NETHERLANDS, WESTERN

In this rapid survcy of German lands wherc thc richcst talents tuo oftcn leave secondary but important masters in thc shade, the West and North of Germany and their ties with the Netherlands may be referred to only in broad terms.
The episcopal city of Utrechr was the most active art centre of the northern Netherlands in the second half of the fifteenth centory. Gradually moving away from the international Gothic style and recepnve to the snfluences of the southern Netherlands, in particular Brabant sculpture and Flemish painting, the art of this city had its own specific language. Several sculptors are recorded in Utrecht, such as Jan Nude, mentioned from 1450 to 1494, and Adriaen van Wesel from 5447 to 1489-1490. The latter carved numerous altarpieces, notably the one, now dismembered, for the brotherhood of Our Lady at ‘s Hcrtogenbosch (1475—1477). As in the southern Netherlands, the scenes were composed of  small polyehrome wood reliefi,juxtaposed in the compartments of the shrine, and affirming a pronounced taste for anecdote, for concrete and picturesque elements. Adriaen van Wesel caught the familiar gestures and the expressive features of his figures with a charming vivacity, but also with a sweetness that places him still in the mainstream of international Gothic.
His contemporaries often handled their forms with a certain hardness. Thus many feminine figures, slim and straight, combine stiff drapery falling in cylindrical folds with delicate and gracious facial types, and show extreme accuracy in rendering the finely chiselled details in oak or stone (St Ursula in the Beguine convent of Amsterdam, attributed hypothetically to Jan Nude; male and female saints of the Master of Koudewater).
This elegant and biting style had direct extensions in the regions of the Lower Rhine, close geographically and historically, since Cleves and Kalkar formerly belonged to the bishopric of Utrecht, itself part of the archbishopric of Cologne.
The most influential personality here was that of Master Arnt, who had a workshop at Kalkar (from 1460), then at Zwolle (from 1484 until his death sn 5492), which carried out important commissions such as the choir stalls for the church of the Franciscans at Cleves (i474) and the altar— pieces of Sr George (around 1480) and of the Passion (1490—1492), for the high altar of the St Nicholas church at Kalkar. The mark of Arnt’s style, at once tense and gracious, linear and solid, and of his incisive treatment of the surface, was determinant for the sculptors of Kalkar and Cleves,Jan van Halderen and Dries Holthuys, and also influenced the chief master established in Cologne at the end of the fifteenth century, Tilmann van der Bruch (first mentioned in 1467). A new stylistic modulation was later added by much sought-after sculptors like Heinrich Douvermann (mentioned at Cleves and Kalkar from 1510 onwards), the Master of Elsloo (active in the Middle Meuse, early sixteenth century) or Arnt van Tricht (active c. 15 22—1560 at Antwerp and Kalkar).