Everyone knows about the Renaissance - it’s that golden period when Italy single-handedly reinvented art... except it isn’t. In fact, the most significant early developments in Renaissance art took place not in Italy, but in the ‘barbarian’ lands of Flanders and Germany.
As his four-part series The Renaissance Unchained, arrives on BBC Four, art critic and broadcaster Waldemar Januszczak explains why busting a few myths helps our understanding of a crucial period in Western civilisation.