Answer to Question 1
Answer: The northern European artists used oil paint, with which they could achieve brilliant effects of light, as opposed to the matte effects of tempera and fresco, and could depict effects of material reality.
Answer to Question 2
Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. In the seventeenth century, works with secular subjects such as still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes became popular.
2. In the North, where Protestant theology discouraged images of saints and of ancient subjects, such scenes were especially popular.
3. In some images, religious stories were dominated by a landscape setting as if the figures are incidental. An example is Annibale Carracci's Landscape with Flight into Egypt, in which the religious scene takes place in a pastoral world, a middle ground between civilization and wilderness.
4. Landscapes such as Jacob van Ruisdael's View of Haarlem from the Dunes at Overveen present the sweeping landscape, sky, and light as evidence of divine handiwork. The spiritual is now found in nature, not exclusively in a church.
The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)
Like most world-changing inventions, the printing press of fifteenth-century Europe took advantage o
European Cuckoo
Diagram of a section of a 15th-century oil painting
The European Core: Cities