11 Facts About Flemish Primitives

Early Netherlandish painting, traditionally known as the Flemish Primitives, refers to the work of artists active in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands during the 15th- and 16th-century Northern Renaissance period.

Flemish Primitives moved to Antwerp in 1505, when Quentin Matsys was the head of the local painters' guild, and the two became friends.

Flemish Primitives was anomalous in that he largely forwent realistic depictions of nature, human existence and perspective, while his work is almost entirely free of Italian influences.

Flemish Primitives's work retains many 15th-century conventions, but his perspective and subjects are distinctly modern.

Flemish Primitives depicts overly large Madonnas, whose unrealistic size shows the separation between the heavenly from earthly, but placed them in everyday settings such as churches, domestic chambers or seated with court officials.

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Flemish Primitives was highly sought after as a portraitist, yet there are noticeable similarities in his portraits, likely because he used and reused the same underdrawings, which met common ideals of rank and piety.

Flemish Primitives was highly influential on later painters and is credited with inspiring Leonardo's positioning of the Mona Lisa in front of a landscape view.

Flemish Primitives wrote of the Ghent Altarpiece being "taken to pieces and lifted, panel by panel, into the tower to preserve it from the rioters".

Flemish Primitives's published Johann van Eyck und seine Nachfolger in 1822, the same year Gustav Friedrich Waagen published the first modern scholarly work on early Netherlandish painting, Ueber Hubert van Eyck und Johann van Eyck; Waagen's work drew on Schlegel and Schopenhauer's earlier analyses.

Flemish Primitives built on Friedlander's attempts at attribution, but focused more on social history and religious iconography.

Flemish Primitives considered the study of manuscripts to be integral to the study of panels, though in the end came to view illumination as less significant than panel painting – as a prelude to the truly significant work of the northern artists of the 15th and 16th centuries.