Romanism (painting)

Romanism is a term used by art historians to refer to painters from the Low Countries who had travelled in the 16th century to Rome. In Rome they had absorbed the influence of leading Italian artists of the period such as Michelangelo and Raphael and his pupils. Upon their return home, these Northern artists (referred to as ‘Romanists’) created a Renaissance style, which assimilated Italian formal language. The style continued its influence until the early 17th century when it was swept aside by the Baroque.

By drawing on mythological subject matter, the Romanists introduced new themes in Northern art that corresponded with the interests and tastes of their patrons with a humanist education. The Romanists painted mainly religious and mythological works, often using complex compositions and depicting naked human bodies in an anatomically correct way but with contrived poses. Their style often appears forced and artificial to the modern viewer. However, the artists saw their efforts as an intellectual challenge to render difficult subjects through a struggle with form.

The term Romanism is now less commonly used as a better understanding of the work of the artists that formed part of the Romanists has highlighted the diversity rather than the commonalities in their responses to Italian art.

The term Romanist was coined by 19th-century art historians such as Alfred Michiels and Eugène Fromentin who had noticed a significant shift in the style of Northern painting in the 16th century. They attributed the shift to the influence of artists who had visited Italy, an in particular Rome, and called them Romanists.

Whereas the term was initially used mainly to refer to the first group who traveled to Rome in the first half of the 16th century, its application was extended by some art historians such as Jane Turner in The Dictionary of Art to include a second generation of artists who made the trip in the second half of the 16th century.

In the first group of artists who went to Rome to study contemporary Italian art as well as the Classical models are typically included Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Lambert Lombard, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Michiel Coxie and Frans Floris. Bernard van Orley is often also included in this group even though he likely never visited Italy and only familiarized himself with the Italian style from prints and Raphael’s cartoons for the papal tapestries, which were woven in Brussels.

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Wikipedia