ABSTRACT
In a beautiful painting in the Pitti Palace in Florence, entitled 'The Four Philosophers', Peter Paul Rubens conveys in a masterful way something of the essential features of humanism in the Low Countries. Humanistic studies could not, however, have flourished without the outstanding efforts and pioneering work of the developing printing industry. Indeed, the history of humanism in the Netherlands is inseparably connected. Between 1477 and 1495 Johannes van Westphalen along with his associates in Louvain, published translations of Aristotle and Plato as well as editions of classical and humanist writers. The impact of humanism in the Low Countries is only represented in part by its academic institutions and its printing houses. Vives, Nannius, and Canterus are the most significant representatives of the large number of humanists and the variety of talents that made the Low Countries in the first half of the sixteenth century one of the leading centres of classical learning north of the Alps.
