The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

For a start, there is a twelfth-century text all about using pressed oil to bind colours: Theophilus Presbyter’s Schedula diversarum artium. Vasari says van Eyck was the one who taught Antonello da Messina how to paint in oils; Pietro Summonte, writing from Naples, says it was a Naples master called Colantonio who had wanted to move to Flanders because he ‘looked to the work of Flemish painters’ but was kept at home by a king with the skill to ‘show him … how to mix and use these colours’.28 The point is that Italian painters looked at the life and brightness, the brilliance and the shadows, of the Flemish masters, and they were hugely impressed. They saw faces that could be alive, which suggested a new kind of portrait, and landscapes of a kind they had never yet tried, which could be used as details in their own paintings. Mona Lisa became imaginable, a woman whose name we still want to know in front of a landscape we still try to read. The Italians learned from the North in the way the Flemish went down to Rome to learn.