What is the first name of the the first scholar to connect the work of Netherlandish painters and illuminators, noticing the considerable overlap?
The most significant early research of Early Netherlandish art occurred in the 1920s, in German art historian Max Jakob Friedländer's pioneering Meisterwerke der Niederländischen Malerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Friedländer focused on the biographical details of the painters, establishing attribution, and examining their major works. The undertaking proved extremely difficult, given the scant historical record of even the most significant artists. Fellow-German Erwin Panofsky's analysis in the 1950s and 1960s followed and in many ways challenged Friedländer's work. Writing in the United States, Panofsky made the work of the German art historians accessible to the English-speaking world for the first time. He effectively legitimized Netherlandish art as a field of study, and raised its status to something similar to the early Italian renaissance.
Panofsky was one of the first art historians to abandon formalism. He built on Friedländer's attempts at attribution, but focused more on social history and religious iconography. Panofsky developed the terminology with which the Netherlandish paintings are usually described, and made significant advances identifying the rich religious symbolism especially of the major altarpieces. Panofsky was the first scholar to connect the work of Netherlandish painters and illuminators, noticing the considerable overlap. He considered the study of manuscripts to be integral to the study of panels, though in the end came to view illumination as less significant than panel painting – as a prelude to the truly significant work of the northern artists of the 15th and 16th centuries.Otto Pächt and Friedrich Winkler continued and developed on Panofsky's work. They were key in identifying sources of iconography and ascribing attribution, or at least differentiating anonymous masters under names of convenience. The paucity of surviving documentation has made attribution especially difficult, a problem compounded by the workshop system. It was not until the late 1950s, after the research of Friedländer, Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro, that the attributions generally accepted today were established.
Erwin