Beyond Italy: the Northern Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation

The Renaissance eventually spread beyond Italy, developing a distinct character in the north that combined the late Flemish Gothic tradition with Italian influences arriving after 1500. Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) perfected oil painting technique in Bruges, with works such as "The Arnolfini Portrait" (1434) and the "Ghent Altarpiece" (1432), while Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg traveled to Italy twice, in 1494-1495 and 1505-1507, fusing Northern precision with Italian theories of proportion. Northern humanism found its foremost representative in Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Christian humanism supplied philological tools that reformers would later put to very different use.