This book evokes the art of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Northern Europe in all its richness and splendour. The works of Van Eyck, Bosch, Bruegel, Durer and other masters are considered within the larger context of a changing society in which church and state, Protestant and Catholic, man and woman, artist and patron, independent mercantile city and noble chivalric court all played a part.

Craig Harbison considers these and many other facets of the Renaissance world, drawing them together into a unified narrative that illuminates the complexity and brilliance of the art and its times.