No, not the color and not the wine! In the 15th century, the duchy of Burgundy was one of the most powerful regions in Europe, and stretched from what is today central France up to what is today Belgium and Holland. The home of the Dukes of Burgundy was Dijon, and Duke Philip the Bold commissioned some of the century's greatest works there, including a Carthusian monastery just outside the city walls, where he hoped to be buried so the monks could pray for his soul for eternity. He hired some of the most brilliant artists in Europe to work for him there, including Claus Sluter. Very little of the monastery survives today, but thankfully Sluter’s great work, The Well of Moses, can still be seen there.

In the 15th century, Flanders (an area that is today part of the Netherlands and Belgium) was ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. The enormous wealth of the court of the Dukes and the wealth of the merchant class (in the thriving cities of Bruges and Tournai) made for a new interest in art that mimicked the material world, though in a way that was quite different from what was happening concurrently in Florence. Oil paint comes into its own in the work of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, and we see how the artists of the North used it to create stunning illusions of fur, wood, wool, glass, and jewels.

Walking through the streets of Florence in the summer isn’t always easy, it’s jam packed with students and tourists who have come to study and admire the city’s treasures including Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the engineering brilliance of Brunelleschi. Florence in the 15th Century was fabulously wealthy thanks to its banking and manufacturing families. The Medici, the de-facto rulers of the city, were bankers who commissioned some of the most important art of the Renaissance. Florence was also a center of the Humanist revival that in many ways is what separates our Modern world from the Medieval era.

Renaissance Venice was a city of merchants that traded with the Byzantine and Islamic Empires to the East, with the Germanic nations North of the Alps, and with Kingdoms to the West. In the 15th Century, Venice was at the height of its power with colonies and a well equipped navy to protect its merchant fleet abroad. Its fabulous wealth financed the construction of sumptuous churches and palaces—and art to fill them. The city’s salty, humid air meant that frescos faded quickly and so in the late 15th century, artists adopted oil, a medium they had seen used on panels from the north. By the late 15th century, they had also adopted canvas as their support of choice and artists like Giovanni Bellini created some of the most subtle and engaging art ever made.

Currently this tutorial contains the work of only one artist, Michael Pacher. It would have been so much easier if we could have included him in Venice, since Pacher was influenced by the work of the great Venetian painter Mantegna. But Pacher spoke German, and the specific area he was from (today in the north-east of Italy), was known as Tyrol (though there is a state of Tyrol today in Austria). Confusing, we know. In this tutorial, we take a look at Pacher’s amazing St. Wolfgang Altarpiece which is still in the church it was made for—a church on a lake surrounded by mountains in Austria, still visited by religious pilgrims. Most altarpieces in the Renaissance were made of many interconnected panels that were later sold and ended up in different collections, and this means that to see one altarpiece you usually have to travel to many museums. But this is not true of the St. Wolfgang altarpiece. Seeing a Renaissance work of art in the space it was made for helps us to travel back in time to the late 15th Century.

The International Gothic Style persists into the 15th Century in many courts in Europe including England.