While Masaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi invented the Renaissance in Florence, a subtler revolution was taking place in the North.

In the Flemish towns of Bruges, Brussels, Ghent and Tournai, under the patronage of the Burgundian Dukes, a new kind of painting emerged, based on the use of pure colours (possible through the new, refined oils) and closely observed natural detail, unified through the fall of light.

With these innovations an extraordinary vividness and realism were possible, in painted panels commissioned by churchmen and princes throughout Europe.

This lecture looks at the miraculous painting of Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memlinc and the ‘Flemish Primitives’, and how this inspired successive generations of Northern artists (Durer, Holbein, Cranach, Bosch, Breughel et. al.) to a Renaissance of their own.