Every list of art movements is a choice, and this one follows the story through the Netherlands and Belgium, keeping the movements that changed how art was made here and often far beyond.
Along the way, we took two editorial liberties. The first concerns the Flemish Primitives. Many historians treat them as a chapter of their own, but we placed them within the Northern Renaissance, because painters like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden laid its foundations.
The second concerns a few artists whose work was so prolific and so singular that no existing label could hold it. Vincent van Gogh, James Ensor, René Magritte and M.C. Escher each appear in these pages as a movement of their own. Magritte belonged to Surrealism, but his Brussels version of it was so personal that it