Visual art reviews: The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein | Dürer's Fame

In the 'other Renaissance', northern Europe adapted the softer glow of Italy's innovations into something harder-edged and precise for a particularly cruel era

The Northern Renaissance: Drer to Holbein

Queen's Gallery, Edinburgh *****

Drer's Fame

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh ****

WHEN somebody refers to "the Renaissance", they usually mean the art of Italy, but there was a Renaissance in northern Europe, too, quite distinct, but every bit as remarkable. It evolved in the cities of Germany and the Netherlands, but was exported both as art and in the person of the artists throughout the north.

Artists travelled in both directions between Italy and the north. Their influence was mutual, but the art of the north is characterised by a kind of wiry intensity that reflects at once a sense of irrepressible vitality and a collective insistence on the priority of truth over any hint of Italian suavity or elegance; in the north, truth of expression and truth of observation reflect the priority of individuality over generalisation.

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Expression is seen at its most dramatic in the woodcuts of Albrecht Drer's Apocalypse, but you see it in the restless outline of figures by Lucas Cranach the Elder, or in those of Jan Gossaert, too. Acute observation is the hallmark of Drer's drawings, but it is also seen in the precision and individuality, utterly without gloss, of Hans Holbein's marvellous portraits.

Prints from Drer's Apocalypse and a group of Holbein portraits are to be seen in The Northern Renaissance: Drer to Holbein at the Queen's Gallery in Edinburgh, but there is also much else in the show including paintings, prints, drawings, miniatures, printed books and illuminated manuscripts by artists from Germany, France and the Netherlands. Among Drer's prints, drawings and one painted portrait are beautiful examples of familiar prints, like the Knight, Death and the Devil, or St Jerome in his study, but less familiar images include, for instance, a strange drawing of the Birth of Venus.

Alongside Drer are masterworks by Cranach, including Apollo and Diana and his sexy Judgement of Paris. Cranach's drawing has such vitality that it takes on a life of its own. Admire, for instance, Venus's animated big toe in this picture. It is playing footsie with Paris all by itself and so hints naughtily at the helpless, involuntary response of a mere mortal man to the naked charms of the goddess of love. Less familiar German works include a beautiful pair of portraits by Hans Brosamer, perhaps a pupil of Cranach. Painted on linen, their delicate surface gives these paintings an almost impressionist fragility and touching impermanence.

From Flanders, Jan Gossaert's painting of Adam and Eve, naked and life-size, is a great Renaissance masterpiece if ever there was one, but for all his acknowledgment of the classical nude, Gossaert's picture is utterly northern in its hint of energy struggling against the constraints of classical formality. Other fascinating Flemish works include a painting of Jonah and the gourd by Marten van Heemskerck. Heemskerck went to Rome and Jonah is sitting under the leaves of the gourd that shaded him, but also under a Roman aqueduct. The city of Nineveh is in the background and it is painted in a way that shows that this, one of the earliest modern landscapes, was inspired by ancient paintings that the artist had seen in the ruins of Rome.

A superb drawing of the crucified Christ, attributed to Hugo van der Goes, is a reminder – although they are not here – that among the greatest Flemish works in the Royal Collection are the wings of the Trinity College altarpiece. Commissioned by James III from Hugo van der Goes, they demonstrate that Scotland was not in outer darkness, but that it too was part of this Northern Renaissance.

In France, going against the trend, Francis I brought the southern Renaissance north. Francesco Primaticcio and Benvenuto Cellini were among several Italians who worked at his Palace of Fontainbleau. Some of Francesco Primaticcio's designs are here, so is a solitary bronze by Benvenuto Cellini.

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Leonardo da Vinci also spent his last years there, and a drawing reveals his genius was employed in his latter days designing fancy dress for royal masques. Jean and Franois Clouet, father and son, were, however, distinctively northern in their precise and strongly characterised portraits of the French court. The latter's exquisite miniature of Mary, Queen of Scots – and, briefly, Queen of France – together with his painting of her dressed austerely in white mourning for her husband, Francis II, who had died aged just 16, are of special interest here. The miniature is first recorded in the collection of Charles I, but before him had surely belonged to his father, Mary's son James VI.

This is grand company, but Holbein is nevertheless the star. He has more than 20 works here including paintings, drawings, miniatures and printed book decorations. Holbein came from the Imperial city of Augsburg and worked in Basel, but in 1526 he travelled to London with a letter of recommendation from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More. More's portrait is here in a drawing so charged with life that it seems momentary, just an instant's pause in the sitter's animation caught by his companion, the artist.

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Holbein went back to Basel, where he painted the superb Noli me Tangere, an example of his less familiar religious painting, but in 1532 he returned to London where he remained till his death in 1543. He worked for the German community in London, represented here by a elegant portrait of the merchant Derich Born, but also extensively for king and court. Henry VIII himself is here in a portrait by Joos van Cleve, but a significant group of Holbein's portraits of his court and courtiers, power-brokers of Tudor England, are here.

His portrait drawings are without rival. For all that they lack the solidity of the painted image, the economy, precision and intimacy of Holbein's drawing brings these people close to us in a way that few other portraits have ever done. They do not look like people you would want to get too close to, however. The Tudor court was a cruel place. Holbein hints at that in the stony, averted gaze of both Sir Richard Southwell and of the unshaven Sir Thomas Elyot, or in the shifty glance of Sir John Godslave. Even painted in his court robes, the elderly Duke of Norfolk looks like an old man who has seen too much. These characters are all so vivid you wonder if without Holbein Hilary Mantel could ever have written Wolf Hall, her remarkable chronicle of life at the court of Henry VIII.

There is a certain irony, too, looking at these portrait heads, that several of Holbein's sitters, including Thomas More, lost their actual heads to the artist's royal master.

There is more tenderness in Holbein's miniatures and a quite different quality in his warm and animated portrait of his friend and fellow craftsman, the Basel printer, Johannes Froben. Erasmus hangs nearby in a version of Holbein's famous portrait. He was Froben's lodger in Basel and reflecting their friendship, these portraits of landlord and lodger were originally a hinged pair. As a scholar, Erasmus personified the Northern Renaissance. Fittingly, he is represented here again in a second version of Holbein's picture by Georg Pencz and in a superb portrait by Massys as well as in a copy of his New Testament, its title page decorated with woodcuts by Holbein.

This brilliant exhibition rather overshadows a small but intriguing show at the National Gallery of Scotland devoted to Drer and his enduring reputation, Drer's Fame. It does provide a certain gloss on the Holyrood exhibition, however. For instance, in a contemporary copy of a Drer print, the Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi smooths out the German's restless northern line and quietens his turbulence. Trying to carry the story down to the present day, though with limited success, the NGS show nevertheless does also hint that it was in the end the northern tradition that proved dominant and it was from there that modern art inherited its troubled, spiky character.

• The Northern Renaissance: Drer to Holbein runs until 15 January 2012. Drer's Fame runs until 11 October.

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