How does the Northern Artistic Renaissance differ from the Italian Artistic Renaissance?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: How does the Northern Artistic Renaissance differ from the Italian Artistic Renaissance?
Position1 of 2›: Northern Art Renaissance
Argument‹5 of 5: Increased use of oil paint

The climate in Northern Europe was cold and arid. Due to this, most painting was done with oil paint and the techniques to use oil were refined. The colors were rich and dark, like jewel tones. This gave the painting a sense of realism and heavy lines of texture.

The argument

The geography in Northern Europe had much to do with the color and medium that Renaissance artists used. Oil paint was used as early as the twelfth century in Northern Europe but flourished after famous artists perfected the technique. Using oil paint offered artists much flexibility in their color and composition. It was slow drying and easy to layer, which allowed artists to paint longer strokes and blend colors together. Jewels and metals, such as lapis lazuli and gold, were used to mix with the oil and apply to the painting, giving them metallic and vibrant colors. These colors were very expensive; only wealthy patrons could afford to buy them for their artist to use, but they gave the paintings an extra sense of depth and opulence. The oil paint was much more realistic than the tempera used in Italy. Artists in Northern Europe could create highly realistic shadows and physical proportions with the strategic use of oil paint. For example, an artist in Northern Italy could easily replicate the shadows required to show muscle tone in a figure's stomach or arms using shading with oil paint. The detail that oil paint allowed made portraiture very popular during the art renaissance. Artists could accurately capture a patron's figure and face using oil paint. Famous artists, such as Jan Van Eyck, were commissioned by royal courts across Northern Europe to provide portraits of the nobility.

Premises

[P1]Northern Renaissance artists increasingly used oil paint, which dried slowly and layered easily, letting them blend colors and paint longer strokes. [P2] Mixing in jewels and metals like lapis lazuli and gold gave their work vibrant, opulent colour that only wealthy patrons could afford. [P3] Oil paint was more realistic than Italy's tempera, enabling lifelike shadows and proportions that made portraiture, as by Jan van Eyck, hugely popular. [C] Therefore, because of its increased use of oil paint, the Northern Art Renaissance differs from the Italian.

Counter-arguments

Oil paint marks a genuine early difference, but it is a matter of degree and chronology rather than a clean dividing line. Italian painters adopted oil themselves over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — Antonello da Messina is traditionally credited with helping transmit the technique, and the Venetians, above all Titian, made oil on canvas central to Italian practice — so 'oil in the North, tempera in the South' describes an early moment, not an enduring contrast between the two schools. Reducing the difference to medium also understates the more substantive distinctions usually drawn: Italian art's revival of classical antiquity, idealised proportion and monumental religious and mythological subjects, versus the Northern emphasis on minute empirical observation, domestic detail and bourgeois portraiture. The medium enabled the Northern style but did not by itself constitute the difference. The body's example also slips geographically, referring to 'an artist in Northern Italy' where it means Northern Europe.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Increased use of oil paint distinguishes the two only at an early date; Italian artists such as Antonello da Messina and Titian adopted oil, so the medium is not a permanent North–South divide. [Rejecting C] The deeper differences between the Northern and Italian Renaissances — classical revival and idealisation versus empirical detail — go well beyond the choice of medium.