Before the Renaissance, There Was International Gothic

Feature image: Upper Rhenish Master, The Little Garden of Paradise, c. 1410-20, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, permanent loan from the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Public Domain via Städel Museum

Around 1400, a panel painter in Prague, a manuscript illuminator in Paris, and an altarpiece painter in Florence were working in strikingly similar ways. Their figures stood tall and slender in flowing robes, their skies were laid in gold leaf, and their saints and kings wore the finest silks a court could buy. Art historians call this shared style International Gothic, and from the 1380s to the 1430s, it was the most fashionable way to paint in Europe. It grew out of the royal and ducal courts of the late Middle Ages, traveled with diplomats, brides, and portable works of art, and left behind some of the most beautiful objects of the entire medieval period.

The name came centuries later. The French art historian Louis Courajod, a curator at the Louvre, introduced the term International Gothic at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the late Gothic art that appeared almost at once in France, Burgundy, Bohemia, England, and northern Italy. German scholars preferred their own terms, the Schöner Stil, or Beautiful Style, and the Weicher Stil, or Soft Style, both of which describe the period's gentle, rounded figures and cascading drapery. Some historians have argued that the label International Gothic smooths over real regional differences, and the debate remains open, though International Gothic is still the most widely accepted name for the movement.

International Gothic was, above all, a court style, shaped by rulers who competed through the art they commissioned. One of its great centers was Prague, where Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, turned his capital into a cultural crossroads in the fourteenth century. Around 1380, the anonymous painter known as the Master of the Třeboň Altarpiece created the Třeboň Altarpiece (c. 1380) for the Augustinian church of St. Giles in Třeboň, setting graceful figures against deep, glowing settings. The National Gallery Prague regards the altarpiece as the beginning of the Bohemian Beautiful Style, the local form of International Gothic, and three of its double-sided wings survive today.

Royal marriages moved International Gothic from court to court. When Richard II of England married Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of Charles IV, the union linked Prague and London, and the most celebrated English work of the period followed. The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395-99), a small hinged panel made for Richard's private devotion, shows the king kneeling with three patron saints before the Virgin and Child, who are surrounded by eleven angels in brilliant blue robes. Its painter remains unknown, and the National Gallery, London, still catalogs the work as English or French. The museum acquired it in 1929 from Wilton House, the Pembroke family seat that gave it its name.

Whether made in Prague, London, or Dijon, International Gothic paintings share a recognizable set of qualities. Figures are elongated and elegant, with small heads, sloping shoulders, and long gowns that fall in soft, looping folds. Backgrounds glow with gold leaf, and ultramarine, the costly blue pigment ground from lapis lazuli, appears wherever a patron wanted to display wealth. International Gothic painters lavished attention on fashionable clothing, heraldry, and the small pleasures of courtly life, and they began to study the natural world closely, filling their scenes with carefully observed birds, flowers, and animals.

The Burgundian court at Dijon offers one of the clearest examples of International Gothic in practice. In 1393, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, commissioned Melchior Broederlam of Ypres to gild and paint the wings of the Crucifixion Altarpiece (1393-99), carved by Jacques de Baerze for the Chartreuse de Champmol, the monastery Philip had founded outside the city. Broederlam's painted exteriors, completed in 1399, set the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Flight into Egypt within fanciful towers and rocky landscapes. They are among the earliest Netherlandish paintings that can be confidently attributed to a named artist, and they remain at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon.

Some of the finest International Gothic painting appears on the pages of private prayer books. John, Duke of Berry, brother of the French king and one of the great collectors of his age, employed three brothers from Nijmegen, Paul Limbourg, Herman Limbourg, and Jean Limbourg, to illuminate his books of hours. Around 1412, they began the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1412-16), whose calendar pages pair each month with a scene of courtly feasting or seasonal labor beneath a blue arc of zodiac signs. On the January page, the duke sits at a banquet table in a blue robe, welcoming guests for the New Year's exchange of gifts.

The project stopped abruptly in 1416, when the duke and all three brothers died within months of one another, possibly of plague. The manuscript passed through several owners, and Jean Colombe completed many of its unfinished pages in the 1480s, roughly seventy years after the Limbourgs set down their brushes. The Duke of Aumale acquired the book in 1856, and today it is kept as MS 65 at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, where its fragility limits public viewing to rare occasions, making it the most famous International Gothic work that almost no one has seen in person.

Italy helped give rise to International Gothic through Sienese painters such as Simone Martini, who worked at the papal court in Avignon in the 1330s and 1340s, and by the early fifteenth century Italian artists absorbed the courtly manner as it returned from the north. Its fullest Italian expression arrived with Gentile da Fabriano, who was in Florence by 1420. The wealthy banker Palla Strozzi commissioned him to paint an altarpiece for the family chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, and the result, the Adoration of the Magi (1423), is often called the culminating work of International Gothic painting. A long procession of kings, horses, hunting dogs, camels, and attendants winds down from the hills toward the Holy Family, and Gentile worked the crowns, halos, and harnesses in gold with a goldsmith's precision. The panel, signed and dated May 1423, now hangs in the Uffizi.

Pisanello, the most celebrated Italian painter of the next generation, carried International Gothic deep into the fifteenth century at the courts of Verona, Ferrara, and Mantua. In The Vision of Saint Eustace (c. 1438-42), an elegantly dressed huntsman stops short before a stag bearing a crucifix between its antlers, while hounds, hares, deer, a bear, and birds fill the dark forest around him. Each animal is painted with a draftsman's precision, matching the many animal drawings by Pisanello that survive today. The National Gallery, London, bought the panel in 1895, and it is one of only two of his panel paintings known to survive.

By the 1420s, a new generation was already heading somewhere else. In Florence, Masaccio built solid, weighty figures in carefully measured space, and in Flanders, Jan van Eyck used oil paint to capture light, texture, and detail with a realism International Gothic had only begun to approach. In Italy, the elegance of International Gothic was absorbed into Early Renaissance painting, while in northern Europe its decorative vocabulary lingered in late Gothic altarpieces, sculpture, and manuscripts into the early sixteenth century. Its love of observed nature, the flowers in Broederlam's landscapes, the animals in Pisanello's forest, and the turning seasons of the Limbourg calendar, passed directly into the painting that followed, and International Gothic now stands as the bridge between the late medieval world and the Renaissance.

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