THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world which could not long remain confined to Italy.

There were then, as now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes of thought stirred in the south.
In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form.

We find a different quality in the art of the north.

Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy.

You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail.