Early Netherlandish Painting - Reappraisal

Reappraisal

With the advent of Mannerism in the mid 1600s, the work of the Early Netherlandish painters fell out of favour. Little is known of the artists due to paucity of surviving documentation in the official record; very little is known about even the most significant artists. The most significant early research on the painters occurred in the 1920s, in Max Jakob Friedländer's pioneering Meisterwerke der niederländischen Malerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, which was followed by Erwin Panofsky's analysis in the 1950s and 1960s. This research tended to focus on establishing biographies and interpreting the complex iconography, while more recent research (notably that of Lorne Campbell of London's National Gallery) relies on X-ray and infra-red photography to develop an understanding of the techniques and materials used by the painters.

Attribution is especially difficult; a problem compounded by the workshop system, which often produced multiple versions of a single work of its master. It was not until the late 1950s, after the research of Friedländer, Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro that the attributions generally accepted today were established. Even so, the major artists' biographies are, for the most part, scanty reconstructions from scattered mentions in legal records. In many instances their identities are unknown or contested, and names of convenience, were used, largely by Friedländer, to group works sharing similarities of style, time and location. The so called Master of the Legend of the Magdalen, who may or may not have been Pieter van Coninxloo, is one of the more notable examples.

In addition many surviving panels are either fragments or wings from lost larger altarpieces.