The expressions ‘Courant international’ and ‘Gothicité international’ were first employed by Courajod with reference to analogies between French and Italian sculpture of the period around 1400. He intended to demonstrate Franco-Netherlandish impulses for the Renaissance and to establish the existence of a universal late medieval Gothic style. Von Schlosser (1895) also described the formation of a European-wide ‘höfische Kunst’ marked by widespread occurrences of the same subject-matter, notably in the more mobile medium of tapestry. What became known as the International Gothic style (or International Style) was seen as the product of courtly patronage and eclectic, supra-regional, stylistic and iconographic preferences. Many of its formal qualities were held to persist well into the 15th century in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Bohemia and Italy.
Paul Binski