Tour: Antwerp in the Early 1500s

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Overview

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, artists from all over northern Europe were drawn to the booming prosperity of Antwerp, in modern Belgium. With the silting up of the harbor in neighboring Bruges and new alliances that brought the English cloth and Portuguese spice trades into the city, Antwerp became the mercantile hub of Europe, where goods from the East, the New World, and the Old World changed hands. The city's cosmopolitan population, wealthy as well as diverse, was a magnet for artists and encouraged experimentation. Painters were little constrained by tradition, since Antwerp had never before attracted important artists. To satisfy their patrons' varied tastes, painters explored new subjects and worked in many different styles, sometimes self-consciously borrowing from the past, at other times taking new inspiration from Renaissance Italy.

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chronology

Captions

1.
1	Jan Gossaert, Saint Jerome Penitent [left panel], c. 1509/1512
2	Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Merchant, c. 1530
3	Joos van Cleve, Joris Vezeleer, probably 1518
4	Quentin Massys, Ill-Matched Lovers, c. 1520/1525
5	Antwerp 16th Century (Possibly Matthys Cock), The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, c. 1540
6	Follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, c. 1550/1575
2.
7	Maerten van Heemskerck, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1530