Impact of Protestant Reformation on Northern European Art in the 16th Century

In the year of 1517, Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in protest against the Catholic church and thus began the Protestant Reformation.  Europe at the time was predominately Catholic, but after the Reformation began, more and more countries adopted Protestantism as their national religion.  The Protestant Reformation changed how artists worked in Northern Europe; patrons commissioned portraits and small paintings that depicted landscapes and/or other secular subject matter for the home.  Due to this interest in other types of artwork, many cities in Northern Europe became thriving art centers with outdoor markets where someone with money could go and buy something from an artist and take it home the same day.  Other forms of art also became quite popular, such as woodwork, metalwork, tapestries, ceramics, textiles, and finally, printmaking.  

Printmaking became an important part of how artists became renowned for their works because it was easy for artists to create multiple copies of one particular artwork, and instead of selling the original, they could sell copies for less money to a larger audience.  One such artist who found great success in using printmaking to make a name for himself is Albrecht Durer. Durer’s attention to detail is the highlight of his work.  He greatly admired the Italian artistic ideals of classical body shapes and types, had an interest in anatomy, worked with religious subject matter and an overall sense of balance and harmony.  "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is one of Durer’s best known woodcuts, which he created to go along with other woodcuts in the publication "The Apocalypse."  This work is not simply four horsemen: Durer created a complex and dynamic composition which allows the viewer to feel the wrath of the horsemen.  Not only are the horsemen mowing down common people, this woodcut shows that no one is exempt from the Apocalypse, with members of the church under-hoof alongside peasants and merchants.  

As mentioned earlier, patrons wanted works that were secular, works that conveyed the plight of the common worker, works that discussed lifestyles different from the ones lived within the walls the paintings were displayed upon.  Pieter Bruegel was commissioned to create a series of works based on the four seasons.  In “The Harvesters,” he portrayed the harvest season, with field workers eating lunch and socializing with a background of a partially harvested field and architecture that isn’t detailed, but is partially hidden and obscured.  In another, called “Return of the Hunters,”  it is winter, snow is on the ground, people are skating on the ice in the background, and there is a group of men and a pack of hunting dogs in the foreground.  These paintings show large amounts of information and are even large themselves.  Bruegel’s paintings show attention to detail and are naturalistic in the sense that they display proper proportions, and nature is depicted without surrealism.

Another artist, this one from Antwerp, is the artist Quentin Massys.  His painting called “Money Changer and His Wife” is a depiction of a goldsmith weighing coins and jewelry with a suspended balance in his hand, while his wife watches and idly flips the pages of her Book of Hours.  This is a great example of a secular painting that has a moral, as was common during the time.  Sometimes people commissioned works that had moral connotations, but they didn’t want it to be straight out of the Bible.  According to the textbook, this painting “concerns the challenge of godly living in a worldly society, but wealth itself is not necessarily the root of the problem,” (701, Stokstadt).  This painting tries to show the viewer that the problem with piety in society is not with money or worldly affairs, but lies in the inattentiveness of people’s devotions and prayers.