The Dignity and Grandeur of Dieric Bouts the Elder

Dieric Bouts the Elder - Portrait of a Man - c. 1470 - Oil on wood, 31 x 22 cm - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Dieric Bouts the Elder - The Ordeal by Fire - c. 1460 - Oil on wood, 324 x 182 cm - Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels - This painting is one panel of a diptych that was painted by Bouts towards the end of his life. The paintings recount a horrific misadventure that befell Otto III and his treacherous wife. Bouts had found the story in a 12th-century chronicle written by Godefroy, Bishop of Viterbo. (click photo for larger image)Like many painters of his generation, Dieric Bouts the Elder (born c. 1415, now the Netherlands - died May 6, 1475, now Belgium) was heavily influenced by masters Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Later on in his career, however, a greater severity and dignity in the treatment of figures; appears in his work. The facial expressions of the figures in his paintings show an extraordinary restraint that appears as a deliberately controlled intensity, made with great spiritual effect.

The Naturalism and Poetry of Robert Campin

Master of Flémalle - Mérode Altarpiece - c. 1427 - Oil on wood, 64,1 x 117,8 cm - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Master of Flémalle - Madonna with the Child by a Fireplace - 1433-35 - Oil on panel, 34 x 24 cm - The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (click photo for larger image)Robert Campin (also known as the Master of Flémalle, according to most scholars) was one of the earliest and greatest masters of Flemish painting. Characterized by a naturalistic conception of form and a poetic representation of the objects of daily life, Campin’s work marks the break with the prevailing International Gothic style and prefigures the achievements of Jan van Eyck and the painters of the Northern Renaissance.

Claus Sluter: The Simultaneous Realist-Spiritualist

Claus Sluter - Well of Moses - 1395-1406 - Stone, height: 183 cm - Musée Archéologique, Dijon (click photo for larger image)Claus Sluter - Memorial to Philip the Bold - 1389-1406 - Stone - Charterhouse of Champmol, Dijon (click photo for larger image)Claus Sluter was born c. 1340, in what is now The Netherlands, and he died at some point between Sept. 24, 1405 and Jan. 30, 1406, in Dijon, Burgundy (now in France). Sluter was an influential master of early Netherlandish sculpture, who moved beyond the dominant French taste of the time and into highly individual monumental, naturalistic forms.

The works of Sluter are infused with a simultaneous realism, spirituality and monumental grandeur. His influence was far reaching, among both painters and sculptors of 15th-century northern Europe. From ducal archives, he is known to have entered the service of Philip II the Bold, duke of Burgundy, in around 1385. Philip II was ruler of the Netherlands and regent of France in the last decades of the century.

Spiritualist and naturalist in one, Sluter epitomized in sculpture the growing awareness of an individualized nature with discoverable laws and an enduring grandeur.