France

Francis I, despite his military reverses in Italy, was enamoured of all things Italian. He commissioned the celebrated goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini to execute both tableware and sculpture and prevailed upon friendly rulers in Italy to send him works by Titian and Bronzino and casts of sculpture. He also imported Italian artists to design, build, and decorate his palaces, the Château de Madrid and Fontainebleau, both outside Paris. Rosso arrived in France in 1530, followed two years later by his fellow Italian, the Mannerist Francesco Primaticcio. In the gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau, Rosso initiated a new and intricate decorative system in which stucco and painting form a richly luxuriant complex—the plastic realization of the late Raphaelesque decorative manner. Primaticcio, who had been trained by Giulio Romano at Mantua and influenced by Parmigianino, took over Rosso’s leading position on the latter’s death in 1540. His Ulysses Gallery at Fontainebleau continued and refined Rosso’s elaborate system of painted narratives surrounded by convoluted strapwork, elegant figures, and swags in stucco. French artists at the court, such as the two Jean Cousins and Antoine Caron, quickly adopted aspects of Italian Mannerism to create a style of painting characterized as the school of Fontainebleau. Less of a tendency to mimic the fashion was noticeable in Corneille de Lyon and Jean and François Clouet, whose portraits, while exhibiting some Mannerist qualities, recalled 15th-century court portraiture.

Spain

During the first decade of the 16th century, Fernando Yáñez, who may have assisted Leonardo da Vinci on the “Battle of Anghiari” in 1505, executed works showing a good knowledge of Italian Renaissance developments. Further Italianate tendencies emerged strongly in the Valencian works of Juan de Macip and his son Juan de Juanes. Full-fledged Mannerism made its appearance in the Seville cathedral in the “Descent from the Cross” (1547) by Pedro Campaña (Pieter de Kempeneer), an artist from Brussels, and subsequently in the refined court portraiture of Anthonis Mor (Sir Anthony More) and Alonso Sánchez Coello, whose royal portraits possess an elegance reminiscent of Bronzino’s Florentine style. Although Campaña’s paintings are Mannerist in composition, they also foreshadow the expressiveness characteristic of Spanish style in the hands of Luis de Morales and El Greco.

From 1546 until his death in 1586, Morales remained almost exclusively in the provincial isolation of Badajoz, developing a highly individual art of great spiritual intensity, radically separated from the Mannerist mainstream. El Greco, though born in Crete, was more fully conversant with Italian painting, having studied with Titian in Venice and later residing in Rome for two years. His Spanish paintings exploit the anatomical attenuations of Roman Mannerism, but the vividly emotional qualities of his colour and paint handling depend almost entirely upon Venetian precedents—Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano in particular. Under the influence of Counter-Reformation mysticism in Toledo after 1575, he developed an increasingly personal and nonrealistic manner, indulging in space and supernatural light effects. The narrative fervour of his style stands in sharp contrast to the stylish formalism of international Mannerism.

Germany

Albrecht Dürer was the first important German artist who displayed a profound understanding of Italian Renaissance art and theory. Trained in Nürnberg in the late Gothic tradition, he had ambitions even as a youth far beyond the narrow confines of his native city and the late medieval style. He traveled to Switzerland and the Rhine Valley and may have been in the Low Countries. Shortly after his marriage in 1494 he made a brief trip to Italy, where he studied the works of Mantegna and the Venetians. In 1505–07 he was again in Italy and was on intimate terms with Giovanni Bellini. Dürer was interested in what he felt to be the “secrets” of Italian art and in the new humanism carried north by such friends as the German humanist Willibald Pirkheimer. As a result, his paintings maintain the northerners’ love of detail, rendered meticulously in oil, but he joined to it the Italian interest in broadly conceived compositions. In “The Paumgärtner Altarpiece” of 1502–04 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), for example, the saints in the wings are depicted with the scrolls and a complexity of composition more reminiscent of a heraldic achievement, while the broad planes of the architecture and the large, simple figures of the adoration shown on the central panel suggest an Italianate conception. The “Four Apostles” (Alte Pinakothek) of 1526 ultimately derives from the wings of Bellini’s Frari altarpiece. Dürer’s close association with the Venetian painter and admiration for his art can be seen in the broad simple folds of the drapery, the breadth of handling of the heads, and the quality of the light depicted.

Although he executed a large number of important paintings, Dürer is perhaps best known for his woodcuts and engravings, by which he raised printmaking from a minor to a major art (see printmaking: Printmaking in the 16th century). Dürer’s prints, paintings, and writings had such a profound influence on 16th-century art in Germany that it is sometimes difficult to realize that he died in 1528.

In the 16th century the Renaissance, as far as German painting was concerned, tended to follow the lines established by Dürer. Two artists of note do emerge, but their styles are so individual that they do not represent a national school.

Lucas Cranach the Elder was deeply influenced by Dürer and the Danube school, an early 16th-century tradition of landscape painting that was in some ways a transition between the styles of Gothic and Renaissance painting. By 1505 he had moved to Wittenberg and become court painter to the electors of Saxony. There his style changed radically, epitomizing the dichotomy that existed in 16th-century northern European painting. He developed in Wittenberg the full-length portrait in which the sitter is rendered with consummate skill and fidelity. Cranach was a personal friend of Martin Luther and is probably best known for his portraits of the great reformer. At the same time, his “Reclining River Nymph at the Fountain” of 1518 (Museum of Fine Art, Leipzig) illustrates his knowledge of Giorgione and Venetian painting and points the way to the group of highly erotic female nudes of his later works.

Hans Holbein the Younger was trained by his father in Augsburg but took up residence in Basel, Switzerland, about 1515. He early developed a portrait style that was greatly sought after by the burghers of Basel. His portraits of Burgomaster Meyer and his wife (1516; Kunstmuseum-Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel) or of Bonifacius Amerbach (1519; Kunstmuseum-Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel) show his gift for characterization. In 1526 he made his first trip to London, where he painted “Sir Thomas More with His Household” (1527). In 1532 religious troubles in Basel were so intense that he accepted a position at the English court and left the city forever. He is perhaps best known for his portraits of Henry VIII, Henry’s bride Anne of Cleves (1539; Louvre), and Christina of Denmark (1538; National Gallery, London), at one time considered by the King as a possible bride. “Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve” (“The Ambassadors,” 1533; National Gallery, London), which depicts two French ambassadors to the English court, is probably the greatest tour de force of his years in England. The two sitters are rendered faithfully in a well-defined room and are surrounded by the trappings of 16th-century humanism—e.g., books, globes, musical instruments. Holbein’s portraits were all painted with a great understanding of the sitter and often have a note of Italian elegance. His surfaces tend to be tight and hard, yet there is a certain expansiveness created by the positioning within the frame. He established a portrait tradition in England and also contributed to the popularity of the miniature in that country.