What does is it mean to see a painting—and is seeing it the same thing as understanding it?

Hieronymus Bosch's monumental Garden of Earthly Delights is instantly recognizable to most lovers of Renaissance art, and as Professor Catherine B. Scallen explains, it has been admired, looked on with shock, and puzzled over for 500 years. In its own time it was copied and even made into tapestries. It has been owned by a deeply devout Catholic king of Spain—and in the 1900s was cited by various scholars as representing the lost golden age of humanity, symbolizing the coded language of the alchemist, or even proving its creator's belief in sexual license. In the turbulent 1960s its images were common in dormitory rooms, delighting students eager to accept its joyful, frolicking nudes in their fantasy landscape as a proclamation of freedom and self-indulgence.

Although critics and scholars differ on what Hieronymus Bosch depicted in the Garden of Earthly Delights, it was definitely not a paean to self-indulgence or drugs. The work is one of a long line of fantastic images left by an artist who was known for moralizing on the consequences of sin and folly.

Bosch's world-view clearly intrigued his contemporaries, whether or not they understood his art better than we do. You will meet many such unique figures throughout the 36 lectures of The Art of the Northern Renaissance, as Professor Scallen guides you through 200 years of remarkable art and artists.

Although the term "the Renaissance" is most commonly associated with an era of artistic bounty in Italy, the massive cultural transformations that were remaking the world were having as significant an impact on art throughout northern Europe as well, and both traditions were highly admired at the time, with significant contact between the two. Italian artists were aware of Northern innovations. Northern artists increasingly traveled to Italy where they were exposed to the art of antiquity as well as the art of Renaissance Italy.

A Brilliant Time and Place in Art History

Using more than 300 images—paintings, woodcuts, engravings, etchings, sculptures, drawings—by well-known artists Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel, along with others who may be less familiar but deserve to be better known, Professor Scallen leads an intensely visual exploration of the glorious art that resulted. She explains devotional paintings, brilliantly illuminated copies of the medieval prayer book known as the Book of Hours, and triptychs—massive three-panel works that often served as church altarpieces.

She shows you how artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer could make landscapes serve as themes of their own. She reveals how portraits evolved from representations of the rich and powerful to a far more inclusive medium, and she decodes the surprising amount of information skilled painters would convey in their compositions, colors, and textures.

As Professor Scallen guides you through these wonderful works of art, she also takes you beyond their beauty and dramatic impact and places them in their social and artistic context as well, exploring a wide range of issues:

• How did changes in society—religious, political, economic, or cultural—transform the role of art from serving religious needs and political requirements to providing status, decoration, entertainment, instruction, and the preservation of memories?
• What was the impact of one particular artist's innovation on those who followed?
• How did patrons, whether commissioning a work or buying it ready-made, influence the artists of this time? How did the expansion of patronage beyond the high nobility and Christian Church affect how artists worked, or their choice of subjects?
• What factors influenced the evolution of artists' stature, as artists began to perceive themselves as figures of importance, worthy of respect and admiration?

Beyond the art itself, you'll also learn how the art world of the time worked and how artists functioned.

For instance, have you ever wondered how artists trained and what was required of them in order to become official "masters"? What their workshops were like, or what their personal involvement might have been in the art produced by those workshops and bearing their name? Or the vital professional roles played by their guilds, or the religious service organizations known as confraternities?

Learn How Great Artists Worked

And what of the works of art themselves? How were they made? What were the mechanics of painting and the various forms of printmaking—woodcuts, engravings, and etchings? How was art bought and sold, and how did the open art market, one of the Northern Renaissance's most significant contributions, evolve?

Wonderful nuggets of information are constantly surfacing during these lectures. You'll learn, for example, that the word "masterpiece" derives, literally, from "master piece"—the single example of mastery that an experienced journeyman painter would have to provide to his guild as part of his application to become an official "master," who could then take on apprentices and journeymen in a workshop of his own.

You'll discover that much of the reason for Pieter Bruegel the Elder's remarkable productivity during a relatively short career—40 highly detailed paintings of substantial size—lay in his style. He painted in very thin layers, foregoing the thick layers of time-consuming glazing used by his Netherlandish predecessors.

And you'll see that the faces of the devout worshipers featured in the wings of a triptych were often the faces of donors whose patronage had made the work possible. Or how modern technologies—x-radiography and infrared reflectography—can reveal the preparatory drawings beneath the layers of paint, enabling modern scholars to understand the work processes of early Netherlandish painters as never before and showing how original ideas and compositions were altered en route to the finished work.

But beyond the opportunities Professor Scallen gives you to understand wondrous works of art and follow their creators' careers and sources of inspiration, the lectures offer an additional benefit.

The art you will see was created during a time of extraordinary cultural transformation, by artists who spent their lives observing their culture and pouring what they saw and understood into their art. To learn how to "read" the content beneath a work's surface beauty or stark drama is a way to understand that transformation in deep and meaningful ways, making this a course whose benefits span both art and history.

See an Era through Its Greatest Art

Professor Scallen's lectures will enhance your understanding of art itself—sharpening your ability to notice the significance of content and detail, and showing you how artists drew from and influenced the work of others—making your next trip to the museum or time spent looking at art in other ways more pleasurable and enriching.

The lectures offer visual evidence of what viewpoints were socially acceptable or popular, for example, or what other views needed to be presented subtly by being "coded" into the content. You'll learn about the artistic "statements" that were requested by an evolving universe of patrons, from the most religiously, politically, or economically powerful to those less influential, but perhaps more representative of a wider range of society.

By the time these 36 lectures are concluded, you may well have found a new artist to add to your own list of favorites. Moreover, you'll do so with a substantial understanding of exactly why you feel as you do—your appreciation enhanced by the questions you know to ask, by the ability to see something different and surprising at each viewing of a work, and by the ever-increasing knowledge imparted in a course such as The Art of the Northern Renaissance.