits tended to be of aristocrats, princes and Church dignitaries (and their various mistresses), the painters of Bruges found themselves commissioned to paint portraits of a more homely aspect. Instead of palatial or classical settings, patrons tended to prefer domestic interiors, with rather more discreet indications of their wealth. The career of Jan van Eyck typically reflects this social development.

It was in 1425, when van Eyck was in his early thirties, that he became attached to the court of Philip the Good. Besides painting, his duties also included work as a valet de chambre, a loosely defined court position which not only secured him a regular income but also involved him in various extracurricular duties. Between 1426 and 1429 he seems to have travelled on a series of well-paid ‘secret’ commissions for the duke ‘in certain distant lands’. It is probable that these were little more than diplomatic tours furthering relations with European trading partners, but they were certainly extensive. According to some sources, evidence for this could be seen in the remarkable accuracy of van Eyck’s portrayal of Jerusalem in the background of a painting he completed some years later. Unfortunately, this work is now lost, though a contemporary copy of it suggests a remarkably detailed verisimilitude.

It is thought that Jan van Eyck may well have served his apprenticeship under his older brother Hubert, who was also a talented artist. Yet from the outset it was Jan who exhibited exceptional skill and imaginative vision in his use of oils. His first transcendent masterpiece was the Ghent Altarpiece, which consists of multiple panels depicting religious scenes and is regarded to this day as one of the masterworks of European art of any period. The sheer immensity of this work, which was to become a polyptych altarpiece for St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, indicates that van Eyck was assisted by several other contemporary Flemish artists. Initially, the chief of these was Jan’s older brother Hubert, though he is known to have died in 1426. After this, it is speculated that Jan’s younger brother Lambert, also a fine artist, acted in a supervisory role over the other artists, as well as making major contributions of his own.

The twelve interior panels are on two levels. Central to the upper level is a depiction of Christ the King, crowned and seated on his throne, and clad in a bejewelled crimson robe. On either side of him are panels of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. The two outer panels on this level depict a nude Adam, a fig leaf modestly obscuring his nakedness, and a nude Eve, holding in her right hand a small lemon (indicating the apple containing the knowledge of Good and Evil). These are said to be amongst the first realistic depictions of the human nude during the early Renaissance. (Unknown to any Flemish artists, the Florentine Masaccio was at the same time painting a naked Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden.)

In the Ghent Altarpiece, the most impressive painting is the large central panel on the lower level. This depicts groups of saints and soldiers, sinners and clergy, all assembled in a rural landscape around an altar on which stands the symbolic Lamb of God, surrounded by a kneeling group of worshipping winged angels.

In all, the painting of the Ghent Altarpiece took just over a decade, being started sometime in the mid-1420s and completed in 1432. (An indication of Philip the Good’s generosity can be seen in the fact that he allowed his court artist to be employed for so long on this major task.) The work also provides a clue to the social structure developing in Flanders during this period. This vastly expensive work was not commissioned by the head of state but by one Jodocus Vijd, a wealthy merchant who would eventually become the mayor of Ghent. Jodocus and his wife, Lysbette, appear on their knees praying on the back panels, which become visible when the altarpiece is closed.

The use of oil paint in the Ghent Altarpiece is immensely sophisticated, entailing full employment of the superior subtleties of hue and density, shading, solidity and overall dexterity of this medium. Oil painting had yet to reach Italy or play any part in the Italian Renaissance. Van Eyck’s near-contemporaries living in Florence, such as Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, were still using tempera. Just a few decades later, Botticelli would paint his Adoration of the Magi in tempera. Like the