A survey of an art historical period written for an undergraduate audience might seem like no place for iconoclasm. Newly issued textbooks can soften the boundaries of the canon without destroying it. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the publication of three notable options for English-language surveys of the “Northern Renaissance,” an art historical period whose name has always required defense, qualification, or the tossing up of hands in the absence of a more favorable alternative. In 2005, Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen published a second edition of James Snyder's original 1968 text, preserving its geographic and chronological arrangement of sculpture, painting, and prints. Two more concise contributions did away with chapters arranged by historical sequence and region by favoring a thematic approach. Susie Nash's 2008 book, with its emphasis on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is notable for two distinctive chapters, one on the technical analysis of paintings and one on workshop practices. Jeffrey Chipps Smith's 2004 text delivers, in place of the iconographical emphasis of Snyder (who was a student of Panofsky), a more contextualizing approach.

In a similar spirit to Smith, Stephanie Porras has written a book that covers a wide range of art in different media. Her Art of the Northern Renaissance, with its lively writing and captivating details, introduces students to the visual and material cultures of France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Central Europe with precise descriptions of techniques, explanations of period terms, references to inventories and other forms of primary-source evidence, and tidbits about failed commissions, uncompleted projects, and destroyed monuments. The book is divided into eight chapters, each covering a twenty- to thirty-year range, thus allowing the discrete units to focus on different approaches to the historical study of art (devotion, civic performance, individual authorship, exchange, etc.), while also grounding a narrative about the secularization of art and its development in response to capitalism and urbanization, in a sense of chronological progression.

Porras's thematic approach is successful because she argues for the interrelatedness of arts of different media and opens up the scope of the objects’ histories. With her discussion of the Goldene Rössl, a New Year's gift given in 1405 by Queen Isabeau of Bavaria to her husband, Charles VI, we learn not only about goldsmiths’ techniques and enamel work, the rendering of visionary experience into tactile form, and the politics of gift giving but also about how this soon-to-be-pawned-off object functioned as convertible currency. While the book includes indispensable descriptions of Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition, Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, and Holbein's Ambassadors, it also makes careful reminders that painting in the early modern period did not yet enjoy the privileged status it would later gain. At the death of Henry VIII, in 1547, the royal collection owned 2,770 tapestries and merely 300 paintings, Porras records.

There is another set of questions worth adding to the now-politicized ones of which works of art are illustrated and how chapters are titled and organized: in what voice, and by what authorities, may any introductory historical survey be written? By beginning her book with the 1902 Bruges exhibition Les Primitifs flamands, the author nods to the notion that art history's critical tradition has influenced what we consider valuable for attention and that the intervening centuries have sometimes skewed the balance away from the objects most prized by the cultures that produced them. We now have a more nuanced and varied contribution to the English-language pedagogical approach, which had never felt comfortable with the territorial organization of Wolfgang Braunfels's Die Kunst im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation, but which had also long contorted itself in an attempt to combine Panofsky's great interests: the successive developments of the early Netherlandish painters, the innovations of Albrecht Dürer that shattered artistic conventions, and the question of whether the term Renaissance has everything to do with Quattrocento Italian interests in classicism or whether it might be liberated from such an association to mean something else. With great delicacy and elegance of language and of logic, Porras has put forth a book that may be the best effort in a survey format to both honor and correct that tradition.