Jan van Eyck within His Art 1789147611, 9781789147612

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ja n van e y c k

☞ Books in the renaissance live s series explore and illustrate the

life histories and achievements of significant artists, rulers, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philos­ophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe Mary D. Garrard Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason Mary Ann Caws Botticelli: Artist and Designer Ana Debenedetti Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity Troy Thomas Descartes: The Renewal of Philosophy Stephen Nadler Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art A. Victor Coonin Erasmus of Rotterdam: The Spirit of a Scholar William Barker Filippino Lippi: An Abundance of Invention Jonathan K. Nelson Giorgione’s Ambiguity Tom Nichols Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World Jeanne Nuechterlein Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy Niccolò Guicciardini John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion Andrew Hadfield John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature François Quiviger Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye Caspar Pearson Machiavelli: From Radical to Reactionary Robert Black Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life Bruce T. Moran Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer Christopher S. Celenza Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist Machtelt Brüggen Israëls Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature Elizabeth Alice Honig Raphael and the Antique Claudia La Malfa Rembrandt’s Holland Larry Silver Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius Alexander Marr Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance Helen Langdon Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing Andrew Hadfield Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy Maria H. Loh Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens John Robert Christianson Ulisse Aldrovandi: Naturalist and Collector Peter Mason

JA N VA N EYC K within His Art alfred acres

R E A K T ION B O OK S

For Audrey, Lucy and James

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2023 Copyright © Alfred Acres 2023 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 761 2

cover: Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1433, oil on oak. The National Gallery, London, photo National Gallery Global Limited/akg-images.

contents

Introduction: As I Can 7 1 A Career 19 2 The Painter at Work 43 3 Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece 65 4 Annunciations and Other Encounters 93 5 In the Company of the Virgin and Child 121 6 Situating Saints 147 7 Portraiture and Presence 167 8 Epilogue: Another Mirror 187 chronology 195 References 197 bibliography 220 acknowledgements 232 photo acknowledgements 233 index 234

Introduction: As I Can

D

espite his fame, which was international already in his own time, Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) lived a life now visible only in small fragments – a handful of brief early references to such matters as his employment, travel, family, death and reputation. He is known best through his work. This is not unusual for Old Masters, and especially for those who pre-date the fascination with artists’ lives that rose during the sixteenth century and has never faded. One of the many ways in which Van Eyck stood apart from his contemporaries, however, was in the intense professional self-consciousness that pervades his art. Although most of the life he lived is unknowable, a deeply original and absorbing mind survives in the paintings. Consider the 1433 painting of a man that must be a self-portrait but is not always labelled as such (illus. 1). The National Gallery in London catalogues it as Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), and countless publications and other presentations have called it Man in a Red Turban. The caution is understandable. Most fifteenth-century portraits depict individuals who are now anonymous. We know of no other independent self-portraits in European painting until decades later, and the earliest known reference to this one as a self-portrait of Jan van Eyck comes in the middle of the seventeenth century.1 Like most of his paintings, this work includes words – on the frame, as if often the case. While most modern frames are supplements to paintings, in the fifteenth century they 1 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1433, oil on oak.

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were typically native to the piece, already in place before the artist touched the panel. For Jan van Eyck more than for any of his predecessors or contemporaries, the frame was also an integral field of representation and information. The bottom of this one is signed and dated, while the top presents Van Eyck’s motto:

aΛΣ ixh xan (‘als ich can’) As I Can joh[ann]es•de•eyck•me•fecit• an[n]o•m°cccc°•33°•21•octobris Jan van Eyck made me on 21 October 1433 To a modern observer the name and date resemble such standard accessories as a label, caption or indeed signature on a painting. But these were not familiar in 1433. While dates and the names of artists and patrons were being inscribed on the frames of some paintings by the fourteenth century, they seem to have been meant less as claims of authorship and more as testaments of devotion on what were invariably religious images.2 This cannot have been the purpose of an artist’s name on a portrait. On the Van Eyck frame, name and date are conveyed in a sentence: the painting – and/or its sitter – declares who made it and when. There also is a first-person voice at the top: As I Can (illus. 2). The phrase has been recognized as a motto in part because it appears on three other Van Eyck paintings and was on at least

2 Detail of illus. 1: Jan van Eyck’s motto.

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Introduction: As I Can

one other known in early copies. Artists did not typically have mottoes – distillations of character or motive, often linked with heraldry, that were the province mainly of the nobility. His ‘As I can’ was meant in the sense of ‘As best I can’. It adapts an ancient rhetorical topos that echoed in the work of medieval scribes, whose colophons sometimes included variations on ut potui non sicut volui: as I can, but not as I would have wished.3 Uttered by Van Eyck, who knew his art was unprecedented and dazzling, the humility of the phrase can ring of false modesty. It is in fact not hard to imagine that within the familiar sense of ‘As best I can’ he also allowed for ‘As I best can’. Whether or not he intended the motto as an almost ironic salute to his mastery, he designed it to work on several levels, beginning with language itself. Although als ich can is Middle Dutch, the sounds are spelled in Greek letters.4 Because medieval precedents for such transliteration were usually of Latin into Greek, there was novelty in this transformation of Netherlandish dialect.5 The effect was underscored by the presence of Latin below, putting three languages in play around the face. Jan van Eyck would not have known Greek, and his Latin was presumably no better than average. But with the prestige of these languages and in other ways as well, he cultivated his reputation as learned. In a bid to maintain the services of his famous artist, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, referred to him as ‘excellent in his art and science’.6 In one of the earliest accounts (1456) of Van Eyck’s work, the Italian humanist Bartolomeo Fazio begins by describing ‘the leading painter of our time’ as ‘not unlettered, particularly in geometry and such arts as contribute to the enrichment of painting’.7 In the company of Latin and Greek, the vernacular of the motto itself stood out – perhaps signalling regional pride. But in his native language Jan van Eyck also found a wonderfully apt pun: ‘als ich can’ sounds like ‘als Eyck can’.8 (Likewise in English: I can/

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Eyck can.) This was more than serendipity; Jan loved wordplay, including rebuses and chronograms, which appear on other works. With deep roots in history and across languages, such ploys of condensed signification were widely associated with erudition and insight. Shakespeare, a prolific punster, drew on the classical wordplay of Plautus, among others.9 (And as Van Eyck had done in his motto, he punned on his own name, most famously in the ardent ‘Will’ of Sonnets 135 and 136.) These flashes of mental dexterity, often entwining word and image, were but one part of Jan van Eyck’s core ambition not just to impress but also to engage. He invited observers to think with him. Some of those who did could also have grasped something divine in the presentation. The ixh and xan of the motto use the letter chi rather than the kappa that might have been a natural first choice for the hard consonant. This has been recognized as a link to the sacred monogram of Christ, most variants of which (ihs xpi; ihc xpi; and so on) use chi.10 Centred at the top of the painting among triple-letter Greek words, that letter would have evoked the sacred name even for many who did not consciously make the connection. And as if to nudge those who did not see or sense it, Van Eyck gilded the frame – the only surviving one among his independent paintings to have been finished this way.11 Perhaps this invoked older gilded religious paintings in a general way. But Jan’s contemporaries could just as readily have associated the portrait frame with the gold – richly inscribed with words – that surrounds God, Mary and John the Baptist at the summit of the magnificent Ghent Altarpiece (see illus. 22), which he had completed in the year before he signed the 1433 portrait. Within this framework of naming and evocation (johes de eyck; Ich/Eyck; Christ; gold; the grand new altarpiece in Ghent), it is almost impossible to see the man in the 1433 panel as anyone but the artist himself. For most observers, however, the cues are outshone if not eclipsed by his sheer presence, both physical and

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Introduction: As I Can

psychic. The ambient darkness was originally less so; the black background was blue, and the dark fur-lined robe was ‘purplish(?) brown’ with more visible folds.12 He has glistening blue eyes and salt-and-pepper stubble. The headwrap is a chaperon, a hood-like hat with a long tail that is here, unusually, wrapped and tucked up into complex folds.13 Two of Jan van Eyck’s later independent portraits (see illus. 56, 58) look directly outwards, as he does. No earlier European portrait makes such direct eye contact, which would have seemed even more so to those who knew him and could hear his voice in the motto. His physical immediacy is amplified by that of the words, which are painted to appear as if crisply engraved into the gold of the frame. Jan van Eyck could not have known that history would often look to this small panel as the birth of an inescapable subject, and with it a new concept of the artist. Given the novelty of such an image, it is remarkable that this was not his only depiction of himself. Each of the others takes a different form within a larger image, and each raises its own questions. In a famous 1568 account of the Ghent Altarpiece, a mounted figure in the Just Judges panel is identified as a portrait of Jan, accompanied by his brother Hubert (illus. 3, 22).14 In the absence of further evidence (and of the stolen panel itself ), scholars remain unsure about the identifica­ tion. By contrast, relatively few doubt Jan’s presence as one of two figures reflected in the mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait in London – despite the complete illegibility of their minute faces (illus. 4, 60). The same is true of a blurry figure reflected in the armour of St George in the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele, which is widely regarded as the artist himself (illus. 5, 42). Another tiny but arresting figure often perceived as Jan is one of the two men standing at the garden wall in the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (illus. 6, 39). Assuming all or most of these are who we think they are, we stand before an artist whose unprecedented self-representations range from a quasi-divine portrait to remote and at times nearly

3 Detail of illus. 22: possible portraits of Jan (in black) and Hubert (in blue) van Eyck within the Just Judges panel (copy after the stolen original) of the Ghent Altarpiece (open).

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Introduction: As I Can

invisible glimpses within larger worlds. Those ostensibly reticent cameos are, of course, among his countless invitations to engage and reflect. They also lay claim to the astonishing worlds he created by occupying them. Although together they shed essential light on Jan van Eyck, these unique self-representations amount to a sliver of his art. Of the roughly twenty surviving works confidently attributed to him, all present either religious subjects or portraits. While the same can be said of the work of most leading European painters of his time, those umbrella terms obscure the immense novelty of his art – in optical effects, to be sure, but also in his very conception of subjects and pictures as such. Among his lost works that echo in copies and descriptions, two or three were secular scenes featuring bathers that would have been pioneering examples of erotic and genre paintings of a sort well known in later centuries (see illus. 62). It is remarkable enough that twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to high-resolution images still marvel at Eyckian realism, but we can scarcely imagine its original impact as the language of images that were themselves completely unfamiliar. Compelling depiction of light, spaces and surfaces was but one part of Van Eyck’s overarching project to captivate. Whose eyes and minds was he addressing? The first answer has always been rulers and those in their spheres. For the two documented decades of his career, he was a court painter: briefly for John of Bavaria, Count of Holland (1422–5); and then for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1425–41). Conspicuous novelty, skill and value were already hallmarks of the arts at court. Jan van Eyck must have demonstrated such gifts before his hires and was stimulated to greater invention in this realm where brilliant creations carried great prestige for owners and, increasingly, makers. At the court of Burgundy he was named varlet de chambre, a designation already held by some leading artists at northern courts. But Jan’s position entailed unusual proximity to the duke

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and his various enterprises, including distant journeys, some of them secret, as a member of diplomatic delegations. Surprisingly, however, perhaps only one surviving painting (illus. 29) by Jan van Eyck is very likely to have been made for Philip the Good. The others reveal a range of clients: courtiers, clergy, international merchants and several people who remain anonymous. Van Eyck would have connected with some of them directly through the Burgundian court and with others through different circles around the city and beyond. His international patrons appear to have included expatriates in Bruges, visitors to the Netherlands and others who acquired his work from afar. The Burgundian court was indeed central to his professional identity and career, but this simultaneous work for a rare variety of other clients also shaped his art. The assertive presence of the artist, including an unprecedented frequency of signatures, could have been meant in part to fortify his identity in work across a variety of sites and communities. His own international travel and regular exposure to people and goods in a cosmopolitan, prosperous Bruges gave him a more capacious sense of the world than most artists had. While this 4 Detail of illus. 60: figures reflected in the mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait. 5 Detail of illus. 42: figure reflected in the armour of St George in the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele.

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Introduction: As I Can

must have contributed to the profusion of highly crafted materials (metalwork, textiles, carved stone and so on) depicted in his work, it is less clear how or how much it might have informed his penetrating articulations of nature – in flowing water, lush gardens, snow-capped mountains, birds in flight, cloud formations and even different views of the moon, which no artist had ever represented as carefully.15 With so many such elements, he built an amplitude of vision that reached, especially when they were new, beyond the optical towards the phenomenological. In their smooth comminglings of far and near, natural and made, heaven and earth, individual likenesses, words, and even sometimes the space, light and figures before an image, the paintings proposed a brand of truth, and experience, that exceeded the picture plane.

6 Detail of illus. 39: figures at the garden wall in the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin.

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And in various highly inventive ways they asserted that this transformative effect was the work of a specific individual. The personal dimension of Jan’s art also lives in the painting of Margaret, his wife – the only other portrait with his motto and the earliest known likeness of a European artist’s spouse (see illus. 56). Absent any evidence that this would have been for any other person or purpose, it appears to have been made by him, of her, for them. We catch sight of them together again in a recently published document: Jan’s successful petition to the Vatican, months before his death, for a letter of perpetual confession on behalf of Margaret and himself.16 Such a letter, often available only at great expense and/or through powerful connections, is likely to have been an investment as much in social and professional prestige as it was in the fates of their souls.17 The discovery of this document adds to a recent surge of important Van Eyck research, which builds on a deep foundation.18 The first wave of systematic scholarship coincided with the early growth of academic art history during the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on attribution and the archives. One focus all along has been Jan’s elder brother and colleague Hubert, whom he hailed as superior – but who remains one of the great phantoms of art history. Public fascination with and enquiry into the Van Eycks grew markedly in the early twentieth century, partly spurred by landmarks like the 1902 Bruges ‘Exposition des primitifs flamands et d’art ancien’ and the indelible cultural portrait of late medieval Burgundy and France in Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919, translated in 1924 as Waning of the Middle Ages).19 These and related scholarship and exhibitions fortified the perception of early Netherlandish painting as a discrete school, with Jan van Eyck at its heart. Jan’s apparent primacy had in fact been established long before by Karel van Mander, whose seminal history of the art of the Lowlands, Het Schilder-boeck (The Book of Painters, 1604), begins its survey of artists with the Van Eycks.20

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Introduction: As I Can

Van Eyck scholarship during the middle decades of the twentieth century was noteworthy for two currents in particular: iconology and the technical examination of paintings. The former is associated above all with Erwin Panofsky, whose Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (1953) remains a cornerstone of art history. Within that disciplinary scope, Panofsky’s approach is remembered especially for his account of ‘disguised symbolism’ in the art of the Van Eycks and Netherlandish contemporaries. Deeply influential on generations of scholarship and even on the public perception of Jan’s work, the concept is now regarded with caution within a more nuanced view of symbolism and other mechanisms of meaning in his art. Technical examination, which is now fundamental to advanced conservation and scholarship in the field, was being applied to panel paintings by the first decades of the twentieth century, including investigation of Van Eyck panels by X-ray.21 It is telling that Paul Coremans’s milestone 1953 study of the Ghent Altarpiece is titled L’Agneau mystique au laboratoire: examen et traitement (The Mystic Lamb in the Laboratory: Examination and Treatment). By far the most sustained analysis and conservation of the polyptych began in 2010 and is still in progress at this writing. A formidable array of expertise and technologies continues to yield extraordinary findings about the work’s production and to reveal colour and detail that had been obscured for centuries. Mystery and discovery have in fact become integral to our view of Van Eyck, with abiding questions about his secret missions for the duke, the elusive career of Hubert, the 1934 theft of one panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, a lingering sense of ‘disguised’ symbolic details and, most recently, the ongoing revelations of scientific analysis and historical interpretation. In past generations such findings became available mostly in scholarly publications, and then gradually in art history courses and relatively rare exhibitions including paintings by Van Eyck, which are seldom allowed

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to travel. This has changed in recent years. Closer to Van Eyck, for example, is an online resource that provides extensive information – including new findings and exceptional high-resolution imagery – on the Ghent Altarpiece project and other works.22 In 2020 we saw the opening (and, alas, pandemic-induced early closing) of ‘Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution’ at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent. Long preparation for this, the largest Van Eyck exhibition in history, occasioned a wealth of new scholarship to accompany an unprecedented look at the paintings themselves – together as even the artist had never seen them. It is no surprise that the abundance of new research and astonishing digital imagery raises at least as many questions as it answers. A challenge to look and think longer is in many ways built into this art. This book is about the deeply self-conscious originality of Jan van Eyck. The first two chapters introduce what we know of his life, career and working practice. The remaining five address his paintings. Although each ponders inventive formulations of appearance and meaning, the chapters are organized mostly by familiar categories of subject-matter: Virgin and Child, saints and portraiture. Two exceptions are a chapter on a single monumental work, the Ghent Altarpiece; and another, ‘Annunciations and Other Encounters’, which explores several works in light of a per­­ vasive dimension of his practice that is as much conceptual as it is compositional. An epilogue considers a lost Van Eyck painting of a woman bathing. While embodying so much of what we recognize elsewhere in his art, that picture created a subject of a sort that would become ubiquitous for centuries. Jan van Eyck could not have foreseen that. But in this as in all of his work, he knew he was changing the art of painting.

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A Career

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t would be impossible to write a traditional biography of Jan van Eyck. Although we know more about his life than we do about those of almost all other artists of his time, it is far less information – and information of a different kind – than is needed for a picture of his life as a life. His date and place of birth are uncertain, and documentation of his youth and education is non-existent. An early record of arms on his tombstone, if accurate, suggests that his family could have been members of the gentry. A reference to his wife as damoiselle and his portrayal of her in a refined headdress suggest that she, too, was perceived as aristocratic.1 Nothing is known about his parents. He had two brothers and perhaps a sister, and a wife and no fewer than two children. But we know almost nothing about his relationships with any of them. There are no personal letters or diaries to offer glimpses of his thoughts about people, places or work. We don’t know what he was like. The closest we have to such a glimpse of the man may be complaints he made about his remuneration. They echo in instructions written to the duke’s accountant in Lille that Jan be paid a pension that had been withheld or delayed. The writer, the general collector of Flanders, notes that if this is not done, he ‘knows’ the artist will take action (‘je scay bien que le même Jehan en fera des poursuites par devers mon dit seigneur’).2 A letter from the duke himself in the following year suggests that this is what

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happened. He tells the accountants he has ‘heard’ that they had held up the payments and that this would cause Jan to leave his service. These reactions reflect the painter’s confidence in dealing with the duke, one of the most powerful men in Europe. But the presumed complaints do not survive in Jan’s own words. Setting aside for now the important body of inscriptions in his paintings and on their frames, it appears that the only words we do have directly from Jan van Eyck himself are notes written on a portrait drawing he made in 1435 (see illus. 13).3 His descriptions of colour here are fascinating, but hardly a window on the man who wrote them. The surviving texts that do illuminate his life were all written by others. A handful from his own time that comment on him were written by foreigners who knew his reputation and some of his work, but probably not the man. Documents written by those who did know and work with him – mostly among records from the court of Philip the Good, who employed him from 1425 until Jan’s death in 1441 – are our main guideposts, and they are all business. What they and related evidence allow us to recount in some measure is less a life than a career. The astonishing work it yielded reveals much about Van Eyck and his world. But what else do we know about him? If the frequent estimation of Jan’s birth in the years around 1390 is correct, most of his surviving work was produced after he was forty. At the time of his death in 1441, probably in June, he would have been around fifty. His birthplace is most often thought to have been in or near Maaseik, on the left bank of the river Maas (Meuse), on the eastern border of what is now Belgium. This origin for Van Eyck is asserted by both Lucas de Heere and Marcus van Vaernewyck, sixteenth-century Ghent humanists whose writings about Jan more than a century after his death remain important documents of his reputation in the region, if not always of verifiable facts about him and his work. 4 Their claims for his origin in or near Maesheyc or Maeseyck have found

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A Career

circumstantial support in the dialect of his annotations on the 1435 portrait drawing and of his motto Als ich can, as well as in the fact that his daughter, Lievine, entered a convent in Masseik in 1449.5 The Mosan river valley, including the County of Limburg occupied by Masseik, had long been a sphere of vital artistic activ­­ ity. Along the same river are the larger, more prosperous cities of 's-Hertogenbosch (to the north), and Maastricht and Liège (to the south). Not far to the east is Cologne, then the largest city in German lands and seat of an archbishopric encompassing much of this territory. Shifting political affiliations among these cities in the decades around 1400 appear not to have impeded – and would sometimes have fuelled – production of sculpture, goldsmith work, illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings and more to serve the needs of nobles, princes and churches. No early documents survive to support sixteenth-century claims that Jan had trained under his older brother Hubert, or guesses that both would have trained under their father, who may or may not have been a painter.6 It is tantalizing to imagine how the young Jan and his siblings might have absorbed and contributed to a rich array of work in the region.7 But our earliest clear sighting of him comes from further north and west, and not until 1422 – leaving him invisible to history both within his native territory and before the age of about thirty. By October of that year he was in The Hague, working at the court of John of Bavaria, Count of Holland. Several payments are made by the count to ‘Jan the painter’ and his assistants during the next two years there.8 Nothing is specified about the location, medium or content of the work, but it is generally assumed Jan would have been contributing to the decoration of the Binnenhof, the principal residence of the Counts of Holland, which had been under renovation since the fourteenth century. Although his later, securely established oeuvre consists entirely of panel paintings, his

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time in The Hague probably included work on some combination of books, walls, fabrics or other materials. While artists at court certainly had specialities, they were often expected to produce work of various kinds as needed. In a letter written in Naples in 1524, the humanist Pietro Summonte remarked that Jan van Eyck had ‘at first practised the art of illuminating books’.9 The closest we have to earlier written evidence of this is Jan’s 1439 payment to an illuminator in Bruges for work done on behalf of the duke. Far more intriguing – and more complex as evidence of Jan’s possible work on manuscripts – are several illuminations in the so-called Turin-Milan Hours, to which we shall return. The count died in January 1425. By May of that year Jan was appointed painter and varlet de chambre (chamberlain) to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy – a post he would occupy for the rest of his life. The household accounts for the duke, which survive from 1426, appear to have been among the most comprehensive kept at European courts in the period. Along with correspondence from the court, those accounts provide the documentary spine of Van Eyck’s career. Philip the Good (1396–1467) would have considered it incumbent upon himself to hire an artist of the finest calibre (illus. 7). His father, John the Fearless, had employed the leading painter Jean Malouel (among others), who had previously belonged to a stable of great artists (including Claus Sluter, Jacques de Baerze, Melchior Broederlam and Jean de Beaumetz) employed by Philip’s grandfather, Philip the Bold. Philip the Bold’s brothers, in turn – the Valois princes Louis of Anjou, Charles v, king of France, and Jean, Duc de Berry – were among the most prolific patrons of the arts in all of Europe in the decades around 1400. When Jan van Eyck entered his service, Philip the Good was almost thirty – perhaps a few years younger than the painter. Having become duke upon the assassination of his father in 1419, he presided over an already opulent court that would become

7 Studio of Rogier van der Weyden, Philip the Good, c. 1445 (after a lost original), oil on oak.

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only more so during the remaining four decades of his reign. The material and ceremonial splendour of the Burgundian court became central to the identity of Philip and his circle. Elaborate pageantry and other festivities, long a feature of civic and court life in Netherlandish cities, reached new heights here, most famously in the Feast of the Pheasant held at Lille in 1454.10 Staged to promote a new crusade against the Turks, the banquet was a spectacle featuring music, drama, disguises, acrobats, tableaux vivants, fountains, tricks and more. Although he had died more than a decade before the Feast of the Pheasant, Jan van Eyck would have contributed – perhaps, for example, as designer, painter and even guest – to comparable events at Philip’s court (illus. 8). The expense and conspicuous craft, the playfulness and thickly layered, multimedia realism of such projects must be kept in mind as we consider his work as a painter.11 Of Philip the Good’s major residences (including Dijon, Brussels, Bruges, Hesdin and Lille), Jan van Eyck’s first posting was at Lille, then the administrative headquarters of the Burgundian Netherlands. He probably moved there in the summer of 1425, following a few months in Bruges after the death of John of Bavaria. Rental payments and other evidence suggest that Lille was his home until 1428.12 The most intriguing documentation of these years, however, entails Jan’s travels elsewhere. He was paid in August and October 1426 for trips taken at the behest of Philip. The first payment was for ‘a certain pilgrimage that the duke had instructed him to undertake in his name’.13 Neither the timing nor the destination is disclosed because they were not allowed to be; the entry specifies ‘a secret journey that [the duke] had ordered him to make to certain distant locations that are not to be declared’.14 This could have occurred during the latter half of 1425, as part of a group recorded elsewhere as having been sent on a secret journey by Philip.15 Whether or not Jan was part of this expedition, it is often speculated that the pilgrimage for which he was paid was

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A Career

to the Holy Land, based on relatively accurate views of Jerusalem in work from his circle or shop.16 It is also thought that this journey could have brought him at least briefly into Italy, judging from seemingly Alpine views in some work associated with him. Because a departure for Jerusalem would most likely have been made either from Venice or Naples, the variety of places and things Jan van Eyck could have seen is enticing to imagine but impossible to know.17 A year later, in October 1427, Jan appears to have attended a celebration in Tournai for the Feast of St Luke.18 Believed to have made a portrait of the Virgin and Child, St Luke was the patron saint of painters, whose professional guilds were typically dedicated to him in Netherlandish cities. Rogier van der Weyden’s painting of the legendary portrait sitting was probably made around 1435 for the Brussels guild of painters, who would have understood it as a claim for the sacred roots and enduring power of their art (see illus. 12). Whether or not St Luke bears the features of Rogier himself, as has often been claimed, the highly influential panel – which was surely known to Van Eyck – reflects a burgeoning professional self-consciousness among Netherlandish painters in these years. Though much less exotic than Jan’s recent travels for the duke, his trip to the feast in Tournai would be remarkable for the likelihood that it brought him to a banquet attended also by Rogier and Robert Campin, the two Netherlandish artists now seen as having played roles comparable to Van Eyck’s in developing a new pictorial language. Unmistakably shared aspects of various paintings (for example, Rogier’s St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Jan’s Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, see illus. 39) imply the three artists’ familiarity with one another’s work. But it is only on this occasion in 1427 that we can reasonably posit a gathering of the three. While Rogier also worked for the Burgun­ dian court (among other aristocratic patrons in and beyond the Netherlands), the position he held for three decades (1435–64)

8 Anonymous, Garden of Love at the Court of Philip the Good, Chateau de Hesdin, 16th century (after an original painting of c. 1432), oil on canvas, mounted on wood.

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A Career

as official painter of the city of Brussels anchored a career very different from Jan’s salaried post in the duke’s inner circle. Jan is often seen, in fact, as having pioneered the role of a European court artist.19 Gifts of wine from the city to the painters may have been genuine honours, but Jan’s attendance on this occasion, and a subsequent visit to the town in March 1428, were probably also desired (if not ordered) by the duke, who needed good relations with Tournai, which at that time belonged to the Kingdom of France.20 One year later Jan was on the road again for Philip the Good, this time as part of a better-documented mission: an embassy dispatched to Lisbon in October 1428 to negotiate the marriage of Isabella of Portugal to the duke. After embarking from Sluis, the party spent a few weeks in England while awaiting new ships. They reached Lisbon on 18 December, three months after their departure, and had meetings with King John i in January 1429. Sometime during this month Jan made a portrait ‘from life’ (au vif ) of the face of the thirty-year-old infanta, which was sent to Bruges for the consideration of the duke (see illus. 55). As they awaited his decision and instructions, members of the mission made the most of their time in the south. They began at Santiago de Compostela, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Christendom. Subsequent stops included Valladolid and Granada, for audiences at the courts of John ii, king of Castile, and Muhammad viii, king of Granada. Although we would like to know many more specifics of these travels, there can be no doubt that the sheer variety of sights and encounters in the region made a deep impression on a painter from the Netherlands. Only in later generations would many northern artists begin to venture so far south. Incredibly, Van Eyck’s portrait of Isabella is the only piece he made for the duke, his employer for sixteen years, that is specifically mentioned in surviving contemporary documents. The

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marriage was arranged by proxy in July, and Isabella arrived at Bruges in December. Van Eyck probably contributed to the design and adornment of elaborate celebrations, which concluded in the early days of 1430.21 We have no record of his work or travels for two and a half years following, until the May 1432 date embedded in the elaborate inscription of the Ghent Altarpiece. By this time he appears also to have established himself permanently in Bruges, having begun mortgage payments in 1431 that he would remit annually until his death. He acquired his house from a wealthy, politically connected mercantile family who remained his neighbours in adjacent houses they owned.22 Their surname, Van Melanen (sometimes spelled Milane, Melane or Milanen), might suggest Italian heritage that would be intriguing in light of Jan’s work for Italian clients.23 Whether or not they were Italian, evidence of the family’s social aspirations and alignment with ducal politics make it likely that they were a significant presence in Van Eyck’s circle. Most interesting among recorded payments in 1432 are gratuities to Van Eyck’s apprentices during vip visits to his shop.24 The first, in July, was by the burgomaster and members of the Bruges city council. This could have been prompted by a city commission to the master, but in any event reflects the esteem in which he was held. The second visit, later in the year, was by the duke himself, who was there to see ‘certain work done by the aforementioned Johannes’.25 We have no way of knowing which of Jan’s projects might have occasioned such an extraordinary visit. Both artist and ruler are, however, likely to have recognized in it an echo of the visit of Alexander the Great to his artist Apelles – reported in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder – whose reputation as the most brilliant of all painters was becoming widely known in Renaissance Europe. The earliest critical appreciation of Van Eyck’s work, from a 1456 treatise on famous men by Bartolomeo Fazio, notes that Jan’s learned approach to art

29

A Career

was nourished in part by his reading of Pliny and other authors.26 By the middle of the sixteenth century, Van Eyck was repeatedly likened to Apelles.27 He appears to have married in 1433. Margaret, given the age of 33 inscribed on the 1439 portrait of her (illus. 56), would have been about 27 when they wed. Their first child was born in 1434. The duke’s order for six silver cups as a baptismal gift in 1434 was repeated in September 1435, perhaps to mark the birth of the Van Eycks’ second child. It is not known whether the ‘children’ mentioned in a 1441 payment to the widowed Margaret refers to more than these two. One was a daughter named Lievine, who would receive a gift from Philip the Good when she became a nun at Masseik in 1450.28 Documents from 1435 together provide an unusually concentrated glimpse of the breadth of Jan van Eyck’s work. By the end of 1434, the year he signed the Arnolfini Portrait of an Italian businessman and his wife, he would already have begun a civic commission for which he was paid in 1435: the painting and gilding of six statues and their niches for the Bruges Town Hall.29 These, along with numerous paintings for other patrons, show that his employment by the duke did not preclude work for a variety of other clients. Yet it was also in 1435 that the duke took extraordinary measures to insure Van Eyck’s continued service to the court. In a stern letter to recalcitrant accountants at Lille, Philip ordered conversion of the painter’s salary to a lifetime pension, along with a dramatic increase in his annual rate of pay. It is striking that the duke’s order – which was presumably to have been executed without question – came with explanation: Philip was about to ‘engage him for certain great works with which we intend to occupy him and we would not find such an artist more to our taste – one so excellent in his art and science’.30 At the end of 1435 Jan was paid for having accompanied the ducal mission in August to Arras, where a peace was to be sought among France,

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England and Burgundy.31 His duties at this high-stakes diplomatic summit probably included portraiture. Two of the attendees, the Burgundian chancellor Nicolas Rolin and the papal legate Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, are portrayed in works he completed in the years immediately following (see illus. 14, 39). His value to Philip is even more apparent in 1436, when his pay is doubled for ‘distant journeys to foreign lands to which my lord has sent him for certain secret matters of which he [the duke] would like no mention made’.32 History has kept this secret too well. Nothing is known of Van Eyck’s destination, company or duties on this trip – which could have been one of the ‘grands ouvraiges’ cited in the 1435 letter to the accountants. The 1436 mission is sometimes hypothesized as having been a component of Philip’s longstanding plan for a new crusade.33 A trip to the Holy Land would have included passage through Italy, perhaps with a departure from Venice. His possible travels there, conceivably including visits to one or more Italian courts where his work was known, have long been a subject of speculation. Whatever its itinerary and destination, this journey has sometimes been associated with a ‘circular representation of the world’ that Fazio reports Jan had painted for Philip the Good.34 This is the only early mention of such a painting, of which, Fazio writes, ‘it is thought no work has been done more perfectly in our time.’ In the absence of any trace of the piece, scholarly speculation has ranged widely about its function, form and even existence as a work by Jan van Eyck.35 The Bruges to which he returned was troubled. A revolt against Burgundian control, led largely by craftsmen, prompted occupation of the city by 3,000 forces under Philip the Good.36 Defeated in a bloody battle there in May 1437, the duke was lucky to have escaped.37 Many wealthy citizens left Bruges in the follow­ ing months. The rule of radicals was short-lived, in part because of famine. Burghers resumed government control by the end of

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A Career

the year, and the March 1438 surrender to the duke included the execution of forty rebels, among other penalties and suffering in the city.38 In the same years (1437–9) Bruges was in the grip of a plague that might have killed up to one-fifth of its inhabitants.39 One wonders how this turmoil affected Van Eyck’s circumstances. Among his securely dated works, only small paintings appear after 1436, the date of the large Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele (see, for example, illus. 36, 44, 48, 49, 51, 56). In 1439 Jan was reimbursed for a payment he had made to a Bruges manuscript illuminator, Jan Creve, for an assortment of initials in a manuscript being pro­­duced for the duke.40 The transaction might imply that Van Eyck himself was contributing to the book, but it could just as well attest to his role as an agent in the commission and coordination of court projects to be executed by others. A payment at the beginning of 1441 to one ‘Jehan de Herch’, who had purchased ‘certain pictures and other secret items’ for the duke, could be another trace of Jan’s work in this capacity.41 The most extraordinary Van Eyck document to come to light in recent generations was drafted in his last year: a petition to the Vatican for a confessional letter on behalf of himself and Margaret.42 Such letters were sought increasingly during the later Middle Ages, when the requirement for annual confession to one’s parish priest often became more challenging in light of travel and other circumstances.43 They could be requested and granted by various channels, including directly to the papal curia, to bishops or to designated papal legates.44 The entry for Van Eyck, registered 26 March 1441, reads: ‘May Your Holiness be deemed worthy to grant Jan van Eyck and Margaretha, his wife, from the diocese of Liège, perpetual confessional letters etc. Let it be done by [special] favour. N.’45 The diocese of Liège included Masseik, long believed to have been Van Eyck’s place of birth and presumably of baptism. Authority to grant such requests had been given by Pope Eugenius iv to Cardinal Niccolò Albergati

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(‘N’), who served as major plenipotentiary between 1438 and 1443.46 Jan van Eyck had almost certainly met Albergati during the Congress of Arras, and produced paintings of and for him.47 Petitions of this sort were very expensive. Jan’s can be understood as reflecting not only his hopes for their salvation, but an interest in the prestige associated with the letter.48 While the timing of the petition mere months before his death is suggestive, we do not know whether he knew his end was near. Jan van Eyck died in late June or early July 1441. 49 He may have been younger than fifty, with children under the age of eight. Probably because of his distinguished service to the court, he was buried at the prestigious Church of St Donatian (demolished circa 1800) rather than in his parish church of St Gillis. A year later his remains were moved from their original resting place in the cloister of the church to a more honoured site within the building, near the baptismal font.50 The relocation of Jan’s body was accomplished thanks to a petition by his brother Lambert van Eyck – one of three siblings mentioned in early documents. All are said to have been artists, though no work by any of them (excepting Hubert’s for the Ghent Altarpiece) has been identified.51 Before his intervention after Jan’s death, the only significant mention of Lambert is regarding work done in 1431–2 for two elite patrons: Philip the Good and Jacqueline of Bavaria, Countess of Holland. For the countess he produced a portrait (of which only echoes survive).52 His work for the duke is unspecified. The modest sum paid by the duke is to ‘Lambert de Hech, frère de Johannes de Hech’, which suggests that the work was not of great consequence and that the recipient was recognized chiefly as Jan’s brother.53 It has been guessed that Lambert continued to run Jan’s shop – probably in partnership with his widow – after the master’s death. Jan and Margaret’s house was sold in 1443 or

33

A Career

1444, but the workshop could have been run separately, allowing for the possibility that it continued business for several more years.54 While he might have completed paintings begun by Jan, there is no way to determine whether Lambert worked on panels from this immediate posthumous period. Even less available to the eyes of history is a sister named Margaret. Her earliest mention comes with an intriguing line in Lucas de Heere’s 1559 ‘Ode’ on the Ghent Altarpiece: [Hubert] began the work, as he was wont But all-destroying death negated his intention. He rests here, buried beside the sister Who also astonished many with her art of painting.55 She is mentioned again as a painter in an account of the Van Eycks by Marcus van Vaernewyck, who gave the name Margaret.56 While there certainly were female painters by the early fifteenth century, the absence of any earlier mention of this Van Eyck sister has cast some doubt on her existence. It has also been wondered whether the name given to her by Van Vaernewyck could reflect a historical confusion with Jan’s wife.57 With Hubert van Eyck we stand on firmer historical ground – and yet facing one of the most elusive figures in the history of art. A major artist based in Ghent, he is assumed, like Jan, to have been a native of Masseik or thereabouts. By the early fifteenth century Ghent was one of the largest cities in northern Europe and home to vibrant craft industries. He was probably older than Jan, though we do not know when either brother was born. Hubert appears to have been unmarried and childless at his death in 1426. Despite evidence of his renown as a painter, he seems not to have been especially wealthy.58 The most important record of Hubert is the quatrain recorded on the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece. Evidently written by Jan van Eyck in 1432, the text explains that

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he had completed the work begun by his brother – ‘a greater man than whom cannot be found’. This posthumous attribution makes the huge polyptych the sole surviving project ascribed confidently to Hubert van Eyck. It does not, however, explain how much or which parts of the work he accomplished. Thus far our account of Jan’s career has relied mainly on documents, with little resort to the paintings themselves – many of which bear signatures and inscriptions that tell us a lot about his work and outlook. Before turning to them, it is helpful to consider a few unsigned works that are often thought to represent – even if only indirectly – Jan’s early production, before the Ghent Altarpiece. If he was born sometime around 1390, this earliest signed project introduces us to an artist around the age of forty. That alone would guarantee that he had already done other substantial work, and his exceptional value in the eyes of at least two courts during the preceding decade make it all the more certain that he was highly accomplished by the time he finished the project his brother had begun. But almost nothing from Jan in this period – at least half his career! – has been confidently identified. For most of the twentieth century it was widely supposed he began as a manuscript illuminator. Few arts were more prized at court, and the phenomenal detail of the finest illuminations of the period bear comparison to Eyckian painting of the 1430s. The manuscript at the heart of speculation about Jan as illuminator is the so-called Turin-Milan Hours. The book was begun in France perhaps during the 1390s for Jean, Duc de Berry, and eventually completed in the Netherlands sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century. The product of a uniquely complex history of production, ownership and partial destruction, the book’s many illuminations included a small handful (a century ago designated the work of ‘Hand G’) that have

9 Jan van Eyck (?), ‘Mass of the Dead’, folio from the Turin-Milan Hours, c. 1430s.

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often been attributed either to Jan or to Hubert van Eyck. However, ongoing analyses and arguments from many angles leave the dating and attribution of these most Eyckian miniatures unresolved.59 One of the illuminations closely associated with Jan is a ‘Mass of the Dead’ painted to accompany the Office of the Dead (illus. 9). A standard element of books of hours, these prayers to be said over a body were often accompanied by an image either of the figure of Death claiming a victim or the recitation of the prayers themselves. The Turin-Milan illumination presents the latter in a way that would have amazed an early user of the manuscript. Mourners surround a catafalque in the nave of a Gothic church as members of the clergy celebrate the Mass further back, at the altar. Few if any earlier European paintings in any medium or scale had so effectively conveyed the relative smallness of figures in a church interior. The painter regarded the building as far more than a mere setting for the action – of which there is, after all, very little. It is a monumentally realized moment among nameless figures animated only by what we imagine as murmured prayer, shuffling fabric, flickering candles and tears. The palpable height of the interior, occupying about half the 26-centimetre (10 in.) length of the parchment, was all the more striking when held in one’s hand. Towering architecture in a page-sized image is also integral to the effect of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church (see illus. 47). The sheer marvel of such repre­ sentation was a goal, not a mere aspect of the artist’s style. As often happens in Eyckian painting, this is partly revealed in the image’s connection with its surroundings. The tidy rectangular frame of the ‘Mass of the Dead’ seems unable to contain the church within, as the top of the vault and a segment of brick wall rise above to claim page beyond picture.60 Foliate marginal decoration touches the vault and wall, along with the frame of the image. With this the painter is finding a way not only to harmonize the flatness

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A Career

of parchment with bold pictorial depth, but to tie the entire page together: the prayer, an image of the Lord in its initial R, the main scene of the Mass and a bas-de-page image of figures in a cemetery. Walking along a pathway, mourners entering at left follow chanting monks. Though in a space far less ambitious than other Eyckian landscapes, these figures’ gentle progress across the page (in the direction of words read above) and among the headstones of a slightly unkempt graveyard is moving. Punctuating this most universal of moments, two tendrils from the R of Requiem curl into the cemetery scene, as if pointing the attention of the judging Lord simultaneously at the mourners and at the word deus. Beyond this and the related ‘Hand G’ images in the TurinMilan Hours, no other manuscript illuminations have been as seriously proposed as early work by Jan van Eyck. A small drawing on paper now in the Louvre has, however, long been considered a possible echo of a wall painting or a tapestry he could have designed for a court – either of Holland or Burgundy (illus. 10). It shows two groups – eight women on the left and nine men on the right – gathered around water in the middle of the scene. Their refined attire and a castle visible over a nearby hill identify them as courtiers. The drawing consists of two parchment fragments that were mounted on wood, probably in the early seventeenth century. Recent technical analysis has revealed that what has long seemed like a scene of fishing from a central stream was probably instead a hunting scene with a larger body of water in the centre.61 Judg­ ing from the facial types, the elaborately realized costumes and some insignia, it has often been thought that the scene included portraits. The original work was probably conceived as an allegory involving love or marriage, perhaps among other themes.62 By the early fifteenth century, such a subject – aristocratic leisure and romance in the outdoors – was thoroughly familiar in courtly literature and visual culture of the Lowlands and far beyond. Hunting and fishing had featured centrally even among

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frescoes in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon in the middle of the fourteenth century, and similar themes occupied countless tapestries, which were among the most expensive furnishings of courts. The lost work partially recorded in the Louvre drawing was probably famous, given the meticulous effort to conserve its parchment fragments in the seventeenth century. Whether or not it had any direct connection to Jan van Eyck, the drawing – which includes minute applications of gold on jewellery, buttons and the spires of the castle – reflects a kind of imagery he would have known well from his earliest days at court. A small Crucifixion in Berlin is also closely associated with Van Eyck (illus. 11). For some, the painting is a product of his shop, perhaps working from Jan’s drawing or a panel left unfinished at his death. Others have seen it as work by Jan himself. Assessment either way is compromised by the poor condition of the painting, which was at some point transferred from panel to canvas and overpainted in several areas. Based on recent ana­ lysis, which has detected Eyckian underdrawing and passages of 10 After Jan van Eyck (?), Fishing Party, c. 1420s, ink drawing with pigment and gold on paper, mounted on panel.

11 Jan van Eyck (?), Crucifixion, c. 1430 (?), oil on panel.

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painting very close to elements of the Ghent Altarpiece, a serious case is made for regarding the Crucifixion as an early work by the master himself.63 The deeply expressive faces of the weeping Virgin and St John are unusual in the secure work of Van Eyck, but not unique. They have cousins among some of the pilgrims in the Ghent Altarpiece and among the mourning figures in Jan’s paired panels of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment (see illus. 33). The relative scarcity of such emotion in his work makes sense in light of his religious subject-matter overall, which favours scenes of the Virgin and other holy figures in serene circumstances. At 43 centimetres (17 in.) tall, the Berlin Crucifixion would have been intended as an object for private devotion, as we assume for Jan’s other small religious pictures. It is the setting of the Crucifixion that most suggests the eye and hand of Jan van Eyck. Its relatively extensive view of Jerusalem is one of several among paintings attributed to him or his shop that have all been tentatively associated with the secret distant journeys he undertook for the duke in 1426 and again a decade later.64 Even more Eyckian (and associable with his travels) are the snow-capped mountains, which appear in no fewer than four works by or attributed to Jan – and nowhere else in earlier painting.65 With several of those works the Crucifixion also shares the powdery light of a daytime moon, which likewise had no real precedent in European art. These and countless other details both far and near are magnetic for an observer able to draw close. Some, like the fascinating proximity of Jerusalem, would have deepened the prayer of a pious owner. Others, like a windmill on the horizon, could have deepened contemplation in different ways – suggesting, for example, a spiritual continuity between the Holy Land and the Netherlands. No one focusing on that horizon can miss the blood that drips from Christ’s hand beside the moon and directly towards the windmill – an even more immediate bridge between Gospel history and the here and now.

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A Career

This concentration of elements, which reaches beyond symbolism, relies on the unprecedented fullness of representation that distinguishes all of Jan van Eyck’s work. How did he accomplish such novel effects?

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The Painter at Work

T

he luminous naturalism of Van Eyck’s paintings makes it almost impossible for modern observers not to associate them with photography, which was invented four centuries later. The parallel is distorting for its anach­ ronism, but even more so because it is reflexive and mostly un­ conscious; we observe his accomplishment with eyes and minds saturated by realistic images made by totally different means. Beyond the vast difference of process, so much of the photo­ graphic imag­e ry that fills our experience is created with little thought, effort, time, consultation or cost; everyone makes pictures. Precisely the opposite was true of images made by Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries. All of his paintings began with drawings – first on paper or a similar support, and then on the panel prepared for the painting. Today there is only one drawing on paper that is widely regarded as having been made by Jan van Eyck: a portrait of a man usually identified as Cardinal Niccolò Albergati (illus. 13). It is in metalpoint, which is made by applying a stylus to a support (usually wood, parchment or paper) coated with a thin layer of bone and ash, chalk, or a similar compound. The resulting surface texture cap­tures metallic particles to register a line.1 The earliest major metalpoint drawings are dated around the early 1390s, roughly the time of Jan’s birth. A century later, silverpoint was being widely used in Europe, as famously attested in sheets by Leonardo, Raphael, 12 Rogier van der Weyden, St Luke Drawing the Virgin, c. 1435, oil and tempera on oak.

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Dürer and Holbein, among other leading masters. But the most important metalpoints in earlier generations were produced in northern France and the Netherlands, where Van Eyck was among the innovators. When Rogier van der Weyden depicted St Luke drawing the Virgin in this medium (illus. 12), he surely recognized it as a special strength of the Netherlandish painters who had commissioned the work for their guild chapel. While the technique is often described as unusually demanding because its marks are largely unerasable, this was also one of its great advantages. Before they became artworks unto themselves in the later fifteenth century, drawings were a kind of equipment in the artist’s workshop. Durability would have been especially prized for these models of figures or motifs to be used for reference and instruction in the development of new work. Wide­spread reliance on such model drawings, many of which copied elements of existing works of art, reflects the fact that artists in these generations developed images in response more to pictorial tradition than to study of the visible world.2 The other main function of European drawings in these generations was as direct preparation for a new work. This was the purpose of Van Eyck’s portrait drawing in Dresden (Gemälde­ galerie Alte Meister), the painted version of which is in Vienna (Kunst­historisches Museum) (illus. 14). Identification of the man as Cardinal Niccolò Albergati is based on a later record of the painting written by the Antwerp collector Peter Stevens, the painting’s owner in the seventeenth century. Naming Jan van Eyck as the artist and 1438 the date, Stevens indicated that it represents ‘the Cardinal of the Holy Cross who at that time was sent by the Pope to Bruges to make peace between Duke Philip and the Dauphin of France in the matter of his father’s death’.3 The cardinal of Santa Croce at that time was Albergati, who was indeed dispatched from Rome to Flanders in 1431 and 1435. Van Eyck’s own involvement in diplomatic missions for Philip the

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The Painter at Work

Good makes the scenario of him portraying the visiting dignitary almost irresistible. Amid high-stakes peace negotiations, the papal emissary sits for the Duke of Burgundy’s internationally renowned court artist and diplomatic attaché. Despite the evidence for identifying the man as Albergati, some doubts have been raised – arguing, for example, that the cardinal was unlikely to have been portrayed without tonsure and ecclesiastical attire, as this man is. With the traditional identification in mind, it is now generally assumed that Van Eyck made the highly finished sheet during the visit of 1435, probably knowing that Albergati would not be in Flanders long enough for completion of the panel. The drawing includes riveting evidence of the artist’s planning for a painting: annotations of colour observed during the sitting. Written in Middle Dutch (the specific dialect of which has been invoked in discussions of Van Eyck’s birthplace), lines of text above and to the left of the face meticulously distinguish areas. Moving downwards, after descriptions of the ochreous or ashy grey of the hair, faint lines describe The lower part of the forehead Between the eyes sanguineous Close to the hair pale-ish The wart purple-ish The apple of the eye Around the pupil Dark yellow-ish And in its circumference Close to the white blue-ish4 . . . and so on for the nose, cheeks, lips, beard and chin. Recent exam­inations also detected an ‘r’ on the left cheek and left corner of the mouth.5 This could have been for red, or ‘red-ish’

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(roodachtich), which is how Jan described the chin. There is some­ ­thing appeal­­ing in the fact that the only surviving hand­writing by Jan van Eyck is these notes recording minute observation of a face. And it is remarkable that he used the suffix ‘-achtich’, or ‘-ish’, after almost every colour mentioned – as if seeing vari­ ances from pure colours, or knowing that pure versions are elu­ ­sive, if defin­able at all. The finished painting shows that he used these notes; there are, for example, thin blue rings at the outer edge of the pupils, next to the white.6

13 Jan van Eyck, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati (preparatory drawing), c. 1435, silverpoint and goldpoint on prepared paper.

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The Painter at Work

Technical analysis has revealed more about the drawing. In addition to silver, the main medium of early Netherlandish metalpoint drawings, Van Eyck used at least two additional styli: one an alloy of silver and copper, and the second in gold, which was used for the inscriptions and final elements of overdrawing.7 When it came time to develop the painted portrait from the preliminary drawing, he needed a way not only to transfer its essential elements but to expand them to the larger panel. Jan 14 Jan van Eyck, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, c. 1435, oil on oak.

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appears to have done so with a divider – a compass-like drafting instrument that allows proportional transfer of a design using relational points and contours.8 The mixture of media in the portrait became still more interesting with the recent appearance of an elaborate Eyckian drawing of the Crucifixion, which also combines metalpoint in both silver and gold (illus. 15). Gold was much rarer for drawing; these two Eyckian sheets are in fact among the very few early metalpoint drawings known to have used both.9 It is not clear what determined the use of one or the other for different parts of the drawing – whether, for example, one stylus was applied in a separate phase of work, or instead was favoured for emphasis or another graphic effect. But an unexpected detail certainly suggests an artist thinking about the choice: one of the horses (third from left) is defecating in silverpoint and urinating in gold.10 The exceptional concentration of figures and detail is one reason for the drawing’s association with Jan van Eyck. A more specific one is its close relationship to the only Crucifixion securely attributed to him, which is one of a pair of panels now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see illus. 33).11 Although some believe the drawing to have been done by the master himself, an evolving consensus points more towards his workshop. Its original purpose is unknown; suggestions have included an elaborate preparatory drawing, a workshop record or copy of a now-lost painting, or even a drawing made as an independent object of private devotion.12 Indentations made on its contours with a pin or blind stylus suggest that the image was at some point transferred to another surface – either a panel or perhaps even a copperplate for engraving – by means of an indigo pigment still present on the back of the drawing.13 This would have yielded a 1:1-scale transfer, unlike the enlarging scheme used for the Albergati drawing. New specifics about these and other aspects of Eyckian practice will emerge as research continues, but we already know more about

15 Jan van Eyck and/or workshop (?), Crucifixion, c. 1440 (?), silverpoint, goldpoint, pen and ink on paper.

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his methods and business than we do about those of most artists of the period. This is thanks to early documentation of a widely renowned court artist, generations of tenacious scholarship in the archives and beyond, and a proliferation of increasingly soph­ isticated scientific analysis. Early Netherlandish paintings were among the first historical bodies of art to have been intensively studied with advanced scientific equipment, largely because their 16 Infrared reflectogram detail of the Arnolfini Portrait (illus. 60).

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The Painter at Work

physical composition allows for especially revealing findings. An early milestone was the examination and restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece in 1951–2.14 The most recent extensive study and resto­ r­ation of the altarpiece, begun in 2010, builds upon the foundation laid by that campaign, which had employed X-radiography, infrared photography and paint sample analysis, among other approaches. Among newer technologies brought to bear on panel paintings of the period, the most important have been dendrochronology, which dates panels and other wood artefacts by growthring ana­lysis; infrared reflectography, which, far more than infrared photog­raphy, penetrates paint layers to reveal underdrawings; and high-resolution digital macrophotography, which captures magni­ fied examination to document information about technique and condition. X-radiography and infrared reflectography have opened especially vivid windows on the artist’s process. For many paintings, they disclose the media of underdrawing (charcoal, ink, wash and so on), the styles of one or more hands that drew it, areas given greater or less attention in the design stage and changes made either within the underdrawing or between the underdrawing and a final paint layer. The most widely reproduced element of an underdrawing from any painting might be the right hand of the husband in the Arnolfini Portrait in London (illus. 16). The hand was first drawn further back and with the palm turned more outwards, then adjusted to the inclined lateral view seen in the painting (see illus. 60). Although the shifted gesture attracts special attention because of debate about narrative and symbolic aspects of the image, it is just one of many changes Van Eyck made while developing the work.15 In addition to the man’s repositioned hands (both of them), his head, hat and shoulders were higher, and his feet were tried in at least two positions other than the one settled on for the painting. The heights and gazes of his eyes and those of his wife were adjusted, with hers shifted more towards

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him and his pulled back from their initial aim more towards her. Among accessory elements in the room, the famous mirror was first drawn larger and with an octagonal frame; the brush was first positioned higher and hung on the wall, not the back of a chair; and the carpet was shorter. Some things in the painting were not underdrawn at all, including the dog, the fruit by the window, the unworn shoes, the chair by the bed, the beads on the wall and the chandelier. If the painter originally anticipated these and other items that emerged only in the paint layer, for some reason he decided they required less preparation in the design stage. Sometimes we find the reverse, and something significant in an underdrawing disappears in the painting. The most intriguing instance in Van Eyck’s work may occur in the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (see illus. 39). Infrared reflectography reveals a drawn money purse hanging prominently from the belt of the kneeling patron (see illus. 40). Trained as a lawyer and at work in the House of Burgundy long before his rise as chancellor under Philip the Good, Rolin had, by the time of Van Eyck’s painting, become fan­ tastically rich as the most powerful member of the duke’s court. The image conveys his renowned love of fine attire and property of many kinds, but the idea to include his purse was discarded. It is often guessed that this was requested by Rolin, believing such a pointed reference to earthly rewards could have tempered the sincerity of his prayer. Whatever the intentions behind it, the change reflects a wider practice of artists’ consultation with patrons during development of a painting. Their give-and-take often revolved around drawings either on paper or on the panel to be painted.16 By the sixteenth century, such a drawing for approval, often associated with a contract for new work, was sometimes referred to as a vidimus (‘we have seen’). The wood panel support for the paintings, typically with the frame already engaged, would have been ordered from the shop

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The Painter at Work

of a carpenter or joiner. Oak was the standard for Netherlandish painters. Several of Van Eyck’s panels have dimensions that match or are multiples of a Bruges foot (27.44 cm/10.8 in.).17 The distinc­ tive shared moulding of several of his frames, and the fact that panels for at least three paintings from his shop were from the same tree, suggest that he had a preferred local provider. Frames and workmanship are different on the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, perhaps having been provided by a Ghent rather than Bruges joiner.18 Panel surfaces were covered with a mixture of chalk and animal glue and smoothed to the master’s specifications in his own shop by apprentices or other assistants. Jan van Eyck’s underdrawings were generally in a wet, probably water-based medium applied with a brush. As would be expected, they emphasize contours of figures, structures and other elements, but many of the underdrawings also include substantial hatching to indicate shading. Until recently it had appeared that his underdrawings for portraits forgo hatching, but improved imaging technol­ogy shows that for at least some of these faces, hatching is present – and with strokes finer and more nuanced than those in the designs for his larger scenes.19 The hatching is especially resolved in the underdrawing for the 1439 portrait of his wife, Margaret van Eyck (see illus. 56). This could have been because the subject was more available to him than any other for prolonged sittings.20 The finesse of Margaret’s underdrawing is comparable to that of the silverpoint drawing of Cardinal Albergati (see illus. 13). Most of Van Eyck’s portraits, both as independent pictures and within larger compositions, would have been preceded by a study on paper to be kept at hand during painting.21 Recent analyses have also discovered distinct stages of underdrawing for some of the larger compositions. There are three discernible layers, for example, in the preliminary design of the elaborate Annunciation in Washington (see illus. 29).22 The first, realizing the main elements in clear, fine lines, was probably shown

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to the patron as a vidimus. Changes made in the second stage of the drawing might have responded at least in part to the patron’s review of the first. The main revisions are to the architecture of the church, including adjustments of perspective and a redesign of the windows on the rear wall.23 Unlike the underdrawing of the initial composition, the revision is applied with a more fluid medium and line, which was also used to fortify distinctions of shadow and light. A final stage switches from the dark, watery medium to lead white, which is applied in precise lines to secure certain details. In contrast to our remarkable access to Van Eyck’s underdrawings, basic questions remain about the paint that covers them. Although much has been learned about pigments, binders, brushes and technique, his process is still not fully understood. In a way this seems almost fitting, given the long-cherished but mistaken belief that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting. Giorgio Vasari made the claim a century after Van Eyck’s death, in the first edition of his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Artists, 1550). In his discussion of Antonello da Messina, which begins with an account of fifteenth-century painters’ search for a greater ‘softness and vitality’ than they had been able to achieve in tempera painting, Vasari hails ‘Giovanni da Bruggia’ as an artist who ‘began to try out various kinds of colours and, as a man who took delight in alchemy, to make a number of oils for use in varnishes and other purposes, following the ideas of learned men such as himself’.24 Describing in some detail his understanding of the Flemish master’s experimentation, Vasari reports that Jan van Eyck, ‘after testing many other materials . . . realized that mixing colours with [walnut and linseed] oils gave them a very strong consistency, and that when they dried, not only were they waterproof, but the colours gleamed so brightly that they possessed lustre by themselves without the need for varnish, and, what seemed even more

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The Painter at Work

amazing to him, they could be blended infinitely better than tempera’.25 Vasari goes on to recount the enormous success and spread of the discovery, noting that many artists’ admiration was tinged with envy because ‘for a time [Van Eyck] did not want anyone to see him working or learn his secret.’26 The vast influence of Vasari’s Vite, along with this appealing story of discovery, ensured its long association with Van Eyck; not until the late eighteenth century was it shown that oil painting had been practised as early as the twelfth century. While Van Eyck and many of his contemporaries were surely aware the medium was older, he was manifestly accomplishing something new in it. Recall that in the earliest surviving account of his fame, dated to 1456, Bartolomeo Fazio reported that Jan was ‘thought for this reason to have discovered many things about the properties of colours recorded by the ancients and learned by him from reading Pliny and other authors’.27 The transalpine recognition of Jan as a learned painter recalls Philip the Good’s reference to him as ‘one so excellent in his art and science’ – bearing in mind that ‘science’ in this context would have had a more expansive scope than it does in our time.28 Material and technical innovation were not yet typical criteria in acclaim for artists. Early discussions of oil media focus repeatedly on their colour, consistency, drying capacity and durability. Vasari was right about Van Eyck’s use of linseed oil; this was relatively standard for early Netherlandish paintings, a fair number of which included walnut oil, as well.29 The linseed binder in several Van Eyck paintings was also mixed with small measures of pine resin. Oils were often prepared and applied differently in different areas of a painting – walnut oil, for example, being favoured for light areas.30 They were sometimes heated, either in sunlight or by boiling, to thicken them. Early Netherlandish painters used a relatively standard array of pigments, most of which were derived from minerals, lead, charcoal or animal and vegetable dyes. Some were derived

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indirectly from previous uses; early recipes recommend, for example, extraction of reds from shearings of dyed wool.31 Van Eyck worked with the same complement of pigments, though his appear to have been especially high quality overall.32 Some of his paints contain finely ground colourless glass. This was a com­ mon additive in European painting well into the eighteenth century, but it has not yet been found in paint before Van Eyck.33 While much later sources recommend glass to improve paint’s thickness and drying, we do not know its intended purpose for Van Eyck, who may have pioneered its use. No less remarkable than his paint is the way he handled it. Tempera, the preferred medium for earlier northern – and most Italian – painters during the fifteenth century, allowed for a relatively limited scope of application. Strokes are discrete, fast dry­­ing and opaque. Oil, which can be worked to various consistencies,

17 Detail of grass and flowers from the Ghent Altarpiece (open, illus. 22).

18 Detail from the robe of Gabriel in the Annunciation (illus. 29).

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is translucent, smoothly blendable and slower drying. From its sheer pliability Van Eyck coaxed countless modes of representation. With thinned paint he could brush broad areas of thin glaze in layers that would have been even more luminous in their day than they are in ours (illus. 17). With thicker paint and finer brushes he made dots, dabs, flicks, squiggles and featherings that could convey any number of details or optical effects – including, for example, light both glinting from and seeping through glass beads hung on a wall (illus. 61) or the textural topography of gold thread, silk and velvet in an angelic vestment (illus. 18). Some effects he achieved by subtraction: scraping parallel furrows into wet paint for the pages of a closed book, for example (illus. 19), or blotting smooth areas of colour to thin or texture a glaze.34 The first may have been done with the back end of a paintbrush 19 Detail of a book in the Ghent Altarpiece (closed, illus. 21), showing paint scraped while wet.

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The Painter at Work

handle and the second with the painter’s palm. Fingerprints elsewhere in his paint layers suggest that Van Eyck, like many oil painters to follow, sometimes touched as he painted, feeling his way towards new effects along with practised ones.35 On the reverse of the portrait of Margaret van Eyck – which is painted, like the backs of several of his panels, to look like variegated stone – a constellation of red blooms was almost certainly applied with n­o contact at all, but rather a spatter from a loaded brush (illus. 20). This improvisational technique, revealed gradually by technical examination, loosens an earlier perception of Van Eyck as a disciple of detail painstakingly transcribed from reality. It is too easy in our time to confuse such compelling realism with

20 Detail of the marbled reverse of the portrait of Margaret van Eyck (illus. 56).

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the mechanical operations of photography and its descendants. Van Eyck’s exploration of materials, tools and manoeuvres sought to recreate not specific forms from the world but rather the more subtle operations and effects of seeing them. This is why reflections, refractions and ambient shadows – which have no actual substance in the world – so deeply define his work. Van Eyck’s technical dexterity, even audacity, may mean that some of his paintings were completed more rapidly than we tend to assume. It has been intriguingly argued, for example, that the face of the presumed self-portrait in London could have been painted in a single day (see illus. 1).36 If so, it was surely on the date spelled out to occupy more than half the inscription on the lower frame: Jan van Eyck made me on 21 October 1433. More than a mere record of completion, the date would announce the sublime fluency of his art. That kind of claim might have seemed apt in an independent self-portrait – a category of painting that did not really exist yet. One thinks ahead to a small, fluidly handled 1506 painting by Albrecht Dürer in which a foreground cartellino presents the year, his monogram and opus quinque dierum (the work of five days).37 This portrait, like most small paintings confidently attributed to Van Eyck, must have been painted by him alone. Among more complex compositions and larger works, the participation of others is assumed and sometimes apparent. The most famous case is the immense and complex Ghent Altarpiece, the inscription on which names Hubert as the initial artist and Jan as the one who finished the work. The specific division of their labour is not clear, though recent analysis has begun to clarify different styles and campaigns of work.38 If they actually worked together on the project, it could not have been for long, given Hubert’s death in 1426. Jan had moved from The Hague (190 km/118 mi. from Ghent) to Bruges (50 km/31 mi. from Ghent) in the spring of 1425; to Lille (75 km/46 mi. from Ghent) a few months later; and made several long-distance trips for Philip the Good between

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The Painter at Work

1426 and 1429. It is unlikely he would have been able to dedicate much time to the Ghent Altarpiece before 1430, after he had returned to Flanders. During his work on the altarpiece, Jan may have had the service of at least some of the assistants who were employed by Hubert. Perhaps Lambert van Eyck, a third brother recorded as having been a painter, was a member of the team. Jan van Eyck certainly had his own assistants, though we know almost nothing about them. They were given a gratuity of 5 sous by Bruges council members visiting his studio in 1432. During the duke’s visit in 1433, he gave them 25. The multiples of five have suggested the possibility that Jan had five assistants, but this is tenuous evidence at best, and the number is likely to have fluctuated.39 Five would have been well above average, as records of Bruges shops from decades following indicate that most would have had somewhere between zero and two. 40 Netherlandish painters had assistants of different kinds, including apprentices and journeymen, who were more seasoned professionals for hire. It was typical for apprentices to pay a fee for training with a master, and in turn for the master to house and feed them. 41 One of their contributions would have been preparation of pigments, panels and other materials. They would also often have been tasked with relatively formulaic painting, for example on banners or other kinds of decoration for special occasions. Most apprentices did not become masters. Journeymen (referred to by various terms in different contexts) provided much of the labour in many Netherlandish workshops. They could be attached long-term to a master or join solely to work on a single project before moving on. Some would have stayed in a city or region, while others had international careers.42 One can only imagine how much these artists disseminated techniques, styles and ideas. Any who worked with Jan van Eyck were collaborating with a master who had learned from foreign travels and in turn deeply affected aims and means of painting across Europe.

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Despite our ignorance about the roster and roles of Van Eyck assistants, it is useful to bear in mind what we know of the systems in which they were trained and employed. Craft guilds in Bruges and most other major cities in the region controlled membership, quality and competition, among other things. Masters in one craft were generally not allowed to produce for profit in another. The sale of imported work was often forbidden or strictly limited, as were the venues from which a local artist could sell. In the middle of the fifteenth century, one article of the regulations of the Bruges guild of image-makers reads: Item what any merchant offers for sale of our corporation, shall be sold only in his inn at opening hours, except on the three exhibition days during the Bruges year market, and the panels have to be of good quality, and this will be approved and expressed by the dean and the inspectors (‘vinders’) on their oath; whomever infringes hereupon will be fined twenty parisian shilling each time.43 As a court artist imported and so highly esteemed by the duke, Jan van Eyck operated beyond such strictures. When he accepted commissions for patrons beyond the court, it was presumably with the permission of Philip the Good – though we do not know whether this would have been on a case-by-case basis or as a standing agreement. If the latter, one assumes that court projects were to have had priority. The question of these arrangements becomes all the more intriguing in light of the extraordinary fact that none of the surviving work by Van Eyck was certifiably produced for the duke. There is evidence from other cities that court artists with similar privileges attracted the envy or enmity of guild artists, whose business, especially from the wealthiest patrons, they could poach without heeding the regulations that bound local masters.44

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The Painter at Work

The changing professional self-consciousness of fifteenthcentury artists came with a burgeoning sense of competition. Among its many roots were the rise of new urban art markets, culturally ambitious courts, and inevitable tensions among artists within and between them. Philip the Good retained several other court artists, including Henri Bellechose, Colart le Voleur, Hue de Boulogne and his son Jean de Boulogne, probably among others.45 Much if not most of their art may have been relatively trad­­itional decorative and ephemeral work for ducal residences and celebrations. All indications suggest that Jan van Eyck was dis­­tinctly – and perhaps officially – out of their league. It would be fascinat­ing to know how they interacted with him. The stratified, regulated and competitive arena of the artisans would never have been far from his sight, and by the middle of the 1430s he was in­­­ escapably in their sight, too, thanks especially to the very public fame of the Ghent Altarpiece. Honed instincts for professional comparison and assessment shaped perception of this radically new kind of painting, and surely also stimulated Van Eyck’s own ambitions for it. Observers have always recognized those ambitions in the seemingly comprehensive realism of his paintings. But they are also apparent in Jan’s inclination to pack paintings with a virtual catalogue of work crafted in other media. Consider, for example, the sheer abundance of artistry depicted in such paintings as the Washington Annunciation (see illus. 29) or the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele (see illus. 42). Each presents an astounding variety not only of materials but of workmanship within them. They are showcases of high-end sculpture in stone and wood, goldsmith work, architecture, weaving, inlay, glass work and more. There can be little doubt that these elements collectively took most of the time and labour required for each painting, even though they would have been understood as auxiliary to the core Gospel or devotional subject. Of course, that very quality – a sense of surplus splendour – would also have been integral to the matchless

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value and appeal of the images. Both within and beyond the court, panel paintings were generally not the most expensive craft good. These ones, however, were replete with the work of other kinds of artists. Many observers must have spent more time on delectation than on prayer before these paintings; they could relish plush brocade or seemingly imported textiles that only the wealthiest could own. In conjuring so much variety of craft in such concentration, Van Eyck knew he was making the work of many arts as if fluent in all of them. His aggregating impulse represents an almost imperial claim for painting as the one art that could, in his hands, create all others as well. In this ambition, no work aimed higher than the Ghent Altarpiece.

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

T

he Ghent Altarpiece presents a foundation, linchpin and puzzle for all modern understanding of the careers of Hubert and Jan van Eyck. It is also unique – in for­mat, subject, meaning and enduring fame – among early Netherlandish altarpieces. Huge, radiant and seemingly endless in variety and detail, the work at once awes and absorbs. Its gene­ sis is among the most mysterious and its afterlife among the most eventful in the history of European art.1 Like many northern altarpieces of the period, Van Eyck’s has hinged wings that allow it to show two aspects: a closed exterior view and an open interior one (illus. 21, 22). It is widely assumed that such altarpieces remained closed most days, to be opened only on designated ones (certain feast days and perhaps Sundays) to provide a sense of occasion and revelation with their more elaborate interiors. The Ghent Altarpiece is among the earliest known to have become a renowned attraction in its own right, alongside its liturgical and memorial functions. In 1458, as part of a ceremonial welcome to the city for Duke Philip the Good, actors staged a public tableau vivant of the altarpiece’s images. Writers and artists were recording their impressions of the altarpiece early on, as Albrecht Dürer would do during his visit to the city in 1521. A fair number of early visitors paid for the opportunity to see it.2 Many more took advantage of the special days when the altarpiece was opened, resulting in ‘such a great crush

21 Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (closed), 1432, oil on oak.

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

that one could hardly get close to it’.3 We can assume many or most in the crowds were there not for prayer, but as tourists and art lovers. Unlike most hinged altarpieces, this one has two main regis­ ters, an upper and a lower. In the closed position each consists of four panels across. Those of the upper register have curved terminals above that create attic-like spaces for an additional row of smaller figures. The strongly architectural character of the exterior fades on the interior, which presents five panels below and seven above. Where the scales of figures in the upper and lower registers of the exterior are comparable to each other, those

22 Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (open), 1432, oil on oak.

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above and below on the interior are completely unlike. This disjunction, along with several structural anomalies, has raised fundamental questions about the evolution of the altarpiece. Was it designed from the outset to look much as it does today? Or is this a radical revision of an initial project with additions that changed its scale, appearance and meaning? Any answers to these and most other questions about the work require reference to a faded inscription on the bottom frame of the closed polyptych, which has been transcribed, expanding abbreviations, as: Pictor hubertus eeyck · maior quo nemo repertus Incepit · pondus · que johannes arte secundus Frater pefecit · judoci vyd prece fretus Versu sexta Mai · vos collocat acta tueri4 Letters here underscored in the last line signify a different colour – red rather than black – in the letters of the inscription; read as Roman numerals (with v and u both representing five), their sum is 1432, the year in which the work was completed. To allow for this chronogram, and because the quatrain as a whole was crafted in demanding poetic form, its language is elliptical and leaves room for varied translations, including this one: The painter Hubert van Eyck, a greater man than whom cannot be found, began this work. Jan, his brother, second in art, completed the weighty task at the request of Joos Vijd. He invites you with this verse, on the sixth of May [1432], to look at what has been done.5 The subject of the last line – the giver of the invitation – has been read in at least two ways: as Jan van Eyck or as Joos Vijd.6

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

The limited Latin of most visitors would have allowed for several ambiguities in the inscription as a whole.7 Extensive speculation about specifics of the inscription should not obscure the remarkable fact that it provides much of the information we most want about old works of art: artist, patron and date. This was not typical. From Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin, the two Netherlandish contemporaries to whom Jan van Eyck is always compared, we have not a single signed or dated work. Although we cannot be certain that the quatrain was written by Van Eyck, it was entirely characteristic of him to inscribe his paintings and their frames with information that is exception­ ally inventive in language, appearance and meaning. For example, along with names and a date, the Ghent inscription offers a dimension of history, as it distinguishes the beginning of the project from its conclusion by a second hand. Equally remarkable is its clos­­ing invitation, which draws that concentrated fragment of written art history forward towards a limitless viewership in posterity; we, just as much as any fifteenth-century citizen of Ghent or visit­ing dignitary, become the ‘you’ (vos) being addressed. That projective consciousness resonates in the famous Johannes de Eyck fuit hic (Jan van Eyck was here) painted two years later at the heart of the Arnol­­fini Portrait (see illus. 60). To whatever extent we should call this peculiar line a ‘signature’, it departs from others of the period by employing a verb of being rather than doing. More typically a work was inscribed as having been pinxit (painted) or fecit (made). It is therefore also worth noting that the invitation of the Ghent quatrain, whether it is tendered by Jan or his patron, is to see ‘what has been done [acta]’ – which emphasizes the accomplishment of making. It insists on the work as work. But questions remain about who did what. Were it not for the quatrain and echoes of its information in later accounts, the painting might have been attributed only to Jan (with workshop assistance) and probably, given its staggering sophistication,

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deemed fruit of his later years. Instead, this record of the elder brother’s role and the year of completion establishes the Ghent Altarpiece as the earliest dated work we have from Jan van Eyck, and the only one securely attributed to Hubert. Parsing their roles remains one of the classic challenges in the scholarship of medieval and Renaissance art. The most recent examination has attempted to distinguish two main styles more clearly than ever before.8 For such a massive work it is certain that more than two painters were involved, and payment records show that both Hubert and Jan had apprentices and assistants, as was customary for leading artists. Jan’s years of travel and other projects for the duke, beginning in 1425, suggest he must have done most of his work on the altarpiece between 1429 and 1432. Such work on another patron’s project would have required permission from the duke, who already had Jan on salary. One hypothesis has proposed that it began with a smaller altarpiece by Hubert – the Adoration of the Lamb panels on the lower level of the interior – that was then in­­­ corporated and expanded upon by Jan.9 The relative roles of the brothers and their shops were probably more complex and fluid than this or any other basic scenario can suggest. It is important, how­­ever, to understand that one of Jan’s aims would have been to create a coherent, if not seamless, effect in the finished altarpiece. Conspicuous ruptures or illogic would have been unacceptable. The altarpiece and its meanings should therefore be regarded as a whole, whether or not the polyptych resembles the one Hubert had set out to produce. The patrons Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut kneel in prayer on the outer panels of the lower register on the altarpiece exterior.10 Vijd, a leading citizen of Ghent with close ties to Philip the Good, was active politically and diplomatically both within the city (including as councilman and mayor) and beyond, on behalf of the duke. Because he appears to have married Elisabeth,

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

daughter of another Ghent patrician family, by 1392, they were probably in their mid-sixties or older when the work was completed.11 With Joos dead in 1439 and Elisabeth in 1443, they had relatively few years with the work that would secure their place in history. It is assumed that the couple, who were childless, undertook the project not only as a testament of devotion but as a memorial to themselves and their noble legacy.12 They would have been pleased to know that for generations it was referred to as ‘Joos Vijds tafele’ (the retable of Joos Vijd). The altarpiece was for their newly endowed chapel in the parish church of St John the Baptist, which was rededicated to St Bavo in the sixteenth century. Two saints anchor the exterior: John the Evangelist and John the Baptist. Painted as stone sculptures, they occupy the central panels of the lower register, between the prayers of the donors who face inwards on the outer panels. Each of the four is framed by a stone arch with finely carved tracery. The light source, which is from the upper right and relatively consistent for each of these and the other exterior panels, corresponded to the real window in the chapel. The arches of the exterior are one of many means by which Jan van Eyck created a dynamic interaction among depicted spaces, figures, frames, neighbouring images and the real space between observers and the altarpiece. Eyckian realism is typically appreciated in the effects of texture, light and the seemingly infinite resolution of details near and far. Equally instrumental to such realism, however, is the less nameable machinery of bridging and division built on the surfaces and edges of pictures. This is variously apparent in many of the single-panel works, and even more among diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs, which multiply opportunities for an artist to define relationships. Along with their other roles, the stone arches on the first story of the Ghent Altarpiece establish a plane, made insistent by repetition, behind and before which we gauge proximities. Because the

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foremost edges of the pedestals touch the bottom of the panel, the extension of the Baptist’s toe over the edge of his pedestal must place it in front of the picture plane. The same seems true for a shoe and fabric overlapping the pedestal of the Evangelist next door, as well as for elements in other panels on the exterior and interior. By contrast, the bodies and robes of the donors are further in. Such delicate calibrations lead a dance of distance and differ­ ence throughout the altarpiece. More obvious in this regard is the contrast between living figures (who were all the more so when they stood in the chapel before these portraits of themselves) and the statues between them. It is not known why the Van Eycks and several of their Netherlandish contemporaries had begun to paint trompe l’oeil images of sculpture, which are often imprecisely called grisailles, by the 1420s and ’30s.13 We can be confident, however, that no single aim would account uniformly for all such depictions. For example, in a variation on the historical tone struck by the quatrain (naming the first and finishing artists), the statues on the Ghent exterior bespeak antiquity relative to their praying neighbours. Their stoniness also announces, in what could otherwise look like a simple distinction of patronage and dedication, an artist’s new authority over the boundaries of painting itself. A higher authority speaks in the register above. The Annunci­ ation transpires in a room that, given its proportions and view downwards onto a town, appears to occupy a tower – maybe of a church, judging from the form of windows and other elements. The room is continuous across the four panels, but there is a stark difference between what we see in the centre pair: in the left a window and in the right a niche with a lavabo and towel, which represent implements of the liturgy. One explanation of the disjunction, which allows these panels almost to interrupt the exchange between Gabriel and Mary, regards them as Jan’s

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

solution to the problem of building a new altarpiece from parts of a smaller one begun by Hubert.14 Whether or not the younger brother was improvising with inherited components, these middle panels – one offering a rich view of a town, the other three discrete objects enclosed in the foreground – should also be viewed in light of a growing fascina­ tion with the space between Gabriel and Mary. By the 1430s and for at least two generations to follow, countless European artists pondered the channel through which the angel’s news, the girl’s reply and, above all, the Logos itself travelled. For entirely different reasons, both an earlier medieval artist and a modern observer could regard this middle as otherwise empty, a relative gap in mean­­ ingful representation. But painters working in these intoxicating first decades of comprehensive naturalism could not have done so. Yes, this is the space through which the Incarnation is accomplished. But it, along with the rest of a painted interior, had also recently become a surface requiring representation of something worldly – fabric, a wall, structures, objects, a vista. The existence of such things behind the words and the Word could not, in the eyes of the Van Eycks and their contemporaries, wholly separate them from the sacred transmission moving across. Written in gold, Gabriel’s ave gracia plena D[OMI]N[U] STECU[M] (Luke 1:28) proceeds from his panel into the adjacent one. The flourish on the ‘g’ of gracia curls as if growing from one of the angel’s lilies and the carved foliate capital behind them.15 This moment of living fusion between architecture (of the nascent church), a flower (of Marian purity) and a word (grace) is one of many Eyckian inventions of a meaningful relationship in seemingly incidental conjunctions on the picture plane. Mary’s reply, ecce ancilla D[OMI]NI (Luke 1:38), remains in her panel. It is also written upside down (illus. 23). This unprecedented ges­­ture, which recurs in Jan’s Annunciation in Washington (see illus. 29), is usually explained as an accommodation either to

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God in Heaven or to the Holy Spirit, which hovers in the form of a dove immediately above Mary. But would any person of the Trinity need help to make the words out from above – especially when they are spoken? Their spokenness, in fact, suggests a more plausible explanation: the words are inverted so that Mary can utter them in order as Gabriel does, with ecce closest to her mouth just as ave is closest to his. This follows a pervasive Eyckian inclination, in a self-conscious variety of ways, to make words physical.16 Else­ where on the Ghent exterior, the words of the prophets and sibyls above are inscribed virtuosically as if inked onto the curling surfaces of papery banderoles. Below, on the frames separating them from the Annunciation, the names of the prophets and

23 Detail of illus. 21: response of the Virgin in the Ghent Altarpiece (closed).

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Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece

sibyls are painted as if carved into the wood. And in the lower register, names on the pedestals of the saints required a chisel rather than a knife or pen. The exchange between angel and Virgin shone in gold and was given life by coordinating their orders of speech. Paradoxically, the inversion of Mary’s words also makes them more physical, as they seem to have been rotated in space as well as written onto a surface. 24 Detail of illus. 21: city view in the Ghent Altarpiece (closed).

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Material presence accrues in different ways to the frame itself, which – astonishingly – casts shadows onto the tiled floor of the Annunciation. Matching the angles of shadows cast in the panels above and below, they demand to be seen as products of real light from the window in the Vijd chapel. The Ghent Altarpiece was not the first ensemble of paintings to adopt the light of a real window. Masaccio and Masolino, for example, had done so around the same time or a few years earlier in their famed cycle of frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel in the Florentine Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. But the potent fiction of continuity between paintings and their environment is taken to a different level when frames participate, as they do at Ghent. As in several works by Jan van Eyck, these images return the embrace of the frames that hold them. Those frames are often painted illusionistically, elided with internal framing elements (like the stone arches of the lower register) and tasked with bearing important text about the images. Only at Ghent are they engaged so fully that they seem to block light entering the pictures. The open flow of light and space between chapel and Annunciation chamber turns frame into window – an effect that corresponds vividly with the window views through the back wall of the chamber. We look downwards onto buildings and streets of a fifteenth-century Netherlandish town. Although these densely realized views may strike us as standard fare from within a painted interior, they were not common in European painting before the 1430s. Here and elsewhere in his work, Van Eyck gave them a power significantly out of proportion to their small share of the picture surface. Such packed glimpses establish a vast living world beyond the intimate drama before us, in a foreground that would not really be a ‘foreground’ without the background that the windows create.17 For observers able to examine this vista far above eye level in the chapel (would anyone have dared to stand surreptitiously on the altar for a better look?), the immediacy of

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that life would have been staggering. In the largest window, men, women and children mill and converse in the streets and from windows and doorways (illus. 24). Birds wheeling overhead mark an instant in time. Longer moments register in the dark sawtooth pattern on the street – the shadows of rooftops seen obliquely at left, on the other side of the column dividing the window. It is either mid-morning or late afternoon. Such palpably familiar moments unfold among other layers of time on the altarpiece exterior. A brief drama steeped in eternity and in view of daily life in the city, Mary’s conversation with Gabriel is witnessed by prophets and sibyls whose own words advance from a deeper past. The prophets Zechariah and Micah are above angel and Virgin, respectively. The Erythraean and Cumaean sibyls perch between them, over the unpeopled centre panels. This alignment may reflect the biblical origin that the prophets share with Gabriel and Mary. In contrast, the sibyls are prophet­esses whose words were adapted by medieval theologians to sink roots of Christian revelation into the soil of pagan antiquity. The evocative alignment of praying figures and stone saints in the bottom register also cre­­ates an optical kinship between donors and the seers above, who are likewise coloured as if living. The prophets and sibyls do not, however, wear any of the radiant red and pink that so strongly distinguish Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut from everyone and everything else on the altarpiece exterior. The alliance of relatively saturated hues above and below brackets the unique palette of Gabriel and Mary in between, which has sometimes been called ‘semi-grisaille’, standing between sculpture and life. In this they partake of what we see in prophets, sibyls, saints and donors – with­out matching any of them. Their in-betweenness, both in col­­our and as occupants of the middle register, parallels their transformative meaning: in this moment the Old is yielding to the New. This dawning is anticipated in the words above, curling on banderoles that make them seem as much uttered as written by

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the prophets and sibyls whose names are inscribed on the frames below. The words of the Erythraean Sibyl are especially intriguing: nil mortale SONA[N]S AFFLATA . . . es numine celso (He speaks with no mortal tongue, being inspired by power from on high).18 They were derived from a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid (vi:50–51).19 The same passage appears to have been the source for the ‘numine afflatur’ (inspired by the spirit) that accompanies the personification of Poetry that Raphael would paint circa 1510 on the vault of the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura.20 While it was natural enough for this Italian master working in the heart of Julian Rome to turn to Virgil, the reference would not have been expected from a Flemish painter working three generations earlier. But Jan van Eyck was more inclined than almost all of his northern contemporaries to mine classical antiquity. This is also apparent, of course, in the very presence here of sibyls with prophets, a combination far more familiar to the Western imagination from the epic pairings later stationed by Michelangelo along the sides of the Sistine Chapel vault. In this light, it is striking to recognize unusual aspects of two of the towering works of the Roman High Renaissance – Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura and Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling – among prophetic figures and words in a late Gothic chapel at Ghent. The tone of anticipation, imminence and witness on the altarpiece exterior is amplified by the presence of something very different just beyond (see illus. 22). For a first-time visitor encountering the closed polyptych there was curiosity – even mystery – and for those who had seen the interior there was a knowledge of radiant, eternal majesty just out of sight. What is revealed within could scarcely be more different. A matrix of shadowy enclosures and modulated palettes gives way to blue skies, verdant landscape, gold, glittering jewels and a flood of colour. Where there had

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been ten compartmentalized figures, marginally varied in scale, there are now almost too many to count – and in scales disparate enough to convey different orders of vision or being. Where the exterior is organized bilaterally around an unpeopled centre, the interior is profoundly centralized. Opening the altarpiece transforms its midline from absence into divinity itself. The deity presides over everything from top centre, but his identity is not as forthright as might be expected. Many observers have called him God the Father, responding to his iconic bearing, bejewelled robes and papal tiara – which was reserved for images of God (and popes). But his dark beard and relative youth are in keeping more with representation of the Son than of the Father.21 These and other aspects, along with the highly original congregation of inscriptions upon and around him, make it clear that this figure embodies at least two persons of the Trinity. His vestments and the larger context also make him priestly. This Father, Son and Celebrant oversees two Masses: an eternal one in the Adoration of the Lamb immediately below, and a daily one below that, on the altar of the Vijd chapel. The axis between the Lord and the Lamb anchors the entire work in both meaning and form. The unworn crown at his feet must belong to the deity, whose inscribed names include King of Kings; the sparkle of the jewelled hem bearing those words mingles with the terminals of the crown (illus. 25). Its placement on the floor literally heightens the significance of the tiara on his head. Their relationship, bridged by the cross-topped sceptre, signals not demoted kingship but supreme priesthood. No other altarpiece of the period was more profoundly dedicated to the Church itself. Mary’s crown as Queen of Heaven is astounding as well. From the gold and jewels of its base there rise symbolic roses, lilies and columbines. Still more remarkable are the blooms of light rising above them, which represent stars. Just as the terminals of the central crown mingle with

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the words rex regum on the hem of the Lord, so do these stars twinkle amid related words on Mary’s golden niche: ‘She is more beautiful than the sun and all the order of stars; being compared with the light she is found greater. She is truly eternal light and the spotless mirror of God.’22 Those words (from Wisdom 7:29, 26) recur elsewhere in Van Eyck’s work, most notably on the hem of the Virgin in the Church (see illus. 47). In both images they assert her role not as humble maiden or heavenly intercessor but as eternal light. Amid the celestial glory at Ghent the painter found a way to picture stars themselves, shining even without the darkness required to see them from earth. Another of Mary’s mystical identities, as seat of wisdom, is invoked by the book she is reading. A visitor could have associated it with the one from which she had turned to acknowledge Gabriel on the exterior, perhaps even recalling that others are on the shelf behind the Annunciate. More generally, the scrolls, books and spoken words on the altarpiece exterior, along with the abundant text of the interior – carved, woven, sewn, en­graved and inked – assured any observer that this altarpiece was a deeply learned work. For those unable to read the words, the ubiquity of the Word would have been just as apparent. Angels accompany the figures with music, singing on the left and playing on the right. Wingless angels were not unprecedented, but these ones stand out in proximity to those that are winged in the Adoration of the Lamb below and Gabriel on the exterior. The decision was at least partly practical: the narrow format of these panels could hardly have accommodated wings. A thinning of the ranks might have allowed it, but this had to be music worthy of celestial splendour. Angel wings, which Van Eyck imagined as robust and rainbow-hued (see for example illus. 29), could also have risked distraction from the heavenly trio between, and even from the magnificent robes of the angels themselves, which are copes worn for the liturgy. Like many other angels in

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Netherlandish painting of this and later generations, these ones are presented as officiants at the Mass.23 Heaven and Church fuse ever more fully here. In Het Schilder-boeck (1604), Karel van Mander remarked that ‘one can see easily from their attitude who sings treble, alto, tenor and bass.’24 Their counterparts and the instruments at right are observed with the same care. It appears that while all the choristers at left are singing, only the organ accompanies them in this moment; the strings of the viol and small harp are silent as their players pause. All of this would have drawn deep interest in fifteenth-century Ghent, which had become one of the centres for innovative music in the Low Countries. 25 Detail of illus. 22: the crown of the Lord in the Ghent Altarpiece (open).

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The attendance of the First Parents is disarming. Their nudity is accentuated as much by the voluminous clothing of all others here as by their own efforts to hide it. Inward turns associ­ate them, like everyone in this register, with the deity. But unlike Mary, John the Baptist and the angels, the balancing act of Adam and Eve creates separation along with symmetry: this couple, the most elementally paired of all mortals, are pulled as far as pos­­sible away from each other. There was precedent for this in architectural programmes (with Adam and Eve flanking a church portal, for example), but here their separation does not follow from an architectural imperative. The result is poignant, with them looking as much to each other as to the Lord. And rather than stand apart as stock emblems of sin, there is narrative between them. Eve holds a fruit that has attracted particular attention, as Van Eyck surely meant it to do. Van Mander gave it more comment than he did almost all other details in the altarpiece, suggesting that this is not an ‘apple (as painters usually depict it) but a fresh fig, from which it appears that Johannes had some learning’.25 Earlier writers had identified it as a fig, too. But subse­­­ quent observers have noted that this bumpy, yellowish, hard-rind fruit resembles not a fig but a citrus known in Europe since at least the thirteenth century as pomum adami, or ‘Adam’s apple’.26 Jan had probably seen them during his 1428–9 travels in Portugal and Spain and would have savoured their exotic appearance to the eyes of northern Europeans. Gazing towards the proffered fruit, Adam’s right leg steps forth as if to approach Eve, whose feet are planted. His foreshortened toes step from the image. This breach of the picture plane by a moving body is more active than those by statues and books on the altarpiece exterior. It is also likely, given the limited space of the Vijd chapel, that the hinged Adam and Eve panels were displayed at an angle, which deepened their interaction with real space and with each other across the breadth of the work. Their

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meticulously rendered bodies and faces would have been even more riveting in the fifteenth century than they are today. These are thinking, breathing people, approximately our size, shifting weight in ways we feel in our own bodies as we stand looking up at them. Their intense clarity and presence, accentuated by their glow within shadowy niches, has convinced many that they more than any other parts of the altarpiece can be confidently attributed to Jan van Eyck alone. So too has the fact that Adam sports a ‘farmer’s tan’– relatively darkened flesh on the hands, neck and face. This is sometimes cited as evidence that for this figure he studied a live model, which was not yet standard practice in artists’ shops. It has even been suggested that Jan was so absorbed by fidelity to the model that he mistakenly implied removed clothing for the man who had never worn any. But as with other seeming illogics of naturalism in his art, this detail would have been anything but slavish or careless. Adam’s selective tan portends their labour in the fallen world they are now making. Such a conflation of moments is subtle but pervasive. Adam’s shame, for example, is already here, fig leaf in place even as he weighs Eve’s offer. The five panels of the lower register belong to a single outdoor vista that is as continuous, wide and deep as the upper scenes are isolated, enclosed and shallow. Where the upper register presents an array of relatively static figures, the lower one is a single scene with a narrative convergence of groups towards a centre. The figures below are far smaller and more abundant. And yet everything above and below is mutually informing. The heart of the entire altarpiece is the Lamb on the altar (illus. 26). This is Christ as sacrifice, a symbol established in the Gospel moment of his recognition as messiah by John the Baptist (John 1:29). John’s words (ecce agnus dei) are written onto the antependium of the altar. Observers reading and hearing them would also see the pointing finger of that ecce in the large figure of the Baptist above.

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Just as his gesture indicates the presiding majesty of the Lord, it also precisely touches a tiny punctuating cross in the gold rising behind his brocade. As if by magic, that touch of John – last of the prophets and the saint to whom this church was dedicated – makes a punctuation mark signify both the Cross and the Lamb, which sheds its blood on the altar below. The recent treatment of this panel revealed a startlingly alert expression for the sacrificial animal, which had been given a more subdued face by sixteenth-century restorers.27 26 Detail of illus. 22: the Holy Lamb in the Ghent Altarpiece (open).

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The dove hovering at the top of the Lamb panel is the Holy Spirit. This sets the Trinity through the central axis, with Christ on the altar, the spirit in the sky, and the Father – inseparable from the Son – enthroned above. Van Eyck connects the registers by placing the dove in a circular aureole of light only

27 Detail of illus. 22: fountain basin and channel of water in the Ghent Altarpiece (open).

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half-visible as if descending from the frame, and by setting the divine crown immediately above.28 They anchor a sequence of modified or partial circles along the midline – from the golden arch at the top to the bands of God’s tiara, his brooch, the crown, the aureole of the dove, the ellipse of the chalice before the Lamb and the opening of the fountain in the foreground. While the altarpiece came to be identified above all with the Lamb, the fountain of life is just as much a key to its programme and meaning. An inscription identifies it: ‘Here is the source of the water of life coming forth from the throne of God and the Lamb.’29 The words are adapted from Revelation 22:1: ‘And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.’ It was for this small river that Van Eyck devised one of the most extraordinary passages of the entire altarpiece: a narrow channel cut into the ground before the fountain, which allows water to course from a spout in its base forward to the threshold of the painting. Recent examination has found that in the first conception of the image, the position of the fountain was occupied instead by what might have been a spring or small pool.30 This arresting discovery deepens questions about the phased evolution of the work. Did Jan upgrade Hubert’s more natural source for the water of life? If so, perhaps he was thinking specifically of the baptismal resonance of the fountain basin, along with his own evident fascination with depicting the surface, motion and even sound of flowing water (see illus. 48, 54). Framed by the swinging censers of angels, the pour of blood from the Lamb and water from the fountain makes the centre of the image conspicuous for its animation of moments. Compared to some of his contemporaries (most notably Rogier van der Weyden), Jan van Eyck is an artist of stillness. Between the perfect instability of the upswung censers there descends a momentum from God through the dove, the blood and finally the water coursing outward towards the real altar and

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space of the Vijd chapel (illus. 27). Van Eyck steered the flow from God into the world with the palpably familiar physics of a trickle, swinging objects, small splashes, a channelled gush and finally a thin rivulet sparkling through dirt. The Eucharist is only one part of the story in the busy world of the lower register. These panels have been recognized as Van Eyck’s version of an All Saints picture, an old subject rooted in a major feast of the Church.31 Figures converge from the sides and the distance in such clearly distinguished groups that groupness itself becomes a theme. Each is defined by an occupation, origin or fate. In the left foreground are the pre-Christian blessed, prophets and patriarchs deserving salvation despite their lives sub lege. Unlike the other groups in the centre panel, they are defined mainly by a disparity of garb – robes of many colours and hats of many shapes – adapting a long tradition of depicting Jews and other non-Christians in this way. Among the relatively few figures that can be plausibly identified in the Adoration of the Lamb, one of the most intriguing in this group is the white-robed man wearing a laurel wreath near centre. He appears to be Virgil, some of whose words are spoken by the Erythraean Sibyl on the exterior of the altarpiece.32 To the right of the fountain, the pre-Christian figures’ counterparts are principals of the Church: the Apostles, kneeling in white robes, and behind them a red-robed assembly of popes, bishops and other high clergy. Two more groups approach from the distance of the centre panel: confessors from the left and female saints (often labelled martyrs because many carry palms) from the right (illus. 28). Among those identifiable by their attributes are, in the front row from left, Agnes, Barbara, probably Catherine of Alexandria and Dorothy. It would not be out of character for the word-loving Jan van Eyck to have aligned them thus as A, B, C and D. The confessors, whose faith remained steadfast through persecution short of martyrdom, are represented heavily by popes, bishops, cardinals and monks. .

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The more general abundance of clergy to which they belong – along with the patriarchs in the foreground and the priestly aspect of God in the upper register – amplifies the ecclesiastical tenor of the whole altarpiece. The core message of its stupendously inventive staging was in fact familiar, even conservative. Where much of the most remarkable northern European art of the early fifteenth century reflects the more individualized, often innerdirected spirituality of the rising Devotio Moderna, the Ghent Altarpiece heralds salvation through the body of the Church. Another four groups approach from the wings, each named below on the frame. From left, they are Just Judges, Warriors of Christ, Holy Hermits and Holy Pilgrims. Only two are women: the figures rearmost among the Holy Hermits, probably Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. Most conspicuous among the male saints is the giant Christopher, who leads the pilgrims, with St James just behind him. The hermits are led by St Anthony. Most of their counterparts, the judges and knights, are less easily 28 Detail of illus. 22: Virgin Martyrs in the Ghent Altarpiece (open).

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identified with saints. As groups they might have been reflexively associated with factions of late medieval society that would have drawn various kinds of interest. Embodiments of government and the noble military in the ranks of the blessed would, for example, have been especially attractive to Joos Vijd and to the court of Burgundy. It was in 1430 that Philip the Good established the Order of the Golden Fleece. The Judges panel, stolen in 1934, is represented by a modern copy. By the sixteenth century, two of the foremost riders in the painting were said to be portraits of the artists: Hubert perhaps in the rider closest, in the fur hat, and Jan the one fourth in depth, dressed in black and looking outwards (see illus. 3).33 That belief was presumably current in Ghent early on but has been neither proved nor disproved by modern scholarship. There are many self-portraits of artists within Renaissance altarpieces and other commissioned works, but this would be among the earliest known. Painted less than a decade later, the grand scenes of just judgment painted for the Brussels city hall included a likeness of their artist, Rogier van der Weyden.34 His self-portrait could well have emulated ones of the Van Eycks in the Ghent Altarpiece.35 The artists knew they were placing themselves in exceptionally prominent works – both of which became, in fact, internationally renowned sights in their respective cities. The shared company of judges in the panels they occupied would have been more than coincidental, perhaps reflecting somehow on a claim for the acumen of artists. The stunning sophistication of the Ghent Altarpiece programme has led most scholars to assume the participation of a theological adviser. While Jan and perhaps Hubert van Eyck may have been unusually learned painters, they are unlikely to have managed the intricate cull and recombination of scripture, liturgy and other texts that inform the programme. One candidate for such work was Olivier de Langhe, a learned Ghent cleric whose

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writings on the Eucharist stand in convincing harmony with the Adoration of the Lamb.36 It is clear, however, that no single text provided a script or master key for the altarpiece.37 Even if there were a precisely drafted ‘programme’ of the type that is often assumed (and seldom found) for major works of Renaissance art, it could have provided no more than guideposts for the painters who devised the figures, worlds and relationships that ultimately shaped its meanings. The earliest surviving mentions call it not the Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Lamb but rather the Joos Vijds tafele – a reminder that this unprecedented work was assertively associated with its patron. Prestigious private commissions for churches already had a long European pedigree. An event on the day of the altarpiece’s dedication (6 May 1432) could suggest that beyond its liturgical and devotional roles, Vijd’s altarpiece might have been meant – if not originally, then as it neared completion – to fortify his relationship to the duke, for it was on this day that the son of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal was baptized, perhaps in the same church, which was a primary venue in Ghent for ducal and other high-profile observances.38 Jan van Eyck made his own role at least as conspicuous and vivid as that of the donor by way of the inscription, a likely selfportrait in the Just Judges panel, and the spectacular accomplishment of the painting itself within an altarpiece that is like ‘a sea within, overflowing on all sides with art’, as Lucas de Heere des­ cribed it in 1559.39 Recall that the sophisticated poetic form of the exterior quatrain, which embeds a chronogram to indicate the date, required meticulous composition. It therefore could not have been coincidental that the two lines that refer chiefly to Jan (rather than Hubert) are on the frames of the two central panels – which places them below the images of Sts John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (see illus. 21). These figures may have been the earliest major example of the ambitious painted fiction of

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sculpture that would feature prominently in subsequent work of Van Eyck and other early Netherlandish painters (see illus. 31). Familiar with many later examples, we must imagine how compelling the novelty of these stony illusions would have been in 1432. The lines below referring to Jan van Eyck would have connected the power­ful effect of this realism especially with him. He must have relished the fact that their pedestals allowed him to write his name – an abbreviation of the ‘Iohannes’ spelled out in the inscription below – twice: iohes bap and iohes ewan. The right foot of each saint steps slightly over the edge of its pedestal, as if pointing to the given name he shared with them. Jan thus found a way to simultaneously name and sign the figures, and to do so with both chisel and brush. And in a sly stroke of authorship that perhaps only he fully appreciated, the threshold of the altarpiece on which he defers to the priority of his brother mentions Hubertus one time, and Iohannes three.

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anifestly unique as an ensemble, the Ghent Altarpiece also contains so much of what distinguishes Jan van Eyck’s other work: endless detail near and far, radiant colour, copious materials and textures, symbolic plenitude, portraiture and rich integration of text and image, among other things. One of its less nameable aspects is also one of its most deeply Eyckian: assertive engagement with observers. It begins with the ‘invites you . . . to look at what has been done’ of the signature inscription on the outer frame. Rising above those words, the depictions of living donors, illusionistic statues, city views and rainbow wings ensured that few could have resisted the invitation. But it was also tendered in structural terms, including the window-like effect of the framing and marginal advance of feet beyond pedestal and frame. An observer’s connection to the inside of the pictures expanded even further when the altarpiece was open, revealing the foreground channel that carries the water of eternal life towards the altar and chapel. Efforts to engage spectators were emerging widely in European art, with the boundaries of images being opened to physical and psychological exchange of many kinds. So varied were these efforts, in fact, that this connective impulse has only in recent decades been recognized as a vital current of the period.1 Jan van Eyck was among its earliest and most inventive explorers. 29 Jan van Eyck, Annunciation, c. 1434–6, oil on canvas transferred from wood.

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With the role of such thought in the Ghent Annunciation in mind, it is revealing to turn to two very different Van Eyck Annun­­ ci­­ations: a single panel in the National Gallery of Art in Wash­­ing­­ton, DC (illus. 29) and a diptych in the Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza in Madrid (illus. 31). One is a lavish staging of the moment with an unbelievable variety of surfaces, and the other a radically distilled isolation of Mary and Gabriel entirely in illusionistic stone. The differences between them shed light on the intensity of the painter’s reflection on a range of meanings in the subject. Across several Annunciations (these two along with the exteriors of the Ghent Altarpiece and a small triptych in Dresden, see illus. 46), Van Eyck pondered the theology, drama and even metaphysics of the encounter. Considered together, they reveal something of his abiding fascination with encounter as such, both between a work and observers and within an image itself. They also equip us well to address two other works, a pair of panels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a portrait-like Holy Face known only in copies, that devise other kinds of encounters. The Annunciation attracted almost uniquely experimental effort from painters and other artists of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Reasons, even beyond its seminal place in the Christian scheme of salvation, are not hard to find. As an instantly recognizable meeting of two figures, and heaven and earth, the Annunciation lent itself to countless contexts and formats. It was almost always staged laterally, either on a pictorial surface or across an actual space framed by images of the separated beings. What happens between them is simultaneously simple (a brief conversation) and miraculous (the Word becoming flesh). The ‘between’ is filled by revelation, response, transformation and incarnation. Working in communities captivated by new dimensions of rep­ re­sentation, fifteenth-century artists increasingly understood space, both real and notional, as a medium of meaning. The interval between Gabriel and Mary, which was surrounded both

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on the surface and in greater depth by increasingly dense fields of depiction, became ripe in ways it had never been before. Here was an opportunity to shape devotional, exegetical, poetic and other dimensions of scripture in ways that would have seemed the exclusive domain of the visual artist. None were more instinctively equipped to explore this than Jan van Eyck. The narrow vertical format of the Annunciation in Washington shows that the panel originally belonged to a larger ensemble, probably as the left wing of a triptych. Its centre might have been a Nativity or Adoration of the Magi, and the right panel perhaps a Visitation or Presentation in the Temple. Remarkably, however, no paintings of any of these subjects – four of the most common Infancy subjects in Renaissance art – have been convincingly attributed to Jan van Eyck, let alone associated specifically with the Washington Annunciation. Later evidence suggests that the original altarpiece could have been made for the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon.2 Founded in the 1380s as the dynastic resting place of the Valois dukes of Burgundy by Philip the Bold, grandfather to Philip the Good, the church and monastery at Champmol became a hub of Bur­ gun­dian artistic patronage. Projects by the sculptor Claus Sluter and such painters as Melchior Broederlam and Jan Malouel established it as an especially vital laboratory of the new naturalism associated with these and other artists who, like Van Eyck in the next generation, were Netherlandish natives working at Valois courts in France and Burgundy. Well aware of this lineage and the prestige of the venue, Jan would have developed his own con­­ tribution with particular ambition. The size (90 × 34 cm/35 × 13 in.), splendour and sophisticated symbolism of the Washington Annun­ciation make it entirely plausible as part of an altarpiece for the duke. If that was its origin, the painting would appear to be the sole surviving autograph work of Jan van Eyck for his primary patron.

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Its meaning is centrally shaped by the setting of a church interior – for which there was ample precedent in manuscript illumination, but much less in painting on a larger scale. Scale itself would, in fact, have been one of the scene’s most striking aspects in its own day. Images of figures in or before large buildings had almost inevitably brought bodies and architecture into close proportion to each other, since truer scale would have required either figures too small to see or buildings inflated beyond the confines of the image. While Gabriel and Mary do stand unrealistically tall within this Gothic interior, Van Eyck created what would have seemed a remarkable effect of great height above them. Unlike, for example, the towering figure of his Virgin in the Church (see illus. 47), the heads of Gabriel and Mary in Washington do not reach above the capitals of the nave arcade. The two and a half storeys above them fill the upper half of the panel with space punctuated by the Spirit on rays of light and an image of the Lord in stained glass far above Mary. More than in perhaps any earlier painting, here a fifteenth-century observer recognized, even felt, the experience of a Gothic church interior. The glow of the highest window, along with three below furnishing a ‘natural’ halo for Mary herself, penetrates atmospheric shadow along the rear plane (illus. 30). The cool shade in the upper space is in its own way no less absorbing than the celebrated naturalism of countless detailed surfaces throughout the picture. There is an amazingly sophisticated iconographic coordination between setting and event, with a central theme of the relationship between the eras under Law and Grace embodied in the Old and New Testaments. The single bright stained-glass window piercing the upper darkness shows God the Father with book in hand and a globe beneath his feet. It is flanked by mural paintings of scenes from the life of Moses, who had always been regarded as a prime forerunner of Christ: on the left presented as an infant to the daughter of Pharaoh (Exodus 2:5–6) and on

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the right receiving a scroll inscribed with the third commandment (Exodus 20:7). Each scene parallels at least one dimension of the Annunciation: the coming of a child to an unexpecting young woman and the delivery of a divine message. Each is also an en­­ counter of two figures, one giving and one accepting. The central window aligns perfectly with the Annunciate below. Such typological parallels, which suffused Christian theology, were especially resonant for Jan van Eyck, who explored them more intensively than perhaps any other Renaissance artist. 30 Detail of the church architecture in the Annunciation (illus. 29).

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Old Testament imagery multiplies further in the inlaid decoration of the foreground pavement. Four scenes are clearly identifiable: Samson smiting Philistines (Judges 15); Samson and Delilah (Judges 16:4–21); Samson destroying the house of the Philistines (Judges 16:29–30); and David beheading Goliath (i Samuel 17:51). The exploits of David and Samson were integral to Christian typology of triumph, but it is worth wondering whether the violence of all these scenes (and two others that are partially obscured) could also have reflected a more current concern of the altarpiece’s patron – perhaps, for example, within the knightly milieu and crusading aspirations of Philip the Good. Viewed from a different angle, they also reflect Jan van Eyck’s own recurring imagery of knighthood, battle and triumph, including figures and historiation in the Ghent Altarpiece (see illus. 22), the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele (see illus. 42) and the triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints (see illus. 44). Zodiacal symbols at the intersections of the square borders configure meaning differently. As an ancient system for picturing the course of the months, the zodiac appeared widely in European churches by the twelfth century; pagan origins had not disqualified it for Christian conceptions of the calendar. In the Washington Annunciation only seven of the twelve signs are visible, some partially covered in a way that signals the presence of the others out of sight – beyond the edge of the picture and under the figures of Mary and Gabriel. One appealing hypothesis locates Virgo under the Virgin, and Aries – which includes 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation – under Gabriel.3 Capricorn, which includes 25 December, is bisected by the right edge of the picture. The time of the Nativity would thus be just coming into view at the moment of Annunciation. This marginal position of the December sign would have made it a fitting bridge to the Infancy scene assumed to have been next door, at the centre of the triptych.

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Although such details might seem too small to bear so much interpretation, technical examination confirms Van Eyck’s meticulous engineering of all aspects of the painting. We now know, for example, that his first design of the architecture and floor was simpler. The Old Testament imagery on the rear wall replaced a surface initially adorned by pilasters and framing ornament in red paint.4 The historiation and astrology of the pavement replaced an underdrawn geometric pattern of carpet, tile or pavement.5 These highly specific iconographic elaborations after the first stage, which have counterparts in other major works by Van Eyck, could reflect consultation with the donor or theological advisers while the painting was in progress. One of the more striking findings about the Washington Annunciation is the state of the church’s wooden ceiling, which had been scarcely visible before the panel’s cleaning. Several of the planks are broken or missing. Examination of the underdrawing and paint layers revealed that Van Eyck first painted the wood intact and then applied darker pigment to create the breaks and shadows of disrepair. While this would have been a common condition on the ceilings of medieval churches, Van Eyck must have added this aspect, as he had the mural paintings and pavement imagery, to elucidate the transition from Old to New.6 The decaying wood appears in high shadows above the stained-glass image of God and the clerestory entrance for the Spirit, whose descent travels as much through history as it does through space. The Annunciation itself was modified less than these surrounding elements during the course of painting. Mary is centred not in the panel but with the rear wall. This aligns her with the image of God above and the three windows immediately behind her – the central one of which turns earthly light into a halo. The windows also embody the Trinity, as the incarnation of the Son is accomplished by the Spirit descending below the shining image of the Father directly above. Alignments like these are

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another dimension of Jan van Eyck’s acute consciousness of the place of an observer. In a way that is all the more compelling for being unconscious, we grasp that their meaning resolves precisely and only from where we stand. The Virgin’s Trinitarian halo would come undone from any other angle. In pointed contrast to the relative simplicity of Mary’s blue robe, Van Eyck lavished incredible attention on the optical splendour of Gabriel’s jewelled attire – a cope and dalmatic like those worn by celebrants of the Mass. Along with his musical brethren at Ghent, he is among the earliest major examples of the ‘vested angel’ that would inhabit many Netherlandish paintings of this and subsequent generations.7 This priestly aspect enhances an old association between Mary and the altar, which is invoked here by her central position in a space that was probably intended as the choir of the church.8 The strongly ecclesiastical tenor of the painting, and presumably the altarpiece to which it belonged, further aligns it with the Ghent Altarpiece. Compare the Annunciation diptych in Madrid, which has none of the liturgical, typological and material profusion of the Wash­ ington Annunciation (illus. 31). Here there is only Gabriel, Mary, the dove – and the carved stone as and amid which they are represented. Everything is stone and yet everything is paint. This radically reductive conception yields one of the most wondrous accomplishments of Jan van Eyck’s entire career. There is every reason to believe that this paradox was central to his ambition for the work. The diptych is thought to be from the second half of the 1430s. It is a relatively late addition to Van Eyck’s known work, having emerged from a private collection in the early 1930s. Given the lack of any evidence for earlier provenance, speculation about origins has focused less on ownership and more on intention and meanings. Was the diptych made mainly as an instrument of devotion, or perhaps more in line with what we would call a

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work of art? Its subject, size (39 × 23 cm/15 × 9 in.) and format make personal devotion a natural guess. By the early fifteenth century, carved and painted diptychs were common instruments of prayer across Europe. They were small enough to be portable, and their hinged centre allowed closure for protection as well as opening that could feel meaningfully like the opening of a book.9 Some would have been mainly hand-held objects of contemplation, while others – probably including the Madrid Annunciation – were more likely to have been set on a tabletop or other surface. The now-damaged reverses of the panels were painted in imitation marble – mostly green, but with delicate hazes and small blooms of other colours. Suggestions that the diptych invited something in addition to prayer respond to its encompassing stoniness – of figures, 31 Jan van Eyck, Annunciation, c. 1433–5, oil on panel, diptych.

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backgrounds, frames and reverses. While grisaille palettes and sculptural depiction had appeared in northern painting at least since the influential manuscript illuminations of Jean Pucelle a century earlier, and most conspicuously on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece, the totality of this illusion was unprecedented. Why would a painter uniquely capable of realizing flesh, fabric and virtually all other worldly materials have done this? The sheer marvel of the effect must be part of the answer. A more spe­cific proposal points to the emerging tradition of paragone, a competition between arts – and especially painting and sculpture.10 The terms of the debate would develop most explicitly in the writings of Italian artists and theorists in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian in leading roles. Italian art theory and criticism of the sort that had begun to emerge in Van Eyck’s time, most prominently in Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise De pictura (On Painting), had little written counterpart in northern Europe. But Jan’s art was itself theoretically engaged avant la lettre. To whatever extent he might or might not have known touchstones of Renaissance art theory (especially including Pliny the Elder’s influential chapters on the artists of antiquity11), the intensely conscious novelty of his paintings made them a font of ideas about representation itself. This outlook almost literally crystallizes in the Annunciation diptych. The decision to depict everything in stone resembles a decision also to make everything in stone, with painter as carver. Van Eyck elsewhere claims mediated mastery of many arts – sculpture, architecture, weaving, embroidery, goldsmith work, armour, niello, woodwork, stained glass. But only here did he attempt full absorption in one of them. The seamlessness of the union includes scale, with the figures of Mary and Gabriel the size of small statues of a sort widely known in the early fifteenth century. Optically prominent pedestals enhance the effect, much as they do for the sculptural Sts John on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece. The

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inner frame is stepped inwards so that Gabriel’s wing and the shadows of both figures fall across them on the left. At the bottom, the frame yields to a shallow floor to support each statue. The foremost edge of each pedestal is painted slightly beyond the flat panel surface onto the inner edge of the wood frame, which is painted as red marble. The projective effect is enhanced by something that looks at first like nothing: the blackness behind each figure. A closer look reveals that this is neither a neutral backdrop nor a dark void, but rather dark slabs so polished that they reflect the edges of the

32 Detail of illus. 31: reflection of Gabriel in polished stone in the Annunciation diptych.

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statues (illus. 32). These reflections point to a key topic of the paragone discourse of subsequent generations: the question of whether sculpture or painting could more fully represent a figure or object. Those arguing for sculpture noted its creation in the round. Those arguing for painting noted that sculpture in the round could never be seen all at once, as a painting can be. Painters themselves responded with pictures containing mirrors and other reflective objects positioned to reveal the back of a figure shown from the front. A lost painting ascribed to Giorgione (d. 1510) was a famous example, and a surviving canvas from circa 1530 by Savoldo, probably a self-portrait, is almost absurdly eager to make the case.12 Van Eyck’s virtuosic formulation a century earlier, before any known Renaissance description of such a manoeuvre, aligns with his exploration of reflections in other works (see, for example, illus. 4, 5). His lost painting Woman Bathing (see illus. 62), which included a mirror situated to provide a view of her from behind as well as before, suggests that the strategy itself was intrinsically appealing to him – especially since the subject could not be more different from an Annunciation. But it would be a mistake to regard the diptych as a demonstration alone. If there were any artists in the 1430s inclined to have contemplated using the Annunciation as a device for a wholly aesthetic performance, Jan van Eyck was not among them. His body of work shows that this magician of representation was also a dedicated theological thinker, able to articulate faith and doctrine in ways that often have no precise sources in scripture or other texts. Some have associated the monochrome of the statues with a theory that the grisaille on the exterior of many hinged altarpieces was to convey Lenten austerity in contrast to a bright internal palette to be revealed on feast days.13 Another approach recognizes a metaphor in the illusionism itself, with this material transformation inviting contemplation of the incarnation it represents; as Word becomes flesh, paint becomes stone and

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stone comes to life.14 More than a mere optical feint, trompe l’oeil becomes an instrument of pious contemplation. In whatever meanings were intended for the subject, the format of the work plays a critical role. Countless late medieval diptychs had presented the Annunciation, but more typically on one panel with the adjacent one showing another subject, often from Christ’s Passion. Giving a panel to each of the figures divides the subject in a way that would have looked striking, especially on the interior of a hinged work. Netherlandish triptychs of Van Eyck’s generation and decades to follow would sometimes divide the Annunciation this way, but always on the closed exterior – as on the Ghent Altarpiece and the tiny triptych in Dresden (see illus. 46). That placement makes the Annunciation prefatory – the beginning of a story to be fleshed out more fully on the bright surfaces revealed when Mary and Gabriel part ways to open the work. On the interior of the Madrid diptych, they are the main event. Their mutual attention and the space between them come unusually alive – and all the more, by contrast, because they are statues. Where so many Renaissance artists would ripen the surface across which the Word reaches Mary with rushing depth or a symbolic garden or doorway, Jan van Eyck used the format itself to make the space dynamic – recalling that the diptych stood or was held open at an angle. The passage is further enlivened by the location of the dove so close to Mary, who looks up from her book towards the arriving Spirit. Only this sole airborne stone breaks the diptych’s consistency of illusion. The material paradox of its flight is intensified by the surrounding blackness. The same happens for Gabriel’s darkly framed finger sending news through the angled space between them – which is continuous with the real space of an observer. Their conversation (Luke 1:28, 38), which Van Eyck wrote into air of the Annunciations in Ghent and Washington, is here carved above each figure. Given the great care with which he designed physicalized texts elsewhere,

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it can be no coincidence that this dove descends from the domini inscribed above the Virgin. Jan van Eyck’s conception of paired panels is vastly different in a work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (illus. 33). Standing half-again the height of the Madrid diptych (at 56.5 vs 39 cm),

33 Jan van Eyck, Crucifixion and Last Judgment, c. 1440–41, oil on canvas, transferred from panel.

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the New York panels join two narrative scenes: the Crucifixion at left and Last Judgment at right. Turning from the twinned isolation of Gabriel and Mary glowing against fields of polished black, here we face expansive worlds of sky, mountain, ocean and architecture. From the carved stillness of the Madrid Annunciation we look now towards dramas roiling with incident, sensation and emotion. And from a diptych that forcefully thematizes the en­­ counter of two figures, we address a pair of pictures that seem – at first – to have almost nothing to do with each other. Recent years have brought new scrutiny to the relationship between them, however. Despite their tall, narrow proportions, which are more typical of the wings of a triptych, most scholars have regarded the diptych structure as original. But X-radiography of the frames has reopened the question, raising the likelihood that the panels were originally hinged as wings of either a central painting or perhaps a tabernacle.15 We do not know the work’s original patron or context. Possible clues were lost in the nineteenth century when, like the Washington Annunciation, the New York paintings were transferred from wood panel to canvas while they were in the collection of the Hermitage in St Petersburg.16 Whether they were directly conjoined or paired as symmetrical wings, the connection between the panels is fortified by a singular density of text around each frame. With these inscriptions and several shorter ones within the images, the New York paintings stand out for their verbal richness, even among Van Eyck’s other work. The surrounding inscriptions are words in pastiglia relief on the inner surface of the frames. Unlike the illusionistic relief Van Eyck created for inscriptions elsewhere (see, for example, illus. 1 and 21), each of these words is physically raised. Those surrounding the Crucifixion are from Isaiah 53, an account of suffering central to Christian readings of messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. The text on the frame of the Last Judgment combines verses about death, salvation and punishment

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from Revelation and Deuteronomy.17 The selections harmonize in exceptionally pointed ways with elements of the image – with, for example, arrows firing into Hell as we read God’s promise that ‘I will spend mine arrows upon them’ (Deut. 32:23), or the promise that ‘the sea shall give up its dead’ (Rev. 20:13) exactly next to bodies rising from the waves. Recent conservation has revealed additional text on the outer frame surface that had been gilded over by an earlier restorer.18 Though heavily damaged, this has been identified as a Middle Dutch translation of the Latin Bible verses. Its vernacular bid to a wider audience underscores the integral character of text to the entire work. The concerted address to observers is punctuated by the imperative to behold – Ecce tabernaculum Dei – on the left side of the frame, which may support the hypothesis that these panels were the doors of a tabernacle.19 While infrared reflectography shows Eyckian underdrawing, it is clear that at least two hands contributed to the painting, with a few passages in the Last Judgment probably the work of a student or follower. A likely date towards the end of his career could mean these passages were finished posthumously by his workshop. Late work by Van Eyck could have been only for a very prestigious patron. The endless detail, abundant inscription and profound subject-matter of the New York paintings have led many to believe they were produced for a member of the Burgundian court – an idea made especially appealing by the presence of courtly figures on Calvary and among the Elect in Heaven. Foremost among these is a mounted man in blue robes and ermine immediately below the thief at right in the Crucifixion. Wearing a headwrap like those on court figures in other Eyckian paintings, the man meets the viewer’s eye with a directness almost unique from within the crowds in both paintings. If he was a portrait, it is intriguing that he was located at the feet of the ‘bad thief’ and directly faced by the sneer of a tormentor. Such juxtaposition could have responded

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to words on the left frame: ‘he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death’ (Isaiah 53:9). The work is about salvation. While paired images in this vein more typically combine scenes from Christ’s Infancy and Passion, the New York panels balance sacrifice and judgment. Christ presides twice, in death and in glory. Rather than give him emblematic pictorial dominance in each role, the painter raises him on the picture planes and presses him into depth. This means that our closest encounters as viewers are not with the Lord but instead with mourners and tormentors at left and the writhing damned at right. In the Crucifixion we see an unusual number of figures primarily from behind, including as many as ten among the men below the Cross. In addition to ensuring a focus on Christ from all parts of the oblong picture, they make a subject of witness – and of seeing itself. Their inward attention mirrors and deepens ours. In this they share an Eyckian dynamic cultivated in the figures looking outwards in the middle of the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (see illus. 40) or the mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait (see illus. 60). Near the lower right corner, Mary Magdalene’s upward gaze and anguished gesture hold the height and depth of the complex composition together. Her exertion and bright clothing also draw attention to the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist and the other mourning women. Sunk to the ground, the Virgin almost disappears in her robes; just enough of her face emerges to reveal her grief. The woman in front of her is one of the strangest figures in all of fifteenth-century painting. Facing inward and fully covered, she is an almost illegible shape. Mary’s drooping left hand is implausibly positioned towards the unseen face as if to punctuate eye contact between the two engulfed women. In hiding the foreground mourner’s face completely, perhaps Jan again had in mind the example of ancient artists. Writing of a Sacrifice of Iphigenia by the painter Timanthes (who ‘had a very high degree of genius’), Pliny the Elder explains that the grief apparent on the faces of

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all present is invisible on the entirely veiled figure of her father, Agamemnon, ‘whom [Timanthes] was unable adequately to portray’.20 In an exceptionally ambitious painting of the Cruci­fix­­ion, Van Eyck might thus have found a way not only to align himself with a forefather celebrated in the same pages as Apelles, the great­­ est of all painters, but to punctuate his Crucifixion with a subtle classical allusion to the unpicturable grief of a father who, like God, had sacrificed a child. The nameless mourner’s central position at the threshold of the picture also makes the figure the most immediate bridge between an observer’s contemplative present – facing inward as we do – and the tumultuous past of the Crucifixion. Another figure with an obscured face looks inward from the left edge of the Crucifixion. She and her counterpart on the right, who faces outward, were almost certainly meant to be sibyls – the pagan seers whose writings were adapted in medieval Christianity as prophecies complementing the canonical ones of the Old Testament. Their pairing here recalls the presence of the Cumaean and Erythraean sibyls on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece. The Crucifixion is represented with a narrative dynamism unmatched in Van Eyck’s other work, which favours scenes of relative stillness. The closest comparisons have been made to some of the ‘Hand G’ miniatures of the Turin-Milan Hours (see illus. 9). Some propose that the painting depicts a precise moment at or just after Christ’s death. As the lance delivers the final wound, his eyes close and mouth opens. The sponge with vinegar is still held aloft. Tied rather than nailed to their crosses, the thieves’ hands have blackened. Reactions below are varied and onlookers are still arriving. Everything is brought further to life by the plenitude of the background (see illus. 34). Over the crest of the barren hilltop rise the many buildings of Jerusalem, dominated by the round Temple of Solomon. Windmills beyond it can be regarded either as quaint traces of the artist’s roots or, more likely, his knowing

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integration of Gospel and contemporary contexts. The same must be true of snow-capped mountains many miles away on the horizon. Whether these recall Jan van Eyck’s own transalpine journeys or his response to depictions and descriptions by others, their conjunction with Golgotha, Jerusalem and windmills insists that this moment permeates the world. The sky is just as specific, with a variety of cloud formations and, famously, the moon just over the mountains at the right edge. Its appearance next to the bad thief might evoke appearances of the moon on the same side of many medieval crucifixes (balancing a sun to Christ’s right), but the presence of the moon in other works by Van Eyck suggests that the one in this Crucifixion is at least as much about a temporally compelling naturalism as it is about iconographic tradition. In the sky of the Last Judgment, where time itself is drawing to a close, there are no such momentary conditions: moon and clouds yield to a smooth blue occupied by the Judge and heavenly host (see illus. 33). Below, the sprawling geography of the Crucifixion contracts to land at left and sea at right. The grandeur of Jerusalem 34 Detail of illus. 33: city and mountains in the Crucifixion.

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is replaced by flaming ruins, and the majestic peaks by minute plumes from ships burning over the horizon of waves. This almost invisibly small detail is among the most affecting inventions in this overflowing image; there is conflagration far beyond the reach of our eyes. Unlike the divided elect and damned in most depictions of the Last Judgment, bodies rising from land and sea do not take sides here. With the possible exception of one tonsured soul whose hand touches the hem of a Franciscan in Heaven and whose leg appears lifted by the wingtip of St Michael, individual fates are undifferentiated left and right. Responding to the challenge of composing this subject in an upright panel, the painter made verdicts a matter of up and down instead. Those consigned to Hell are already there, dropping from the splayed figure of death. Their descent could mean that all the figures rising from the ground and waves are bound for Heaven – as if the damned plummet directly from their graves without even a glimpse of light. Like those who approach the Lamb in the Ghent Altarpiece, the blessed convene in groups: apostles, female saints, nude souls, clergy, secular leaders. Several angels bear instruments of the Passion around Christ, while others attend Mary and John the Baptist. Two more, over the wings of St Michael, touch two of the most powerful individuals among the elect: pope at left and emperor at right. While such figures would appear in other images of the Last Judgment (such as the one painted by Rogier van der Weyden circa 1450 for the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune), the unusual angelic contact with these two may be further evidence that the work was made for a courtly owner, perhaps the Duke of Burgundy himself. The angels welcoming them are paired facing inwards and outwards, much like the sibyls in the Crucifixion. They accentuate the unusual receding perspective of this Heaven.21 The depth of Heaven distances it from the forward crush in Hell, where souls are bitten, torn and eaten (illus. 35). Here as 35 Detail of illus. 33: hell in the Last Judgment.

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in Heaven there are monks, cardinals and bishops. Princely patronage of the work may or may not help explain the presence of two crowned figures who join them in the churning violence. Van Eyck pressed the agonies close to us in counterpoint with the foreground mourners of the Crucifixion. No less fearsome than the tortures is our confrontation with Death, whose outward gaze is propelled by the foreshortened body behind. If he is flying, as his awful wings suggest, he and the horrors in his shadow are headed our way. Death’s acknowledgement of our presence has a tiny counterpart in the Crucifixion that is in its own way just as compelling: the shadowy reflection of two or more figures in the gleaming shield of the soldier in purple. It is one thing for Jan van Eyck to include reflected observers within a private portrait (Arnolfini) or even a majestic devotional gathering (Van der Paele), but it is quite another to have them reflect from an object in the tumult of Calvary. One of the New York panels thus pulls observers backwards in history, while the other lunges towards them from the end of time. Van Eyck created an entirely different kind of encounter in a small panel depicting the Holy Face. The original painting is lost but is reflected in early copies and adaptations that show its influence. Two of these, panels now in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie) and Bruges (Groeningemuseum), are different in ways that may point to two Eyckian originals: one dated 1438 (illus. 36) and the other 1440 (illus. 37).22 The starkly isolated image had roots in the Vera Icon, an image of Christ miraculously imprinted on the cloth of a woman who wiped his face as he approached Calvary. By the fourteenth century the Holy Face, which was known in variant legends and relics, had become one of the most venerated icons of the Church. And by the early fifteenth century it began to appear most widely in depictions of Veronica, who holds the imprinted sudarium either in narrative images of the Passion or as a saint displaying the miraculous portrait.23

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Separating Christ’s face from both Veronica and her cloth, Van Eyck presented it like an individual framed portrait of the sort that he and a few contemporaries had begun to paint. The effect of seeing the Lord’s face this way would have been extraor­ dinary in the 1430s, long before such images had entered Euro­ pean consciousness. His guide for the likeness appears to have been the famous description of Jesus in the Lentulus letter, a 36 After Jan van Eyck, Holy Face, original dated 1438, oil on wood (Berlin version).

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late medieval text purported to have been written by a Roman governor. Full of details about Christ’s complexion, as well as his eyes, hair, beard and more, the description would prove ir­­ res­is­tible to any number of fifteenth-century artists, especially north of the Alps.24 Van Eyck was apparently the first to translate it as a portrait. In addition to the innate appeal of develop­ ing a true likeness of the Lord, the verbally inventive master 37 After Jan van Eyck, Holy Face, original dated 1440, oil on oak (Bruges version).

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would have enjoyed the challenge of turning a description into a picture – a portrait whose sitter was a text. Perhaps he even had the Lentulus letter somewhere in mind when he made the silverpoint drawing of Cardinal Albergati (see illus. 13), on which Van Eyck’s scrupulous colour notes (blue-ish, red-ish and so on) para­­ llel indications of the ‘reddish complexion’ or ‘grey-blue eyes’ of Christ. Our encounter with the face is exceptionally direct. Where the tight framing and neutral dark background are typical of Van Eyck’s portraits of individuals, only a few of them make direct eye contact – and none pose the body so frontally. To fortify this immediacy he made Christ’s halo distinctly physical: a cruciform bloom of floriate goldwork that captures light from the same direction as the face does (from opposite sides, as it happens, in the 1438 and 1440 versions). Pairs of letters denoting the eternity of the Lord are crafted in the same way: Alpha and Omega floating in the upper corners, and I(nitium) and F(inis) suspended like Christmas ornaments from lateral terminals of the nimbus. Text on the frames is also rendered illusionistically, as if in multiple media – carved and inked – like the text on several of the secular portraits. Although the inscriptions differ somewhat on the main copies in Berlin and Bruges, both frames include the signature of the painter and his motto: Als ich can. Jan van Eyck knew very well that the miraculous character of the Vera Icon lay in its origin as an acheiropoieton: a divine image not made by human hands. The wording of the signatures complicate this origin in different ways: Joh[ann]es de Eyck Inventor anno 1440 30 January (Bruges version) Joh[ann]es de eyck me fecit et [com]plevit anno 1438 31 Januarij (Berlin version)

Each asserts the identity of the very human hands that crafted both image and words. Jan had indicated dates to the day on a few other portraits (see, for example, illus. 1, 56), but the decision to do so stands apart for an image not only based on an eyewitness description of the historical Christ, but surrounded by 38 Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, oil on limewood.

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letters proclaiming his eternity as the beginning and end. The adjacent days of the month (30, 31 January) on the two versions is intriguing, but possibly a coincidence – especially given their reference to the creation of each painting in a different year (1438, 1440). The top of each frame is inscribed with via veritas vita (Berlin) and ihesus via ihs veritas ihesus vita (Bruges). Placing them here, parallel with his own signature and motto below, Jan van Eyck knew that this description of the Lord as ‘the way and the truth and the life’ came from Christ himself (John 14:6). There can be little doubt that Albrecht Dürer knew some version of Van Eyck’s Holy Face or one of its many descendants when he painted his iconic self-portrait of 1500 (illus. 38), a breathtaking claim for the stature of a Renaissance artist.25 Jan’s decision to underwrite Christ’s face and words with his own presence makes it clear that Dürer was not the first to ponder parallels between painter and Creator. Jan amplified his presence as maker by including his motto, immediately to the left of the signature line. Whatever devotional utility he intended for the Holy Face, he also infused it with assertions of his own shaping role. Brought immediately before us by his direct gaze and the illusionistic frame, the face of the Lord explicitly becomes – in addition to the way, truth and life; alpha and omega, beginning and end; King of Kings – a Van Eyck portrait.

five

In the Company of the Virgin and Child

J

an van Eyck’s ingenuity about pictorial encounters also shaped the Marian paintings that are a cornerstone of his art. Consider the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, the very subject of which is a meeting: the patron kneeling in prayer towards the Virgin and Child (illus. 39). As in so many Renaissance Annunciations, the painter makes the centre of the picture much more than an interstice. Between the figures, attention plunges towards a garden in the middle ground and a vast landscape beyond. So pronounced is the crossing of the two vectors, in fact, that Van Eyck seems almost to have built the composition around it.1 The inward one is pressed by the perspective of the inlaid floor, observers at the garden wall and river winding towards the mountainous horizon. The lateral one is pronounced by the arcade at the rear of the chamber and the river bridge – which aligns perfectly with the raised right hand of Christ, as if to transmit his blessing to the chancellor. Pictorial precedents for a patron praying before the Virgin included images in illuminated books of hours – usually accompanying either the morning prayer (matins) or the ubiquitous prayer that begins Obsecro te, beseeching Mary. Van Eyck seems to have had the former especially in mind given his inclusion of some of the matins text on the hem of Mary’s robe.2 The manuscript before Rolin is open to pages that show an initial D – likely 39 Jan van Eyck, Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, c. 1435, oil on oak.

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for the Domine that opens the matins prayer, which comes to life between the ink of his text and the golden letters on her robe. With only a handful of letters legible between them, the words could be realized only in the minds and mouths of Rolin and other observers. Its beginning, Domine labia mea aperies (Lord open my lips), tells one to say the rest aloud.3 This creates another, explicitly temporal kind of encounter with an image. In 1434 Rolin had sought and received papal dispensation to celebrate Mass at sunrise, close to the time of matins. Canon law forbade Mass before terce, later in the morning. 4 Rolin would have known that receiving this dispensation put him in the company of other powerful individuals, including kings, dukes and various high-ranking officials.5 Van Eyck probably knew it, too – though he would already have been fully aware of Rolin’s stature and prerogatives as the chancellor of Burgundy. Born to a bourgeois family in Autun and trained as lawyer, by 1422 Rolin had been named to the post and elevated to knighthood by Philip the Good, whose father, John the Fearless, had also employed him. During his forty years in the role, Rolin’s power within the duchy was often second only to that of the duke himself, who entrusted him with matters of policy and high-stakes diplomacy, including peace negotiations between Burgundy and France in the early 1430s.6 As his wealth multiplied, Rolin and his third wife, Guigonne de Salins, became prodigious patrons of religious and charitable institutions. Later documents suggest that Van Eyck’s painting was installed at Rolin’s home church in Autun, Notre-Dame du Châtel, perhaps in a chapel dedicated to St Sebastian. Its likely position on the wall to the left of the altar there would have had the image of Rolin facing both the painted Virgin and the real altar.7 This would also have aligned the light in the picture with light in the chapel – as in the Ghent Altarpiece.8 Given the fictive green jasper painted on the back of the panel, it has been wondered whether the relatively small painting might

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first have been intended not for a wall but as a portable instrument of private prayer for Rolin, and then eventually installed in the chapel.9 Those who regard his stark proximity to the Virgin, unmediated by saints, as presumptuous – as if implying, say, Rolin’s paid reservation in Heaven – point to contemporaneous descriptions of the chancellor as less than saintly; a man who ‘always harvested on earth as though earth was to be his abode forever’, as the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain put it.10 No observer could have missed the splendour of the setting: an arcaded chamber elaborately appointed with stained glass, finely carved stone, historiated capitals and an inlaid floor. This is not Rolin as humble visitor to a celestial throne room. He wears his wealth in a plush robe of velvet, gold and fur. One of the most intriguing discoveries about the painting is evidence of a specific change of mind: a large purse on Rolin’s belt that was included in the underdrawing but left out of the final painting (illus. 40).11 Perhaps the chancellor, having been shown the working plan by Van Eyck, vetoed the moneybag as the wrong message in this context. Who­ ever made the decision, we would like to know much more about the relative contributions of painter and client to a design. How much of such an unusual image was Jan’s own idea? The question is particularly apt for a painting that looks, to modern eyes at least, like the most biographically dense of Van Eyck’s known religious works. There are of course other portraits, even other portraits within a full scene, but the Rolin picture imbues more of the setting with aspects of his life. Some of this happens in the landscape, which is as absorbing for variety as it is for detail. The verdant hill between Rolin’s gaze and hands includes vineyards, which were one source of his wealth.12 Even closer to his hands is a church – possibly meant to be Notre-Dame du Châtel itself. As its primary benefactor, Rolin would be shown essentially as offering Notre-Dame to Our Lady herself as he prays to her.

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The arcades surrounding the chamber have been likened to distinctive ones in the church, making another possible bridge between the painting and its location.13 Historiated capitals suggest at least one other biographical thread: biblical scenes involving wine, including the drunkenness of Noah (Genesis 9:20–23) on a capital above Rolin and the

40 Infrared reflectogram detail from the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (illus. 39) showing underdrawn money purse of Chancellor Rolin.

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meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18–20) above Mary. It is clear, however, that they were not included solely as scriptural nods towards a reservoir of Rolin’s wealth. Wine’s first meaning, especially near an altar, was eucharistic. The sacramental resonance was well established for the story of Abraham and Melchizedek, which entails a gift of bread and wine. It was less so for wine in the story of Noah, which Christian theology interpreted in other ways. Discussions of the capitals as a group have variously emphasized themes of sin, sacrifice and salvation.14 While such minute representation of an unprecedented sequence was clearly a matter of deliberation, it is not certain that painter and client would have intended an encompassing programme of meaning among them. As with interpretation of scripture itself, individual figures and stories could be read in different ways, depending on context and the outlook of an interpreter. Perched between the celestial room and sprawling world, and between the Virgin and her devotee, the scenes from Genesis lent themselves to layers of understanding that invited reflection about not just theology but also the lives of Rolin and his contemporaries in this world and beyond. There is much more. An angel approaches with a magnificent jewelled crown for the Queen of Heaven. Like everything in the painting, this was a decision; not all images of the Virgin in this period present her as queen. And in fact Van Eyck didn’t, either; the crown is arriving, not yet worn. The moment of giving might refer to a crown of gold and jewels that Rolin had given to NotreDame du Châtel.15 It also animates a regal presence in keeping with the courtly milieu Rolin had reached from relatively humble beginnings in Autun. The other most specific action of the painting is Christ’s blessing of the chancellor, who has looked up from the book before him. Christ holds a crystal orb surmounted by a jewelled cross, his attribute as Salvator Mundi. Like Mary’s crown and jewelled mantle, it associates the Lord with majesty and

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dominion, not humility. Just as the landscape beyond Rolin frames him with vineyards and a church likely to have represented NotreDame du Châtel itself, Christ is surrounded by distant churches that become equally halo and crown. The grandest church on this side of the river, surely a cathedral, touches Mary, who was synonymous with Ecclesia. Prayer is framed by a world of property and power. The garden between the chamber and the world beyond is one of the most distinctive elements of the painting. Although it is often referred to as a hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden symbolic of Marian purity, the presence of two figures suggests this would not have been its primary meaning. Roses, lilies, peonies, irises and other flowers here symbolized aspects of Mary and Christ. Closer to Rolin there are peacocks, variously associated with royalty, pride and eternal life. It is more difficult to interpret the magpies near the centre and the carved rabbits pressed under the column close by.16 Lions and other creatures are carved into the capitals and the central arch above. Through the right arch, barely visible, a flock of geese travels the glowing sky. One wonders whether Jan, an artist endlessly inventive about the physicalized representation of language, could have intended the V of their formation as a tribute to the Virgin below. Their flight in her direction on the picture plane complements the approach of the crown, which is borne earthwards by another winged being. While the thought might have occurred to him, this is but one of several comparable flocks aloft in his paintings. Like the many other birds perched and soaring through Jan’s art (including more than one hundred in the Ghent Altarpiece), they are rendered with almost unbelievable specificity.17 Eventually we also spot the moon in this sky, next to the Noah capital above Rolin’s head. Together with the moon in the Crucifixion of the New York diptych, the one in the Berlin Crucifixion, the one above the Knights of Christ in the Ghent Altarpiece and

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the one near the tower in the tiny St Barbara (see illus. 49), this moon establishes Van Eyck as a true pioneer of lunar depiction in the Western tradition – an infrequently remarked upon dimension of his work.18 Earlier painted depictions – including, for example, a compelling nocturnal Crucifixion painted by the Limbourg brothers in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1415) – generally presented the moon in a traditional symbolic counterpoint with the sun, on either side of the Cross. Carried far from that tradition, it is more reticent in the Rolin panel, nearly eclipsed by the capital and illuminated in a way that, allowing for shifts in pigments over the centuries, blends it into the radiant sky. If intended as symbolic, its meaning must have involved the carved story of Noah it nearly touches on the picture plane. This moon has also been seen as part of the matins emphasis of the prayer and Rolin’s dispensation to celebrate Mass at dawn.19 Early morning light rakes the mountaintops and warms a busy morning below. Although many of the more than two hundred visible figures are no more than two or three dots of paint, they come to life in conversation, climbing steps behind the cathedral, passing through doorways. Their circulation concentrates in the pedestrian flow on the bridge, where some pause to watch boats on the river (illus. 41). Their – and our – observation of this world crystallizes in the pair at the garden wall, who have attracted curiosity and imitation since the fifteenth century. They are at the crux of everything – between patron and Virgin, river and garden, foreground and background. Proposed identities for one or the other have included the theologian Honorius of Autun, Duke Philip the Good and the Florentine architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti.20 Far more plausible is the occasional suggestion that one, perhaps the man in the red headwrap, is Jan van Eyck – who portrays himself with a comparable chaperon in the portrait in London (see. illus. 1) and who included himself in different ways in no fewer than two other paintings. The figure’s companion

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leans outwards through the crenellation. In that figure Van Eyck found a way, as he did in other paintings, to create intriguing places within an image that are forever invisible to us.21 Whatever this man sees is unavailable to his counterpart, whose gaze is blocked by the wall. If the man on the right was meant to be Jan van Eyck, why not allow him a view as well? Who would be more deserving than the man who made it all? Perhaps the painter wanted at least some degree of actual self-portraiture in a magnificent painting for a powerful patron; the turned head allows us to see his profile. There could also be something sly in his 41 Detail of illus. 39: central garden and landscape in the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin.

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denied vista, as if to insist that he is no mere sightseer in a world he created. He stands at the geometric centre of the painting. If this is Jan, we should entertain the suggestion that he intended his companion, who sees things invisible to the artist and to us, to be his deceased brother Hubert.22 Jan included himself in an inconspicuous yet brilliant way in another major religious work from the same years. Signed and dated 1436, the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele is Van Eyck’s largest work, after the Ghent Altarpiece. As in the Rolin picture, the patron joins the Virgin and Child (illus. 42). Van der Paele was secular canon of the Bruges Church of St Donatian. He had essentially retired to his native city in 1418 after a distinguished career in the papal curia that included time in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Pisa, Geneva and Constance, among other centres. He was also favoured with a remarkable number of paid clerical appointments in cities (Constance, Cologne, Strasbourg, Ghent,

42 Jan van Eyck, Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele, 1436, oil on oak.

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Utrecht and others) where he did not actually serve.23 Wealthy, aged and in failing health, in 1434 he established the first of two chaplaincies in St Donatian. The endowment stipulated regular celebration of Masses to ensure ‘the salvation and good of his soul and the souls of his parents and benefactors’.24 Although many have assumed Van Eyck’s painting was an altarpiece, it was probably created as an epitaph at the canon’s tomb in the church.25 Unlike Rolin, Van der Paele is accompanied by saints: Donatian on the left as patron of the church, and George on the right as the name saint of Joris. Van Eyck painted his own reflection on the shield of St George (see illus. 5). The figure is small, loosely rendered on the back of a curved surface and in shadow at the right edge of the image. All attention within the painting turns away from it, towards the centre. The red-capped figure looks outwards in a way that suggests eye contact with observers. Like the two smallest figures in the Arnolfini mirror, it reflects someone standing in front of the painting – where Jan was when he painted it and where all other visitors follow. But while one must draw very close to detect the figures in the Arnolfini mirror, the calculated blur of the Van der Paele reflection resolves best when a viewer steps back, an effect registering the fact that a shield was not designed for perfect reflection.26 When he chose to include himself in his works, Jan would have thought carefully about where. The polished shield offered an opportunity for optical performance, which must also partly explain his recurring depiction of the armoured St George – here, in the Knights of Christ on the Ghent Altarpiece and in a now-lost painting of the saint that was celebrated in the fifteenth century.27 Van Eyck burnished the shield’s reflective power by having the same object capture the adjacent red column below himself and the white-and-red banner above. Standing reflected below the latter, which equally resembles the standard of St George and the banner of Christ’s Resurrection, the artist must have

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signalled hope for his own eternal life.28 And in occupying the saint’s shield rather than his armour, Jan embraced an etymological harmony: in Middle Dutch, ‘shield’ was schild and a painter was a schilder. Schild could also refer to a painting. Here, then, is a schilder reflected on the schild of a favoured saint in a grand schild dedicated to the Virgin.29 This, after all, is the painter whose motto can read both ‘As I can’ and ‘As Eyck can’. Would the patron have endorsed or even sought this inclusion, thereby inviting the famous painter as part of his own posterity? Or could he instead have been unapprised and unaware? The marginal reflection is unmentioned in abundant writing on the painting before the middle of the twentieth century.30 Whatever his knowledge of the reflection might have been, the patron certainly approved the elaborate inscription on all four sides of the frame, the lowest of which specifies that Joris van der Paele had the work done by Jan van Eyck, that he founded chaplaincies in the church beginning in 1434 and that the work was completed in 1436.31 The sides synopsize biographies of the adjacent saints Donatian and George, emphasizing for each a triumph over death.32 The top of the frame presents Van Eyck’s favourite Marian text, a passage from the Wisdom of Solomon (7:29, 26) which appears in four of his works: ‘For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the orders of the stars; being compared with the light, she is found before it. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.’33 The luminous imagery of the words seems to cue the picture itself (illus. 43). There are windows, candles, jewels and of course the shining armour of George, which reflects more than just the painter: from the helmet downwards there are glints of the Virgin and Child, George’s banner, the column and more. Given Van Eyck’s special dedication both to Mary and to this hymn, its description of her as an ‘unspotted mirror of the power of God’ could not have been an accidental

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parallel for reflections of himself – here in the armour of a saint, and in another painting on the wall of a home, in a mirror surrounded by scenes of Christ’s Passion (see illus. 4). Reflection itself becomes a shared arena of mastery and the divine. Where Rolin’s audience with the Virgin is palatial, Van der Paele’s is ecclesiastical. Mary’s centrality before the apsidal curve 43 Detail of illus. 42: St Donatian in the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele.

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of architecture likens her to the altar. Seated on her lap with a white cloth below him, Christ parallels the offering at Mass. Be­tween them they clasp a small bouquet and a parrot. The flowers, a late addition to the composition, were probably symbolic chiefly for their triad of white, red and blue – perhaps for chastity, love and humility. The parrot would have looked especially intrig­ uing. There was an old belief that parrots can say ‘Ave’ – a word inseparable in Christian thought from Gabriel’s greeting to the Virgin.34 Presented here as more than a mere Marian attribute, the bird turns its head in acknowledgement of Van der Paele, following the gazes of Virgin and Child. Parrots are included in images of Mary by a few major artists in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but Van Eyck appears to have been the first to do so in a major work of art, choosing even to set the Christ Child to one side to allow the bird a more central perch. Jan no doubt welcomed the addition of bright feathers to the superabundance of textures and colour in the image. But given his persistently clever verbal integrations, including puns, rebuses and homonyms, his first inspiration for the parrot could have been its eligibility to become a symbol solely in the sound of a word. As he did in other work, Van Eyck devises architectural carvings to elaborate meaning further. Historiated capitals present Old Testament incidents, here emphasizing sin, redemption and triumph. Their narratives in the shadowy background – some almost as hard to make out as the reflection of the painter in the armour – find counterpoint in prominent sculptures on the throne of the Virgin: Cain Slaying Abel and Samson Rending the Lion. Van Eyck cultivated the paradox of great exertion in stone figures surrounded by the serenity of living ones. Their bal­­ancing expressions of sin and triumph are underpinned by the figures of Adam and Eve in niches below. For many visitors to the Church of St Donatian, the First Parents’ flanking of the Lord would have recalled their monumental symmetry in the

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Ghent Altarpiece. Whether it was intended or not, such an association would have blended reference to salvation with reference to the artist. As with Rolin, Van der Paele’s presence in this company can be best understood as a realization of prayer. Having looked up after removing his glasses (a lens of which actually refracts the text we see through it), he apprehends in his mind, heart and perhaps eternity everything the words before him offer, and more.35 If his gaze is unfocused, as some believe, his thoughts are beyond this world; if it is focused, it may be chiefly on St Donatian, patron of the canon’s burial place, and the prospect of eternal life in the cross the saint holds. Among all the optical and other wonders of the painting, one of the most compelling for contemporaries might have been the immediacy of Van der Paele’s portrait – the intense likeness of someone they knew, kneeling in the presence of the Virgin and Child. He is accompanied by a saint whose hand casts a shadow on his surplice, whose boot stands on its hem, and whose armour reflects the artist who stood where an observer stands now. Everything asserts contact and continuity with the holy. Van Eyck’s smaller paintings of the Virgin and Child, made for the prayers and delectation of individual owners, share the optical and symbolic amplitude of the larger works. Superabundant formulations of vision and meaning were one kind of performance at the impressive public scales of the Ghent Altarpiece and Virgin of Canon van der Paele, but quite another in paintings less than 30 centimetres (1 ft) tall. Spectacular craftsmanship in miniature had long been treasured in courtly patronage of manuscripts, goldsmith work and ivory, among other materials. For small panel paintings, however, Van Eyck was mastering new terrain. The centre of a tiny triptych in Dresden (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) presents the Virgin and Child enthroned in the nave of a church (illus. 44).36 The wings look into its aisles, with

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St Michael on the left presenting a male donor and St Catherine alone on the right. The patron is likely to have been Italian, based on southern echoes of the painting already in the fifteenth century. A Giustiniani coat of arms on the frame makes one of them a natural candidate, but questions remain. The man’s Burgundian clothing does not rule out the Genoese family, several of whom were based in Bruges. We can say at least that this was one of several works Van Eyck produced for Italians and that its presence in a noble collection would have made it an important early example of his work south of the Alps, where Eyckian technique and style would radiate widely.37 Dated 1437, the triptych shares several aspects of the large Van der Paele panel completed a year earlier: frame inscriptions including Jan’s favourite Marian hymn (sun and stars, as mentioned earlier) and descriptive texts for each saint; the Virgin enthroned before a cloth of honour in a church; a single donor presented by an armoured saint with another saint across the way; a rich carpet below. One of the most absorbing aspects of the triptych is the greater distance between the Virgin and the threshold of the picture. The carpet stops short of the edge, with the elaborate polychrome of the church pavement visible between. This, along with columns extending deeply between the picture plane and the sanctuary at the end of the nave, creates an avenue between the main figures and an observer. We are invited to imagine stepping into the space. That invitation inwards is also tendered, almost teasingly, by minute text on the banderole held by the Child. Only by drawing very close can one read, ‘learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart’ (Matthew 11:29).38 Christ directs the message towards the patron at left, who must have either proposed or approved the sentiment of divine humility. ‘Meek and lowly’ strikes an interesting chord amid grand architecture, sparkling attire, lavish textiles and a golden throne. By the 1430s one of the most popular

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European types of Marian image was what came to be known as the Madonna of Humility, with the Virgin seated on the ground or floor. It was not, however, a part of Jan van Eyck’s repertoire.39 Regarded in light of the splendour he occupies, this Christ Child’s expression of modesty can evoke the rhetorical posture of humility in Jan’s motto. It is in fact present here, concluding the signature across the inner level of the frame: Johannis de Eyck me fecit et co[m]plevit Anno D[o]m[ini] mcccc XXXVII-ALC-IXH-XAN Jan van Eyck made and completed me in the year of our Lord 1437. As I can. Among the four universally accepted Van Eyck paintings that bear the motto, the Virgin and Child with Saints is the earliest religious work, preceded only by the presumed self-portrait in London.40 44 Jan van Eyck, Virgin and Child with Saints (Dresden Triptych), 1437, oil on oak, triptych.

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It is also the earliest of his inscribed works to indicate that Jan ‘fecit et complevit’ – both made and completed the work. This implicitly recognized that some of his paintings included contributions by assistants, as would have been typical in commissions from a leading master. The tiny scale of the Dresden triptych made it feasible as the work of a single hand. The inscription documented it as such, and the motto called attention, with affected modesty, to the accomplishment. Jan literally opens a window on his virtuosic aims in the right panel, behind St Catherine (illus. 45). The corresponding window in the left wing is closed. There one marvels at the glimmering armour, accoutrements and rainbow wings of St Michael. While the regal St Catherine is captivating in a different way, we are taken aback by the accompanying vista of a castle, rolling hills and snow-capped mountains on the horizon. Designing the collision between proximity and distance, Van Eyck playfully aligned several windows in the castle as if they continue the row of black ermine spots on the saint’s sleeve. This is the only surviving triptych by Jan van Eyck.41 The closed wings present an Annunciation in painted sculpture (illus. 46). Unlike the reflective black background of the Annunciation diptych in Madrid (see illus. 31), these panels present the two figures in narrow stone spaces. Jan heightened the trompe l’oeil effect by projecting light and shadow from outside the paintings and framing their austere white with the marbling of the fictive stone frames.42 The shared perspective angle of the boxy containers, locating an observer precisely between them, prefaced the deep spatial pull towards the Virgin and Child when the owner opened the triptych. Only the dove escapes the rigorous illusion of a carved tableau, unsupported as it descends towards Mary. It appears to be intended as floating stone, but one cannot rule out a flying dove. Material uncertainty may have been by design for this element in seminal transition, the Word becoming flesh.

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Another small panel depicting the Virgin in a church has come to be seen as one of the most exemplary of all Van Eyck paintings (illus. 47). Crowned and standing, Mary holds the Child in the luminous space of a grand nave. Its Gothic architecture, which would have looked modern to contemporaries, is conspicuously unlike the older, more Romanesque vocabulary in most of Jan’s works featuring the Virgin. Netherlandish and French artists had begun to develop this stylistic contrast as symbolic analogy for the transition from Old (the world under Law) to New (under Grace) with the coming of Christ.43 A traditional identification between Mary and Ecclesia is given novel emphasis by her towering presence, as tall as the church triforium. Disjunctions of scale, including between figures and structures, were standard equipment of medieval representation – often as an emphatic index of importance within a relatively schematic image. Here, however, Van Eyck makes the same move in a picture that otherwise looked startlingly realistic. It is a mark of both audacity and ingenuity that he was able make her symbolic immensity look so natural that not all observers notice it. A painting of the Virgin in a church becomes the Virgin as the Church.44 The grand windows of the Gothic nave allowed Van Eyck to expand his rich portfolio of light symbolism. His favourite verse, comparing Mary to the sun and stars (from Wisdom 7:29), is cued from a few gleaming letters legible on her hem. The space is alive with light. Sunshine pours inwards, its slant measured by bright pools on the pavement at right and sharply lit angles just outside the doorway at left. As if to echo this shining embrace of Mary, Jan flanks a statue of her – in a nearby niche visible just over her shoulder – with the flames of two candles. Standing crowned, and holding the Child in the same position, this carved Mary affirms the breathing reality of the one before us. Some observers would have recalled stories of

45 Detail of illus. 44: St Catherine in the Virgin and Child with Saints.

46 Jan van Eyck, Annunciation (closed view of the Virgin and Child with Saints triptych), 1437, oil on oak.

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miraculous animations of sacred sculpture. But with this juxtaposition Jan van Eyck was also hailing his own enterprise of spellbinding transformation, in which paint can conjure anything, including art in other materials – as, for example, in the Annunciation diptych (see illus. 31). That statue also urges us to look further and notice more. In the sanctuary visible through the door of the choir screen, two figures vested as deacons stand before an open book on the lectern, mouths open as if in song. They register as a lifelike detail, people doing something off in a different part of a large church. But they become less familiar when we realize one is an angel with glowing red wings – a divine being embedded in the seemingly routine life of a building. He and his wingless companion are framed by an altarpiece filled with golden statues – more art, in another material – that are in fact no more than pulls and dashes of white and yellow. Far above, a concentration of red and blue stained glass looks like a blossom atop the crucifix over the choir screen. This is one of Jan van Eyck’s many meaning­ful surface conflations of elements nominally separated by the depth of a scene.45 He also repeatedly summons places and things withheld from our view, as with whatever one man at the Rolin garden wall can see as he peers downward through a crenellation. Something similar occurs in the Virgin in the Church, where the tops of flying buttresses peek through the clerestory windows. They firmly build, but only in our minds, the massive exterior of this church on a gorgeous day. Eyes lingering around those windows eventually spot cobwebs in the vaults. Unlike the angel in the sanctuary, these absorbing minutiae are not divine and are unlikely to have been symbolic. But they install a gentle dimension of passing time that is all the more compelling for being something we feel rather than think.46 The Virgin in the Church was presumably the left half of a diptych joined by a donor in prayer from the right. We would have

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suspected this based solely on the panel’s shape and composition, but the hunch is confirmed by later copies with other donors attached. 47 Beyond telling us something about the format of the original work, they also attest to its reception. It was valued not only as a painting by the famous Jan van Eyck but as an effective image of and for prayer. Others wanted a version for themselves. The same was true of the smallest Van Eyck painting, the Virgin at the Fountain in Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) (illus. 48). 48 The composition echoes in numerous works of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, from close copies of the entire composition through adaptation of its figures in other settings.49 In a compact garden dense with flowers, the Virgin stands before an ornate cloth of honour suspended by two angels. Here as in all Eyckian paintings of the Virgin, setting and other elements convey distinct aspects of doctrine and devotion. The garden recalls the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden (Song of Songs 4:12), that flourished in late medieval and Renais­ sance art as a symbol of Marian purity. The fountain has its origin partly in the same verse, which describes a sealed fountain (fons signa­­tus) in the enclosed garden. Conspicuously unsealed, however, this flowing one also alludes to the eschatological fountain of life – which had been most famously depicted in the Ghent Altarpiece, where it is described (in words on the basin) as ‘the fountain of the water of life, proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb’. With one arm embracing his mother, the Child holds rosary beads in the other – as sure a sign as any that the tiny painting was made for prayer. The awkward reach backwards of that arm insists that the beads are for the eyes of a devout observer, not the Child holding them. His nuzzle against her cheek aligns them with a distinct iconographic type, the Virgin of Tenderness (Madonna Eleousa) that radiated from Byzantine icons into western European art.

47 Jan van Eyck, Virgin in the Church, c. 1438–40, oil on oak.

48 Jan van Eyck, Virgin at the Fountain, 1439, oil on oak.

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Signed and dated 1439, the painting is among Jan van Eyck’s latest known works, along with the 1439 portrait of his wife, Margaret (see illus. 56). The inscription on the frame below the image, painted as if carved into stone, reads: alc ixh xan ioh[ann]es de eyck me fecit + c[om]plevit an[n]o 1439 That text closely echoes the signature line of the Virgin and Child with Saints of two years earlier (see illus. 44). It is striking that both of these tiny Marian images from Jan’s later years include his motto as well as the paired verbs of making and completion – the latter underscoring that this is work of his hand alone. Situ­ated at the lower edge of both paintings, the illusionistic letters share the representation of the image, making a permeable threshold between divine space and our own. It is thus visibly through ioh[ann]es de eyck that we are able to approach. Where the Dresden Virgin invites our inward approach, the Virgin at the fountain stands very near. The wings of the angels holding the cloth behind her follow the inner edges of the frame as if pressed against it. To see it that way is to see Mary closer to us than the frame is – at least in the upper portion of the painting. Below, the base and basin of the fountain seem to touch the frame as well, which establishes the more foregrounded position we expect for it. By relativizing the picture plane in this way, Van Eyck may have been coaxing meditative absorption that exceeds physical logic.50 The fountain seeks this in another way. Where some early observers would have focused first on its scriptural symbolism, more were likely to have heard, consciously or otherwise, the splash of its streams as they contemplated the image. An owner holding the panel might even have imagined some of its tiny drops on

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her hand – much as visitors to Ghent watch the water of eternal life trickling forth towards them from the grand fountain within. In his largest and smallest paintings, Van Eyck’s abiding aim to engage a viewer has a literally fluid dimension.

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hree small paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck and his workshop each feature a single saint. The most famous is the astonishing St Barbara, signed and dated 1437 (illus. 49). St Jerome in His Study, which bears the date 1442, could have been completed by one or more members of Van Eyck’s shop (illus. 51). St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, another presumably late work, might also have been begun by Jan and completed in his circle (illus. 52). Each raises many questions, but together they reveal an element of Van Eyck’s oeuvre that is rarely noted as such: the very idea of a small, independent painting of a saint in a fully realized setting. Most of the countless earlier images of saints in European art were conceived as components of larger works or series, such as figures on a facade, panels in a polyp­­ tych or predella, illuminations within a book of hours or attendants in a larger scene focused on Mary. Many of them were statues either fixed in situ or portable for private devotion, with their sanctity anchored by names and attributes. Within the new fullness of places and implicit time in paintings by Van Eyck and his contemporaries, images of saints could claim much more of that which most powerfully defines them: their stories. Each of these panels presents one of the most frequently represen­ ted saints of the period. While all could serve prayer, early observers would also have savoured the visual bounty of the images themselves. As with Van Eyck’s altarpieces and Marian

49 Jan van Eyck, St Barbara, 1437, metalpoint, brush drawing and oil on oak.

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paintings, they were religious images that also drew reverence for the artist. The lower frame of St Barbara (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) leaves no doubt: Jan van Eyck made me 1437. In a time when artist signatures were far from common, it would have been striking to see one written conspicuously below a saint whose own name appears nowhere in the work. As with other Van Eyck paintings, this frame is itself a picture of sorts: wood painted to resemble stone with an inscription rendered as if carved. The reverse of the panel is also painted as stone, speckled by a spatter of white pigment.1 Fully wrapped in representation, such paintings were objects as well as pictures. Raised spherical nail heads at the corners of the St Barbara frame, both front and back, must have been designed to buffer its paint from contact with other surfaces – possibly within a wooden case to hold the panel.2 The technique of the St Barbara image is unprecedented among finished works on panel. Preliminary fine lines are covered by a brush drawing with dark pigment in a fluid medium. Incised lines in the prepared ground, including some made with a straight edge to delineate architecture, resemble incisions in the underdrawing of numerous panel paintings by Van Eyck and Netherlandish contemporaries.3 There is also selective white heightening in a thicker medium, probably oil. These highlights appear mostly in the architecture, where they accentuate effects of relief and depth. Colours washed into the sky might have been added by a later hand. We do not know what Jan wanted this picture to be: perhaps an intentionally unfinished painting, perhaps a painting of a drawing, perhaps something else. Regardless of how he might have described it, the panel’s appearance was manifestly unusual. The Christian convert Barbara was said to have been locked in a tower by her pagan father. Seeing two windows in a building being constructed for him, she convinced the workmen to add

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a third in honour of the Holy Trinity. Her father turned her over to the authorities, who ordered her torture and execution. Where most earlier images of the saint shrank the tower to a toylike attribute small enough for her to hold, Van Eyck wanted a tower large enough to hold her. A year later, in a 1438 panel depicting St Barbara, Robert Campin pictured the structure through a window behind the saint, who is indoors – thus allowing the tower to be both realistically scaled in the distance and pictorially compact, like an attribute.4 Van Eyck placed Barbara on a foreground hill and the tower in the middle ground in a way that accords each about the same portion of picture surface. As with the manipulation of architectural scale in the Virgin in the Church (see illus. 47), figure and building symbolically define each other. 50 Detail of illus. 49: figures in the middle ground in St Barbara.

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The tower is also a hub of activity. Barbara’s tranquil focus, holding the palm of martyrdom and turning a page, deepens against the varied bustle behind her (illus. 50). Workmen haul and carve. As a man steps into the portal at left, three around the corner from him ponder an unseen part of the building. Others arrive on horseback, and several work atop the tower. Near its middle, before elaborately carved windows revealing an enormous wheel powering the crane above, a solitary man leans pensively on a balustrade. Far below, visible just beyond Barbara’s left elbow, three richly attired women and a man visit the construction site. They turn their attention towards the saint and appear to represent something specific – maybe an elaboration of the holy legend, or reference to certain contemporaries of the artist. Sheltered by Barbara’s palm and framed by concentrations of dense shading, this group’s gaze towards her enriches the integration of saint, site and story. Images of a female martyr with a book were familiar, but the scene behind this one would have been a marvel. It is another of Van Eyck’s compelling invitations to look beyond a main event or figure, like the optically magnetic mirror behind the Arnolfini couple, the lively street scene out the window of the Ghent Annunciation, or the intriguing figures in the garden of the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin. Each is a different kind of lure not simply of the eye, but of curiosity and thought. While the intricate, statue-adorned tower and expansive landscape themselves would have been enough to draw interest beyond St Barbara, it is the varied craft and machinery of building that most fascinates – much as construction sites can still do today. Van Eyck must have associated the captivation of this labour with his own work. Within the great scope of arts (textile, gold, jewellery, woodwork, stained glass and so on) that he repeatedly subsumed in painting, none were more prominent and brilliantly realized than architecture and stone sculpture. Think, for example, of the church interiors

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of the Virgin in the Church or Annunciation in Washington, or the carved statues of the Annunciation diptych or saints on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece. In St Barbara, it is as if he declares his power to depict not only statues and buildings, but the work of making them. The frame, represented as stone, strengthens the kinship among building, sculpting and painting. The only words are the fictively carved inscription on the lower frame: ioh[ann]es de eyck me fecit. 1437. Among the surviving signatures on his paintings, it most resembles the one on the presumed self-portrait in London: joh[ann]es•de•eyck• me•fecit•an[n]o•m°cccc°.33°•21.octobris. Other Van Eyck paintings use the same verb in combination with others, such as fecit fieri (ordered made) or fecit et complevit (made and completed). The contrast of fecit with fecit et complevit might have consciously distinguished making from completing. On the London portrait, this could have involved the extraordinary depiction of the artist’s self, especially in conjunction with the motto above. Together, fecit (without complevit) and als ich can may convey that more could have been done; there was a still-higher ceiling for both painting and career. In St Barbara, the image itself features making. An inscription carved in stone underscores a scene of men working in stone. There is another link between internal work and external representation at the top, where the crane rises beyond the frame. It lifts materials towards completion of a tower that promises to transcend the picture. A line dropped plumb from the base of the crane runs though a sharply defined pier, the man with three noble women and the middle of the word fecit. Could that man, who looks forward towards both the saint and viewer, be meant as the artist or someone associated with him? Regardless of any possible identity for the figure, the painting begins to look like a meditation on the time, labour and ambition of making. That idea, which appears nowhere else so vividly in Van Eyck’s

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work, strengthens the likelihood that the seeming unfinish of the image was intentional. Framed in illusionistic stone with corner studs to protect the surfaces, it would be a finished painting of an unfinished painting about an unfinished tower. Seeing it this way risks implying that St Barbara herself was little more than a prop – a saint chosen because her legend pivots on a construction site. It is not inconceivable. The eccentricity of technique is hard to imagine for an owner whose sole interest in the panel was prayer. Even if the work was not commissioned, Van Eyck, an internationally esteemed figure by 1437, could safely have assumed a buyer for a unique picture of one of the most widely popular saints. One can also imagine, however, that he made the work for himself or his circle – either as a demonstration piece or as a work of art. The small scale and absence of glazed pigments required less time and assistance than a larger commissioned work. Assuming he intended it as a drawing (either the underdrawing for an unfinished painting or an independent drawing framed as a painting), it can be considered the earliest autonomous one in the European tradition.5 The earliest known mention of it comes in Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck of 1604: ‘I well remember seeing a portrait by him of a woman with a landscape behind which was merely underpainted but nevertheless most excellently neat and smooth; it was at the house of my master Lucas de Heere in Ghent.’6 Van Mander’s praise of a work in the collection of a distinguished painter suggests a particular esteem in which St Barbara was held among artists and connoisseurs of succeeding generations. The same can be said of St Jerome in His Study, which is painted on paper mounted on panel (illus. 51). Questions of attribution, technique and dating have swirled around the panel since its acquisition by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1925. Scientific examination of the support, pigments and technique suggests that the panel conforms in various ways with others by Van Eyck

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and his circle.7 One impediment to a firm attribution has been the date 1442, the year after Jan’s death, which is inscribed in tiny numerals on the wall above the saint. Many have regarded this, along with a few passages of average-quality painting (including overpaint by later restorers), as evidence that the picture was probably begun by the master and finished by a member of his shop. This may indeed have been the case, but more recent analyses have fortified the possibility that Jan himself painted all or most of the image, and perhaps as early as 1435.8 The work is mentioned in the 1492 inventory of the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici: ‘a little panel from Flanders, on which is a Saint Jerome in his study with a bookcase with many books in perspective and a lion at his feet, the work of Master Jan of Bruges, painted in oils, in a case.’9 Kept in the study of the Palazzo Medici, where the most valuable treasures in the collection were concentrated, the tiny panel was valued at an impressive 30 florins.10 But the greater value of the Van Eyck might have been its inspiration of Florentine painters – most famously in a pair of large frescoes painted in 1480 for the Church of Ognissanti: St Jerome by Domenico Ghirlandaio and St Augustine by Sandro Botticelli. Each presents its saint as a scholar surrounded by books in a compact study. While Ghirlandaio’s Jerome is more closely based on the Eyckian painting of the same saint, both Florentine masters appear to have been responding to the prized Netherlandish panel in the Medici collection. Their prominently paired frescoes were a marquee episode of competition between Italian Renaissance artists.11 This makes it all the more remarkable that each looked to a foreign panel no larger than one of the books pictured in their frescoes. The fame of that small painting echoes a half-century later in Vasari’s mention in 1550 that the Medici had once owned a St Jerome by Jan van Eyck.12 No one knows when or how the Van Eyck painting left the Medici collection in the half-century after the 1492 inventory.

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There is, however, a strong hypothesis to explain its arrival in Florence by the 1440s. A folded piece of paper at the front edge of the saint’s desk bears a tiny but legible Latin inscription: ‘To the Most Reverend Father and Lord in Christ, Lord Jerome, Cardinal-Priest of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem’.13 This has been recognized as an address to Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, who was cardinal priest to the Roman church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme between 1426 and his death in 1443. Albergati served for more than a decade as a busy papal legate to Burgundy and France, seeking rapprochement among Philip the Good and the French and English crowns.14 The key episode of this endeavour was the cardinal’s presiding role at the Congress of Arras in 1435. Lavishly hosted by Philip the Good and attended by thousands of ecclesiastical and lay delegates, the congress was an international stage for the Burgundian court. After talks broke down with the English delegation, Albergati met with Philip and his counsellors, including Chancellor Nicolas Rolin, whose Virgin Van Eyck was painting at about this time (see illus. 39).15 The eventual result was a separate treaty between Burgundy and France, which would be the signal accomplishment of the congress. Jan van Eyck was there. On 29 September, as delegates were leaving Arras, Burgundian accounts record a payment for six silver cups that were given by Philip the Good to Jan van Eyck.16 This has been credibly explained as special remuneration for his court painter’s creation of an extraordinary diplomatic gift: an image of St Jerome as cardinal, dedicated to the ‘Cardinal-Priest’ of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme – Niccolò Albergati.17 Perhaps the painting was presented to him the day after the payment; 30 September is the feast day of St Jerome. The hypothesis is complicated by the existence of the Van Eyck portrait of a man – in both a drawing and a painting – generally identified as Albergati (see illus. 13, 14). Resemblance between the face in that portrait and the Detroit St Jerome is not obvious. The identification of the portrait in Vienna

51 Jan van Eyck and workshop (?), St Jerome in His Study, c. 1435–41, oil on linen paper, mounted on oak.

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as Albergati hinges on an inscription recorded from the long-lost frame, which dated the painting to 1438 and associated it with the cardinal’s role at the Congress of Arras. The drawing in Dresden, which includes notations for colour, has been considered Van Eyck’s direct work from the sitter in Arras, from which he later developed the painting.18 Not all scholars are convinced that Albergati is the man in those portraits.19 But whether they depict him or not, the St Jerome was almost surely dedicated to Albergati. This connection becomes even more fascinating in light of the cardinal’s recently discovered role in securing a confessional letter from the Vatican for Jan and Margaret van Eyck in the months before Jan’s death in 1441.20 With or without an actual portrait likeness, the St Jerome stands as one of the earliest examples of a sacred figure conflated with a living individual. Sacred and allegorical portraits of this sort became familiar in generations to come (including later cardinals painted as St Jerome), but the idea would have been extraordinary in the 1430s and ’40s.21 No less novel in those years was the scene itself: Jerome en­­ sconced among books and office ware. Most of the latter are things one might expect given wide familiarity with later images of Jerome in his study, such as Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 engraving: a bookstand and writing implements, folded paper, prayer beads, an hourglass, a piece of fruit. But two items in the Eyckian panel remain outside the tradition the painting seems to have inaugurated: an astrolabe and a jar labelled ‘Tyriaca’. Both appear to have been topical references to Albergati and the circumstances of this presumed gift. The position of the astrolabe has been read as indicating approximately 5 August, which was the opening day of the Congress of Arras.22 Tyriaca, or theriac, was widely prescribed to alleviate the pain of kidney stones, from which Albergati had suffered acutely for years – including in the days around the opening of the congress.23 This syrupy compound, widely used since antiquity, could contain as many as eighty substances, including

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cinnamon, saffron, ginger, coral, balsam, viper flesh and opium – the last perhaps among its most active ingredients.24 By the later Middle Ages it was considered a nearly universal antidote for poisons and a powerful treatment for countless afflictions, including plague.25 Albergati must have appreciated the prominence of Tyriaca, which is larger and more legible than the minute dedication on the nearby paper. It touches the right edge of the image, as if the medication were literally at hand when he held the tiny panel. Immediately beside it is a flask of liquid, likely wine for steeping the compound.26 Technical examination, and even the naked eye, reveal that the artist originally placed the circle of the astrolabe (inscribed by compass onto the panel surface) to this side.27 With its circumference touching the jar, wine and prayer beads, and hours trickling just below, such a positioning would have created a compact still-life about Albergati’s days in Arras. Below the shelf at right there is a tiny slip of paper with markings that depict a list with strike-out lines marking tasks completed.28 Almost too perfectly, the to-do list touches the upper bulb of the hourglass, where time remains. This dense constellation of personal references, anchored by the inscription below, was hardly weakened by the artist’s decision to move the astrolabe leftwards, which may have been to align its sighting axis better towards the light of the window. In that position it ties the other elements more closely to the cardinal. It also places the heavens, in a way, directly above the tome in which his fingers mark several passages. The learned man’s steady focus belongs simultaneously – and across a millennium – to Jerome on scripture and Albergati on affairs of state and Church. Florence was Niccolò Albergati’s home during his remaining years, and the Van Eyck painting probably entered the Medici collection not long after his death in 1443.29 The inconspicuous ‘1442’ on the wall, which has been at the crux of debates about

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authorship of the painting (given Jan’s death in 1441), might have been a posthumous addition. It appears to belong to the same period, but maybe not to the original paint layer.30 The date could have been added by a subsequent owner to mark Albergati’s year of death; getting it wrong by a year was not unusual in this period.31 The absorbing space of Jerome’s study made a deep impression in another Van Eyck painting of the saint in Italy, a triptych for the Genoese nobleman Battista Lomellini. Long lost, the work was described in Bartolomeo Fazio’s appreciation of Van Eyck in his De viris illustribus (On Famous Men, 1456). Mentioning it first and at greater length than the other Van Eyck paintings he knew, Fazio had seen it in the private apartments of King Alfonso v of Aragon, who had probably acquired it in the 1440s. He des­cribes this image of the saint, a wing of an Annunciation also flanked by a scene with John the Baptist, as ‘Jerome like a living being in a library done with rare art: for if you move away from it a little it seems that it recedes inwards and that it has complete books laid open in it, while if you go near it is evident that there is only a summary of these.’32 The dramatic rise of St Jerome’s star during the Renaissance was thanks largely to his career as a scholar, which made him a beacon for humanists and the intellectual worlds they were mapping.33 No artist shaped the bookish image of him more fundamentally than Jan van Eyck, whose paintings of the saint in the most august collections in Naples and Florence established a type that would radiate throughout and far beyond the Italian peninsula. In turn, those images of the saint augmented the international reputation of Van Eyck himself, an artist revered as much for his learned invention as he was for his eye and hand. Van Eyck created an entirely different sacred moment and world in St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, a painting known in two versions: one in Turin (Galleria Sabauda) on panel, and the other in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) on vellum mounted

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on panel (illus. 52, 53). The compositions are nearly identical, though the panel in Turin is larger: 29.2 × 33.4 centimetres (11½ × 13 in.) versus 12.4 × 14.6 cm (5 × 5¾ in.). Neither is signed or dated, and neither has an original frame that might have provided information. Technical analysis suggests the Turin panel was painted first, either entirely or mostly by Jan van Eyck. The Philadelphia panel appears to be a superb copy made in the master’s workshop; its panel came from the same tree as the panels of two Van Eyck portraits now in Berlin.34 Generally dated to the 1430s, the stigma­tization paintings have long been associated with Anselm Adornes, a prominent Bruges citizen of Genoese ancestry. His will, drafted in 1470 before a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, included a bequest to each of his daughters, both nuns, of ‘a picture wherein Saint Francis in portraiture from the hand of Master Jan van Eyck’.35 Anselm, who was a teenager when Van Eyck died, probably 52 Jan van Eyck and workshop (?), St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, c. 1430–32 (?), oil on oak, Turin panel.

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inherited the paintings from his father, Pieter Adornes. The family chapel in Bruges, dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, had been consecrated in 1429. This might help explain the Adornes commission of an image of St Francis, which was a rare subject in earlier Netherlandish painting. The Franciscans were caretakers of the Holy Sepulchre, and Anselm’s 1470 will specified Franciscan friars as pallbearers for his funeral.36 The smaller St Francis Receiving the Stigmata might have been intended to accompany the travels of its first owner. The stigmatization was the most widely represented episode in the richly documented life of Francis of Assisi (c. 1182–1226). During his prayer and fasting on La Verna, the apparition of a six-winged seraph on a cross gave Francis the five wounds of Christ. Brother Leo, his secretary and faithful companion, was reported in some accounts to have witnessed the miracle. Van Eyck’s telling 53 Jan van Eyck and workshop (?), St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, c. 1430–32 (?), oil on vellum mounted on oak, Philadelphia panel.

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has sometimes been considered oddly inert, with a calm Francis kneeling in prayer and gazing more in distraction than wonder.37 These modern verdicts are shaped in part by familiarity with famous Italian versions, including two by Giotto (an altarpiece of circa 1300 for San Francesco, Pisa, now in the Louvre; and a fresco of circa 1325 for the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence) and Giovanni Bellini’s later St Francis in Ecstasy (c. 1475–8) in the Frick Collection, New York. Each of them seeks drama in the encounter, with Francis raising his face and opening his body to the vision. The contrast is especially stark with Giotto’s fresco, which is enlivened by the extraordinary turn of the kneeling saint. But Jan van Eyck, who would not have known these or most other major Italian depictions, favours the stillness that pervades his art. Tiny wounds in the hands and feet of St Francis seem smaller than the recognition in his heart and mind. It is the decidedly inward kind of revelation that Van Eyck also realized for Chancellor Rolin and Canon van der Paele, among others (see illus. 39, 42).38 The feet of St Francis have also drawn scrutiny, often being deemed too high for the angle of his legs and turned too far outwards towards the viewer. But the position of the feet is more plausible than is often assumed. Many observers likely mistake the bottom right corner of the robe for the site of a knee, which would be far too low. The position of the feet is also comparable to those of kneeling apostles in the Ghent Adoration of the Lamb. The outward angle of Francis’s feet seems to have been an adjustment to reveal the wounds on his soles. Another revealing adjustment, visible in infrared reflectograms of the Turin panel, was the decision to remove the sandals Francis had worn in the underdrawing.39 Bared feet allowed Van Eyck to show not only the divine wounds but a heel smudged by the saint’s immersion in nature. Brother Leo’s role in the image is remarkable. When he appeared in earlier depictions of the episode, he was typically

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further from the saint and either reacting to the seraphic encounter or absorbed in his own prayer or meditation – as he does, for example, in the fresco cycle of circa 1300 in the Upper Church at Assisi. Van Eyck settles him mere inches from Francis, his back to the miracle, head in hand and fast asleep. Like a shadow in sunshine, Leo’s unconsciousness intensifies the adjacent illum­ ination. Since the stigmatization was when Francis most fully inhabited his role of alter Christus, Van Eyck might have devised Leo’s slumber to evoke the Agony in the Garden, when apostles sleep as Christ confronts his fate.40 He could also have had in mind images of the Resurrection, when stricken or sleeping guards fail to witness Christ’s departure from the tomb. Like apostles at the beginning of the Passion and the guards at its end, Brother Leo is oblivious to a divine moment.41 But the unaware friar is no mere attribute of the saint. Van Eyck gives him half the picture, points to him with the stem of the hovering crucifix and links him to Francis with rope belts converging on the ground. A near-miss of their tassels punctuates the men’s separation in this moment. Their juxtaposition without overlap allows the world to wind between them, from tiny flowers in the foreground to the river, city, mountains and clouds beyond. A plunging vista between foreground figures also defines the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (see illus. 39). Recall the two figures at the garden wall at the heart of that picture: one peers through a crenellation to marvel at the world while his companion cannot see it at all. This and passages in several other paintings show that the slumber of Brother Leo, for now blind to the miracle and world, is another of Van Eyck’s reflections not only on vision but simultaneously on things unseen. What Leo misses accentuates just how much we see in a landscape that is among Jan van Eyck’s most original. St Francis and Brother Leo are integrated with a complex vista in a way that accentuates the place of nature in the life of this saint and event.

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His gaze towards the seraph crosses our view of the city they have left behind. Its grand walls are reflected in a river that gleams beyond the towers as it winds towards snow-capped mountains. The dense splendour of that view is made even more absorbing by its retreat in a tiny fraction of the picture surface. Van Eyck arranged it so that our glimpse of the distant people who boat, ride and stroll places them directly between the floating cross and fresh streams of blood on the saint’s hands. This charged concentration of the worldly and divine abuts an outcropping of rock that has been an object of particular fascination in modern times. Formations and surfaces are so meticulously observed as to allow precise geological identification. Limestone, sandstone and shale, all sedimentary, predominate in the cluster next to Brother Leo, while some of the rocks behind St Francis are metamorphic. 42 Areas of reddish orange represent oxidized iron deposits, and the dispositions of cracks, joints and scrapes bespeak aeons of

54 Detail of illus. 52: rocks and water in St Francis Receiving the Stigmata.

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geological formation. 43 No other painter had ever differentiated rocks so intensively. Even more intriguing are the shell fossils nestled in surfaces of the limestone (illus. 54). Were these mainly a tour-de-force of observation or also an ingredient of meaning? Fossils had been understood in a variety of ways in antiquity and the Middle Ages – sometimes as deposits of early floods or the Deluge itself, and sometimes as formations native to the rocks.44 Jan van Eyck probably intended the inscription of deep time in fossils, as he surely did in the tumbled, worn and layered rocks themselves. That im­­­­perceptibly slow register of history comes into relief against animate moments of birds in flight, trickling blood, the flowing river and, most palpably of all, the spring that gushes forth in the lower right corner. By running its bright ripples to the threshold of the picture, Jan made the water as audible as it is visible. Recall the eternal sprinkle into the fountain of the Ghent Adoration of the Lamb, which releases water into a ground channel to pour forth from the image (see illus. 27). Or the Virgin at the Fountain, where one of the thin streams splashing into a golden basin runs along the edge of the tiny panel’s fictive stone frame (see illus. 48). The water in all three paintings flows against stone. As one of Jan van Eyck’s most compelling images of a deep vista, St Francis Receiving the Stigmata is often considered a signal early accomplishment of European landscape painting. In the eyes of history, this is true enough. But because independent landscapes would not begin to emerge for another half-century, it is important to realize he would not have meant or understood this – or any of his paintings – as one. What we discern in the up-close rocks and rivulet required no less care than the city and mountains miles away. This balance of what are, in fact, entirely different kinds of observation and technique is partly captured in the fam­ous claim that Jan van Eyck’s eye ‘operates as a microscope and as a telescope at the same time’.45 Rather than optical contrast, however, it is

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the incredible unity of such observations that matters. The result is not so much landscape as it is nature – which is far larger and more inseparable from the experience of an observer. Like St Francis, one is opened to something as vast as it is penetrating. Each of these three paintings of a saint was unprecedented for its depth of worldly circumstance. Nothing is mere background, and surroundings do more than surround. They infuse each saint and legend with spaces, things and substances of the observer’s own experience. Regarding the paintings together this way, it is not hard to imagine Van Eyck approaching each as an essay in a different mode of staging: a saint before a building under construction, another in a cosy interior and a third on a mountain overlooking a deep vista. We have circumstantial evidence for original owners of the Jerome and Francis panels, and the great specificity of the Barbara suggests that it, too, was meant for someone who would have been attuned by the artist himself to its subtleties. Those kinds of conversations, which are forever lost to us, would have been at least as essential to the development of Jan van Eyck’s portraits of his contemporaries.

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n a mid-January day in 1429, ambassadors sent to Portugal by Philip the Good of Burgundy were granted a meeting with the infanta Isabella, whose father, King John i, had welcomed them two days earlier. They were there to arrange a marriage for the duke. The official account of their mission notes that during the meeting with the princess, the ambassadors had her portrait painted from life (au vif) by ‘Jan van Eyck, varlet de chambre of my lord of Burgundy and excellent master in the art of painting’.1 In February, the ambassadors sent a report of their visit and impressions to Philip the Good with four messengers: two by land and two by sea, to guarantee safe delivery. They also sent the portrait, which might have been made on fabric rather than wood for easier transport. While it is often assumed that it, too, was copied and sent by both land and sea, it is possible that only one painting was made and delivered.2 It may or may not speak to the success of the portrait that Philip the Good married Isabella by proxy in Lisbon in July of that year. She joined him in the Netherlands a few months later, travelling in the company of the returning Burgundian delegation that included Van Eyck.3 Our best echo of the lost painting is a drawn copy from the seventeenth century (illus. 55). The inscription around the elaborately decorated frame in the drawing identifies the image at centre as the portrait sent to Philip. The simpler internal frame, which likely reflects the Eyckian original,

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includes thin columns, a ledge supporting the hands and an inscription at the top naming l’infante dame isabiel. Although Jan van Eyck was an experienced master by the time he painted it, the 1429 portrait is the earliest recorded work by him. He had no doubt produced others, as portraiture was a traditional task of court artists. The decidedly practical function of this one, transmitting a likeness for a distant suitor, was still in play a century later when Thomas Cromwell sent Hans Holbein to Brussels to portray Christina of Denmark for the consideration of Henry viii. 4 Van Eyck’s Isabella made eye contact with an 55 Anonymous (after Jan van Eyck), Isabella of Portugal, 17th century (after a painting of 1429), ink on paper.

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observer in a way that would have looked distinctive at the time, when independent European portraits had typically been in profile. He heightened the sense of connection by having her hands rest over the edge of the illusionistic parapet, which, together with the colonnettes to the sides, created a window-like encounter. Much of what made her pose original would later shape the sense of immediacy in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: hands resting at different angles, right atop left, a half-length body at a three-quarter angle and eyes turned forwards to meet ours. Portraits were more integral to the art of Jan van Eyck than they had been to the work of any other European artist since antiquity. Although many will think first of his famous individual likenesses or the completely unprecedented image of a couple standing in their home (see illus. 60), the portraits within larger works, including the Ghent Altarpiece, the Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin and the Virgin of Canon van der Paele, were in different ways just as fully realized and original. Having begun with the lost picture of the infanta, it is striking to realize that most of his surviving portraits were not of members of the Burgundian court, or any other. Those sitters who can be identified include at least one wealthy burgher, churchmen, an expatriate businessman and his wife, a goldsmith, the wife of the artist and Jan van Eyck himself. This range of portrayed individuals, reaching well beyond royalty and the high nobility, was new with Van Eyck but would soon become one of the defining enterprises of Renaissance art. Just as new was the sheer variety of aims for Van Eyck’s portraits. It is possible, in fact, that the artist and his clients would not even have recognized all of these likenesses as belonging to a single category that would eventually be called portraiture. Their evident diversity of functions does not, however, mean we can confidently know them. Even when the paintings were made, the desires of a client, decisions of an artist and actual uses of a portrait would seldom have aligned precisely or remained stable over time.

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Consider, for example, the portrait of Margaret van Eyck – the earliest known depiction of an artist’s wife (see illus. 56). We have no mention of the painting before 1769, when Jean-Baptiste Descamps reported seeing it in the chapel of the Bruges painters’ guild, where it was displayed each year on the feast day of St Luke. He and a few observers in the following decades note that the portrait was secured there by a chain because its pendant had been stolen.5 That pendant is sometimes assumed to have been a 56 Jan van Eyck, Margaret van Eyck, 1439, oil on oak.

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self-portrait of Jan. If so, it probably was not the presumed selfportrait now in London (see illus. 1). Absent any other trace of a missing pendant, we cannot know its subject or even whether it was an authentic painting by Van Eyck; one can easily imagine a later, maybe imitative panel having been attached to a treasured portrait. The annual display of the painting would have been a celebration less of Margaret than of Jan van Eyck, who no doubt rivalled St Luke himself for the devotion of the Bruges painters. None of this afterlife reveals the intentions behind the 1439 portrait, which must have been a personal work.6 It was not made in anticipation of their marriage, which probably occurred no later than 1433; their first child was born in 1434. It was not a memorial portrait, because Margaret survived her husband, who died two years after he signed the painting. Could it have been a gift to her? Or commemoration of a milestone in their lives? If it was originally accompanied by a portrait of him, together the works would have been a very early if not unprecedented diptych of a married couple, with each defined by the union. If, on the other hand, Margaret began as a stand-alone painting, it appears to be the earliest known European portrait of an identifiable woman not presented as a dynastic or other courtly image.7 Like most of Van Eyck’s portraits, this one came with words – in this case on the upper and lower frame: My husband Johannes completed me on 17 June 1439. My age is 33 years. As I can8 Margaret’s name is not here, but her voice is. The words are written as if spoken by her, with the exception of the concluding artist motto. While modern observers might wince at the sound of a woman ‘completed’ by her husband, the claim would have been mainly about the painting. But because the mention of her husband and age would apply only to Margaret herself, the voice

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belongs equally to picture and woman. Jan himself chimes in at the end, almost in reply: I did this as best I can. Two first-person voices from a painting perhaps made just for them. The words are depicted as finely engraved on metal plates set into the fictive marble of the frame, building a ubiquity of illusion typical of Jan’s art. The angle of light on the letters matches that on Margaret herself, just as their address to the viewer matches the directness of her gaze – more direct than the gaze of any ear­lier independent European portrait of a woman. She is tightly framed against a dark background that concentrates her proximity. Her left elbow seems to rest upon or just within the lower edge, and her right hand to press against it from within. The glinting light on the words is picked up in the highlight on her golden ring, which touches the stone like a bridge of realities within and around the picture. Connective elements like these boost Margaret’s immediacy in this exceptionally well-preserved image. It is hard to decide which is more brilliantly realized: the nuance of the half-shaded left side of her face, which captures reflected light from the white of her headwrap, or the whole of the headwrap itself, which is a symphony of curved geometry. The portrait Man with a Blue Chaperon, sometimes considered one of Van Eyck’s earliest surviving works, might also have been made with marriage in mind (illus. 57). The man holds a ring that has often been taken to indicate the occupation of goldsmith. More recently, it has been argued that the ring is instead an offer of betrothal.9 In this scenario he is a suitor, likely a Burgundian noble, for the hand of a distant woman who might have sent her own likeness in return. If an early dating of the panel around 1430 is correct, Van Eyck would have painted it soon after his assignment for the portrait of Isabella of Portugal. The Man with a Blue Chaperon could even echo a betrothal portrait of a ring-bearing Philip the Good that might have preceded and invited the one that the duke received from the infanta in 1429.10 Chances are that the lost

57 Jan van Eyck, Man with a Blue Chaperon, c. 1430–32, oil on oak.

58 Jan van Eyck, Jan de Leeuw, 1436, oil on oak.

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frame of the Man in a Blue Chaperon would have told us more about him. The format is typical of the individual portraits: a threequarter view of the face turned to our left, tightly framed against a dark ground and (in most cases) hands at the lower edge. With light falling from upper left, the further side of the face is more fully illuminated than the nearer one, enhancing the effect of projection from a darkened background. At a mere 22 centimetres (nearly 9 in.) tall, the panel is the smallest of Van Eyck’s surviving portraits. This could have reflected either a premium on portability (if, for example, it was sent as a proposal), a constraint of time or budget, or some other consideration. The varied sizes of the individual portraits (with heights of 22–34 cm/9–13 in.) are a reminder that wood panels were not standardized items. Occasional speculation that the Man in a Blue Chaperon was a goldsmith points to a ring held similarly in Van Eyck’s portrait of the Bruges goldsmith Jan de Leeuw (illus. 58). Since this sitter makes eye contact with us in much the same way as the portraits of Margaret and Jan himself, it is sometimes suggested that Jan de Leeuw, a master craftsman whose work and clientele would have been familiar to the painter, might also have been a friend of his. Whatever their acquaintance, the directness of the goldsmith’s gaze raises the intriguing question of his and other artists’ relationships with Van Eyck, whose position at court exempted him from guild membership. Consuming dynamics of admiration, competition and envy among elite craftsmen must have had him at their centre. We are given the man’s identity by a rhymed inscription in four lines around the four sides, beginning and ending top left: ian de [leeuw] op sant orselen dach dat clAEr eerst met oghen sach. 1401 ghecontERfeit nv heeft mi ian van eyck wel bliict wanneert bega[n]. 1436

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Jan de [Leeuw] who first opened his eyes on the Feast of St Ursula. 1401 Now Jan van Eyck has painted me, one can see when he began it. 1436 Like the inscription on the portrait of Margaret, this one names the artist, provides a date and gives voice to the sitter (‘Jan van Eyck has painted me’). It also names the man and his year of birth. There is a lot here, but no written transcription of the text can fully capture its deeply pictorial character, which is integral to its meaning. Leeuw, for example, is present not as a word but as an image of a lion (leeuw in Flemish). It is painted as if finely rendered in metal, like the rest of the inscription – a product of the sitter’s profession. As if touting the scope of a goldsmith’s skills, the letters are depicted as crafted in two ways: most of them engraved, with others standing in relief, like the lion.11 The raised letters, read together as Roman numerals (recognizing Y as I and W as VV), create chronograms of the dates 1401 and 1436, which appear at bottom right and upper left. Jan de Leeuw and others in his circle presumably knew the chronogram on the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece and would have relished this personalized adaptation of that device from the most prominent of works. Remarkably, each date is embedded within a statement keyed to it: the birth of the sitter and the creation of the painting. Each is also about sight: the date when one Jan first opened his eyes and the year, which ‘one can see’, when the other Jan painted him. Along with the chronogram there is another echo of the 1432 Ghent inscription, the final line of which ‘invites you with this verse . . . to look at what has been done’. The final line of the Jan de Leeuw inscription also makes a direct bid for the viewer’s attention: ‘one can see when he began it’. This must refer to the date built into the words, which takes time and thought to discern. The optical, literary and even mathematical cleverness of the inscription was at least as important as the information it imparts. As it flaunts the multivalent virtuosity that had become central

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to Van Eyck’s work, in a portrait this brand of sophistication must also have reflected certain interests of a sitter. Given the likelihood that the ring he holds was at least partly a nod to Jan de Leeuw’s livelihood, the painting is often considered an early example of occupation portraiture, which would gradually become a familiar category by the early sixteenth century. A goldsmith seeking elite clientele might well have embraced association with the intellectual play of Van Eyck’s art, just as Van Eyck would have appreciated close association with the exceptional value and prestige of the goldsmith’s art.12 The use of verses in Flemish could also reflect Jan de Leeuw’s association with the rederijkers – dramatic and literary societies best known in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holland, but already established in Bruges by the late 1420s.13 Language is also at the heart of the portrait of a man in London (illus. 59). He appears behind an illusionistic stone parapet bear­­ ing three lines of text. Largest and most conspicuous is leal souvenir (faithful remembrance), which is depicted as if deeply carved across the centre. An inscription below is painted in fading white pigment on the surface of the stone: Actu[m] an[n]o d[o] mini• 1432•10•die octobris•a•ioh[anne] de Eyck (done in the year of our Lord 1432 on the tenth day of October by Jan van Eyck). The same white pigment is used for the upper line, closest to the top of the parapet: t y m . Ω Θ e o Σ. The Greek letters of this line appear to be a transliteration of tum otheos (then God), the meaning of which is unclear.14 The man’s name might have appeared on the original frame. Worn and chipped, the inscribed parapet has a memorial aspect. ‘Faithful remembrance’ could refer equally to a true likeness in the image and to memories of the man himself, kept visible in posterity. But the unique combination of texts, written in a mixture of techniques and languages, makes it clear this was something more than an epitaph. Along with whatever words might have occupied the frame, there are still more in the picture, on the

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rolled sheet of paper in the man’s hand. Writing is visible on the outer surface rather than hidden within, as would be more typical. Beckoning us thus to look more closely, Van Eyck then makes the writing illegible. The effect is almost teasing, given the richness of text below and the fact that he more than any other painter would have been capable of making real words on the curled sheet. Maybe the document is either a generic attribute of a profession or reference to a specific transaction or event. The latter might be sug­­gested by the unusual first word of the signature line at the bot­­tom of the parapet, which is precisely on axis below the docu­ ment. Actum, denoting something achieved or accomplished, replaces more familiar signature verbs like fecit or complevit.15 The first owner of the portrait – likely the sitter himself – would have fully understood the meanings of the parapet, inscriptions and document. Together they attest that in this portrait, as in most of Van Eyck’s others, likeness was only a part of what was being conveyed. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Arnolfini Portrait (illus. 60), which during the twentieth century became one of the most intensively interpreted works in all of art history. Speculation about the painting’s symbolism and possible functions often takes for granted what would have seemed most striking about it in Van Eyck’s time: the portrayal of a man and woman standing in their home – or a room devised by the artist to represent their home. There appears to have been no precedent for such a picture. By 1434 there was independent portraiture of private individuals, and perhaps portraits of wives and husbands conceived as tandem panels. But here they are together in the world, and not as attendants to sacred figures. Likenesses and place are made inseparable as a new kind of image. No one would have missed the fact that they occupy two things that they conspicuously own: a richly appointed home and a painting by a famous artist. The room is at least as fascinating as the figures themselves. Though often called a bedroom, it would have been more a

59 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (‘Léal Souvenir’), 1432, oil on oak.

60 Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on oak.

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reception room of a sort that sometimes included a bed. Furnishings and space are arranged in ways that are technically unnatural but thoroughly compelling as the place of a domestic moment. The woman is aligned with the bed and the deeper inte­­rior of the home, while the man is closer to the world barely glimpsed through a window. The window’s light falls behind them onto a wall adorned with a con­­vex mirror and, astonishingly, the artist’s sig­na­ture. The figures are illum­­inated by a window closer to us on the same wall but visible only in the mirror, and there merely as a daylit win­­­dow frame. Con­­temporaries would have spotted wealth in the mirror, brass chandelier, bed, carpet and oranges sur­­­rounding the expensively attired couple. They would also have understood, as those of us living long after the invention of photography sometimes forget, that this image is an invention, not a record of reality. Jan van Eyck’s name on the wall makes this explicit. His control is also palpable in the formalized presentation outwards, with figures facing us as much as they do each other from either side of a pronounced central axis. The figures are not static. Meeting her gaze and holding her right hand in his left, Arnolfini raises his right in a gesture often regarded as the sign of an oath. Under­drawing shows that some of the most substantial adjustments in the preliminary design of the image were to their eyes and hands, evidence that Van Eyck was seeking a specific interaction (see illus. 16).16 With her left she holds up some of the vol­­ uminous dress, creating a bulge that has sometimes been mistaken for pregnancy. Our sense of watching a lived moment rather than a held pose is enhanced by the dog looking at us, unlikely to stand still. The man’s identification as a member of the Arnolfini family is based on the earliest documented mentions of the work, in inventories of 1516 and 1523/4 that call him ‘Hernoul le Fin’ and ‘Arnoult Fin’, respectively. By this time the painting was in Mechelen as part of the collection of Margaret of Austria.17 Based

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in Lucca, the Arnolfini were mainly merchants with an international portfolio; no fewer than five members of the family are documented in Bruges during Van Eyck’s lifetime.18 The husband in the painting has been most convincingly identified as Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, whose dealings had included sales of tapestries and cloths of gold and silk to Philip the Good during the 1420s.19 In 1426 he was betrothed to the thirteen-year-old Costanza Trenta, daughter to a Lucchese father and Florentine mother whose wealthy families were important patrons with connections to France, Burgundy and England.20 Although we have no docu­ mentary connection between Jan van Eyck and the Arnolfini family, there are at least two reasons to believe he was a friend or relatively close associate of Giovanni di Nicolao: evidence of many changes between the underdrawing and the finished portrait, which suggests repeated consultation with the client; and the fact that he painted the same man, probably a few years later, in an independent portrait, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.21 Many have imagined this as a milestone moment for the couple, such as their wedding or betrothal. The most influential proposal came in a 1934 article by Erwin Panofsky, who saw the painting as a depiction of private vows that could serve as a marriage certificate, should these expatriates in Bruges have needed one. He explained Jan van Eyck’s unique signature at the centre of the image – Jan van Eyck was here 1434 – as the affidavit of a witness.22 The allure of the argument resonated in a half-century of scholarly labour to modify and then dismantle it. Few scholars now regard the painting as an image of a ceremony or other specific event. Panofsky and most others had believed the man to be Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini, a younger cousin of Giovanni di Nicolao. The latter emerged as the likely patron when it was discovered that Giovanni di Arrigo did not marry until 1447.23 But a problem remained: Giovanni di Nicolao’s young wife, Costanza Trenta, was dead by 1433, at least a year before the painting was

61 Detail of illus. 60: chandelier, inscription, mirror and beads in the Arnolfini Portrait.

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signed.24 With no evidence of a second wife for him, the most convincing interpretation thus far has been to see a posthumous portrait of Costanza with her living husband.25 While she could have been alive when Van Eyck began the painting, it seems more likely that the picture was commissioned after she was gone. The unprecedented scene would thus have had a memorial function, probably along with maintaining a treasured connection to the Trenta family.26 The dog, often deemed a symbol of fidelity, has also been associated with those that appeared at the feet of carved tomb effigies, especially of women. In the two foremost chandelier arms, a solitary lit candle on the side of the husband stands in contrast to the remnant wax of a finished candle on the side of the wife (illus. 61).27 In De pictura, written in the year after Van Eyck signed the Arnolfini Portrait, Leon Battista Alberti observes that the art of painting ‘possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist’.28 Although this capacity of painting was not new, Jan van Eyck may have been the first to effect the convincing reunion of a living contemporary with a dearly departed. If this is indeed what we are shown, its magic and poignancy are augmented by the intense specificity of the setting and moment – the detailed surroundings, the operations of light and the interaction of the couple. Having thus kept them together in the world, Van Eyck’s mastery could have seemed to reach beyond mimesis towards the limits of life itself. He might not have minded if contemporaries saw him crafting a form of immortality in this. After all, he claimed a piece of it for himself by doubling his own presence – in word and image – between the couple separated by death. The fuit (was) of Johannes de Eyck fuit hic hails his own posterity from a limitless future; it asserts his being rather than doing.

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Just below that sentence, Jan must be present in one of the two additional figures visible in the mirror (see illus. 4). They are shown standing outside the picture but exist only within it. One wears red, the other blue – colours that recur in the mirror border as if to bridge the figures glowing in the depth of the painting with their living selves in front of it. The red headpiece on the pre­­sumed self-portrait in London has prompted some to identify the mirrored figure in red as the painter. I would nominate instead the man in blue, who stands before the other and is highlighted – almost haloed, really – by a window in the room behind them. But we can do no more than speculate, since neither has more than a daub of paint for a face. Tiny and blurred, they cannot qual­­­ify as portraits. The same is true of the figure reflected in the armour of St George in the panel for Canon van der Paele (see illus. 5). There, too, the artist’s tempered visibility within the picture insists on his actual presence before it – where we stand. He was here and is still there.29 These small, indistinct presences become Van Eyck not by likeness but by logic; the artist compels us to see him in them. The moment of recognition brings pleasure in the largely unconscious feeling that we collaborate in the representation. Is the second mirrored figure in the Arnolfini Portrait, free of likeness and always looking over the artist’s shoulder, us? If so, Van Eyck’s posterity in the signature above becomes personal for viewers, too. Think of how all are addressed from the base of Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, painted a few years earlier in Florence.30 Carved into the stone above the recumbent skeleton at the base of the work, the words of its silent voice remind us that ‘I once was what you are, and what I am so shall you be.’ That mural and the Arnolfini panel stand as perhaps the two most innovative and eventually canonical engagements of viewers in European art of the early Renaissance. Within the textbook familiarity of parallel Renaissances dubbed Italian and Northern, it is perfectly

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fitting that they were painted in Florence and Bruges, in fresco and oil paint, and dominated by geometric perspective and luminous detail, respectively. Van Eyck would not have meant his own projection into the past as a gesture of memento mori – a popular theme largely absent from his work. In fact, his deep consciousness of time almost allows life to balance, if not overshadow, death, with was here written above and is here made visible below. Where the Holy Trinity fresco speaks to us through a skeleton, the central voice in the Arnolfini panel is that of the artist himself. Recall that Jan’s motto, As I can, is present tense. Each time he painted it he knew, as he did when he chose past tense on the Arnolfini wall, that it would be read long after he was gone. By utter­­ing his ability in the now of observers (I can, not I could), Jan van Eyck proposed a personal immortality that the sheer brilliance of his art would have ensured even if he had never mentioned or shown himself within it. But he did, of course – and in a conspicuous variety of forms, as we have seen. The mirror’s expansion of the painting beyond itself does the same thing, in a way: making the artist and his work explicitly continuous with the place and time of all observers. We should continue to be amazed by the idea as we stand beside Jan and look at each other through the centre of a picture. The ten scenes from the Passion and afterlife of Christ in the frame of the mirror, evidently small paintings under convex pieces of glass, were no afterthought. We have no mirrors from the period framed and decorated in this way that would suggest Van Eyck had a specific model in mind.31 This makes his decision to design one all the more interesting. He knew it was unusual, even audacious, to situate a cycle of sacred images as a detail in a secular setting. Divine narrative (and perhaps prayer invited by the adjacent beads) is made at once central in the picture and peripheral to the artist, his patrons and a world they share with all observers.

epilogue

Another Mirror

‘

J

an of Gaul has been judged the leading painter of our time.’1 Thus begins Bartolomeo Fazio’s account of Jan van Eyck in his De viris illustribus, a collection of brief biographies organized by profession that is now especially known for its section on four artists. After years of study and writing in Verona, Florence, Lucca and Genoa, Fazio was established at the royal court of Aragon by the mid-1440s. Acquainted with a wide range of art he encountered in these courtly and intellectual centres, his writing on artists featured remarks on several individual works by each. Of the half-dozen Van Eyck paintings Fazio mentions, his longest commentary is on the image of women bathing he had seen in the collection of Ottaviano della Carda, a nephew of Federigo da Montefeltro: women of uncommon beauty emerging from the bath, the more intimate parts of the body being with excellent modesty veiled in fine linen, and of one of them he has shown only the face and breast, but has then represented the hind parts of her body in a mirror on the wall opposite, so that you may see her back as well as her breast. In the same picture there is a lantern in the bath chamber, just like one lit, and an old woman seemingly sweating, a puppy lapping up water, and also horses, minute figures of men, mountains, groves, hamlets and castles carried

62 After Jan van Eyck, Woman Bathing, early 16th century, oil on oak.

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out with such skill you would believe one was fifty miles distant from another. But almost nothing is more won­ der­ful in this work than the mirror painted in the picture, in which you see whatever is represented as in a real mirror.2 That painting, like the others Fazio mentions, is now lost. But we have echoes of a comparable work by Jan: in a small, badly preserved sixteenth-century panel, Woman Bathing (illus. 62); and in a seventeenth-century depiction of a larger version of the same composition, believed to be the lost Van Eyck itself, in Willem van Haecht’s The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, dated 1628 (illus. 63).3 The approximate size of the depicted Van Eyck would make the original comparable in size to the Arnolfini Portrait (84.5 × 62.5 cm/33 × 25 in.). Observers have naturally been intrigued by the many elements shared between that iconic image and the lost bathing scene: a domestic interior lit from the left, ceiling beams, two figures, a mirror, a dog, a bed, a high-backed chair, shoes in the left corner, fruit on the windowsill and a chest below, among other things. Some have proposed an explicit link between the paintings, for example with the lost Woman Bathing showing nuptial preparations for what used to be regarded as a wedding in the Arnolfini Portrait.4 More recent scholarship tends to resist such a connection but has yet to settle on a clear interpretation of the lost painting. None of the proposed biblical episodes of bathing (Judith, Susanna, Bathsheba) or moralizing readings of the nude bather (including as faith, purity, vanity, lust) have been widely embraced.5 Woman Bathing entered the Antwerp collection of Peter Stevens after the death of Cornelis van der Geest in 1638. A 1668 sale catalogue of the Stevens collection includes this description: ‘By Jan van Eyck, number 3. The very famous Bath in which Van Eyck painted the portrait of his wife nude and clothed.’6 This

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understanding of the picture as a double image of Margaret van Eyck has not been widely discussed in the literature.7 If it was a mistaken interpretation, one that Jan and Margaret might have found startling or laughable, it had become accepted two centuries later. The person cataloguing (often a notary) suggests no uncertainty about what is shown in a famous painting with recent provenance in two elite collections.8 A doubled portrait of a woman simultaneously dressed and undressed was not standard fare in seventeenth-century Europe. If they did have it wrong, it was strange that they deemed it a kind of image that was otherwise unknown – especially in a market that distinguished works chiefly by subject-matter.9 The general modern assumption that the clothed woman is a maidservant is complicated by her expensive attire, which is comparable to that of Margaret in her 1439 portrait (illus. 56). If Jan did create the picture as the later owners understood it, what could it have been for? Some of the possibilities parallel those that have long surrounded the Arnolfini Portrait. Was it, too, mainly a portrait, but made uniquely personal and narrative? Or could the action itself have been the focus, as either a ceremonial ablution or a more general image of bathing? The latter would place it in the realm of genre imagery, which was not yet familiar in European painting. But if this was an image of Margaret at her bath both unclothed and clothed, it was in some measure both portraiture and genre – and yet so unusual that those and other categories fail to contain it. Another might be fully symbolic, but Margaret’s presence would seem to rule this out.10 Her presence in fact would have made the image so patently personal that interpretation itself might miss the point. For their eyes only, we might guess, the artist depicted his wife not as a likeness, but in life. With her right hand over the basin, her left holds a cloth to cover or dry her body. If her clothed companion is herself,

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her gesture towards modesty would be for other eyes – let’s say those of the artist and observer. In this view, her twinned presence could correspond to Jan’s own double roles: the artist who portrays his wife’s public self and the husband who admires her private one. Whether or not Margaret was here at all, the mirror was almost a third character. Its placement at the window maximized light on an observed self, and later images suggest that this could have been common practice. But the mirror’s position is also fas­cinating within the larger dynamics of the scene. The best view of it belongs to the clothed woman, whose profile stance and slightly lowered gaze seem directed towards the mirror. If the bather sees it at all, it is only obliquely; her body is turned outwards to accommodate the viewer’s gaze rather than her own. The double distortion of what we see (on the side of a convex surface) makes our view of the nude seem all the more immediate – a bit like the representation contrasted with reality in the 63 Willem van Haecht, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628, oil on panel.

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carved statue of Mary visible just over the shoulder of Mary herself, standing in a church (see illus. 47). Jan’s plays with reflection in other paintings – variously curved, blurred, tiny, central or inconspicuous – guarantee that this one was no afterthought. If the original panel ever comes to light, countless eyes will turn first to the mirror. For many this will include a search for any sign of a reflected third figure. But even those unfamil­ iar with Van Eyck’s other reflections will be drawn to it. Recall Fazio’s account of another Van Eyck bath­­ing picture, which concluded: ‘almost nothing is more wonderful in this work than the mirror.’ The one in Woman Bathing was enlivened by the basin in front of it. Golden circles rhyme between frame and rim with a convex centre above and concave below; both mirror and water reflect. To punctuate this gleaming formal conversation Jan caught the bowl in the base of the mirror so that their curves nestle perfectly. Above that union the reflected women, who are separated in our view, converge like two halves of a person. Here, as in all of his paintings, it is in seemingly marginal things that some of his most original and captivating ideas take shape. The position of the hand makes it almost certain that water was trickling into the basin, as it does in the fountains of the Adoration of the Lamb and the Virgin at the Fountain. In each of these completely different works – the core of a huge altarpiece, a tiny devotional panel and a secular erotic image – water is made deeply sensory: tactile, temporal and aural. Along with streams in the foreground of the Ghent Altarpiece and St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, the gentle splash of these basins makes the opening to the real world not just visible but palpable. It becomes clear that Woman Bathing shared so much of what distinguishes Van Eyck’s other work: a fully realized interior, con­­ tinuity with our space, revealing reflections, moving water, dynamic light, tantalizing vistas (outside the window), prominent nudity

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(Adam and Eve in Ghent) and very possibly portraiture as well. And yet the subject, along with that of the related bathing picture described by Fazio, stands apart. Paintings of nude women are as familiar as can be in European art of the Renaissance and ever since. Those with religious, mythological and symbolic subjects were joined early on by paintings with few or no such anchors – most famously in sixteenth-century Venetian work by such masters as Bellini, Giorgione and Titian.11 But here as in so many things, Jan van Eyck appears to have pioneered the idea. While the bath itself could have been meaningful, there can be no doubt that he designed a picture to present a nude as a nude. Her exposure is accentuated by the classic gesture of modesty with one hand (notably unmatched above), juxtaposed with a fully clothed woman – possibly herself – and the play of vision in the bather’s mirror. Van Eyck’s fascination with the very idea of the presented body is confirmed by Fazio’s account of the other lost bath painting, which begins by describing how its mirror shows parts of the body otherwise unseen in the picture. Both such reflections of bathers bolster the evidence of Van Eyck’s sustained argument for the singular power of painting, as in the black marble reflection of Mary and Gabriel in the Annunciation diptych in Madrid (illus. 31). In two subjects that could scarcely be more different, he performs his mastery in a manner intensely conscious of the presence and mind of an observer. The shoes at left, very similar to those near Giovanni Arnolfini, are hard not to see as belonging to the artist, as no other man is present. Whether or not the lost painting in­­ cluded his signature, motto or other words, everything about the image insists that Jan van Eyck was here.

chronology

c. 1390? Jan van Eyck is born, probably in or near Masseik 1422 Jan is in The Hague, working at the court of John of Bavaria, Count of Holland 1425 Moves to Bruges and is appointed court painter and chamberlain to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Relocates from Bruges to Lille 1426 Jan is paid twice for travels on behalf of Philip the Good: 1) ‘a secret journey that [the duke] had ordered him to make to certain distant locations that are not to be declared’. This journey, perhaps begun in 1425, is often thought to have been to the Holy Land, presumably by way of Italy; 2) ‘a certain pilgrimage that the duke had instructed him to undertake in his name’ 1427 Attends a banquet (attended also by the leading painters Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden and Jacques Daret, among others) hosted by the guild of painters at Tournai 1428 Travels to Portugal as part of a Burgundian delegation arranging for the marriage between Philip the Good and the infanta Isabella, daughter of King John I of Portugal 1429 Paints a portrait of the infanta that is sent to Bruges for the consideration of the duke. The Burgundian delegation, presumably with Jan among them, also travels to Spain (including Santiago de Compostela and Granada) before returning to the Netherlands by the end of the year 1432 Signs the Ghent Altarpiece, specifying that it had been begun by his brother Hubert (d. 1426). Signs Portrait of a Man (‘Léal Souvenir’)

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Jan is now settled in Bruges, which remains his home for the rest of his life. Records indicate two visits by dignitaries to Jan’s workshop, first by the Bruges burgomaster and council members, and subsequently by the duke himself 1433 Signs Self-portrait (‘Portrait of a Man’), including the earliest known inscription of his motto As I can. Likely year of marriage to Margaret 1434 Signs the Arnolfini Portrait. Child born to Margaret and Jan 1435 Paid for work polychroming statues for Bruges Town Hall. Philip the Good orders an immediate payment to Jan van Eyck lest he lose the services of the master. Jan’s salary is increased and converted to a lifetime pension. He travels to an international diplomatic congress in Arras, where his work probably included portraiture of one or more participants. Possibly the year of a second child’s birth to Margaret and Jan 1436 Signs the Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele. Signs the portrait of Jan de Leeuw. Paid for foreign travel on ‘secret business’ for the duke 1437 Signs the Triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints. Signs St Barbara 1438 Signs Holy Face (lost) 1439 Signs the portrait of Margaret van Eyck. Signs Virgin at the Fountain. Reimbursed for having paid (in 1438) the manuscript illuminator Jan Creve for initials in a book for Philip the Good 1440 Signs a second Holy Face (lost) 1441 Jan successfully petitions the Vatican for a confessional letter on behalf of himself and Margaret. Dies in June or July

References

Introduction: As I Can 1 Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools (London, 1998), p. 212. 2 Patricia Rubin, ‘Signposts of Invention: Artists’ Signatures in Italian Renaissance Art’, Art History, xxix/4 (2006), pp. 566–8. 3 R. W. Scheller, ‘als ich can’, Oud Holland, lxxxiii/2 (1968), pp. 135–9. 4 See most recently Susan Frances Jones, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Greek, Hebrew, and Trilingual Inscriptions’, in Van Eyck Studies: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 12–21 September 2012, ed. Christina Currie et al. (Paris, 2017), pp. 291–308. 5 Transliterations of vernacular were not, however, unprecedented; Jones notes examples from French, including in the Savoy Hours (c. 1370s) for Charles v; ibid., pp. 299, 304. 6 W. H. James Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (London, 1908), pp. xlii–xliii. 7 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De viris illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii/1 (1964), p. 102. 8 Dirk De Vos, ‘Nogmaals als ich can’, Oud Holland, xcvii/1 (1983), pp. 1–4. 9 Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford, 1995). 10 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, il, 1993), pp. 107–8; Jones, ‘Inscriptions’, p. 305. 11 Campbell, Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, p. 214. 12 Ibid., p. 212.

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13 Ibid., p. 214. 14 Marcus van Vaernewyck, Den spiegel der Nederlandtsche oudheyt; transcribed in Elisabeth Dhanens, Het retabel van het Lam Gods in de Sint-Baafskathedraal te Gent (Ghent, 1965), p. 115; Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, ‘The Creators: The Role of Hubert van Eyck in the Ghent Altarpiece’, in Van Eyck – The Ghent Altarpiece: Art, History, Science and Religion, ed. Danny Praet and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens (Veurne, 2019), p. 119. 15 Matthias Depoorter, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Discovery of Nature’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Maximiliaan Martens et al. (London, 2020), pp. 226–30. 16 Hendrik Callewier, ‘A New Document on Jan van Eyck: His Request for a Confessional Letter in the Vatican Archives’, Simiolus, xliii/1–2 (2021), pp. 16–25. 17 Ibid. 18 For a recent overview see Larry Silver, ‘Ideas and Methods of Van Eyck Research’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution , ed. Martens et al., pp. 36–57. On modern reception, see Jenny Graham, Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age (Oxford, 2007). 19 See now the first complete translation from the Dutch: Johan Huizinga, Autumntide of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life and Thought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Lowlands, trans. Diane Webb, ed. Graeme Small and Anton van der Lem (Leiden, 2020). 20 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1603–1604: preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1616–1618, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. i (Doornspijk, 1994), pp. 54–71. 21 Alan Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory (Boston, ma, 1938), pp. 39–56. 22 There are two components at http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa. be: ‘The Ghent Altarpiece Restored’ and ‘Further Work by Van Eyck’, under the auspices of Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access (verona).

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References

1 A Career 1 Catherine Reynolds, ‘“The King of Painters”’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister, Sue Jones and Delphine Cool (Turnhout, 2000), p. 4. 2 ‘I know the same Jan will pursue this with my aforementioned lord.’ W. H. James Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (London, 1908), p. xli; Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck (New York, 1980), pp. 42–3. 3 A. L. Dierick, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Handwriting’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Foister, Jones and Cool, pp. 79–82. 4 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 12. 5 Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Jan van Eyck: The Myth and the Documents’, in The Road to Van Eyck, ed. Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse, exh. cat., Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rottterdam, 2012), p. 84. 6 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, pp. 13–14. 7 See the wide-ranging exploration of this material in Kemperdick and Lammertse, eds, The Road to Van Eyck. 8 ‘Ian den maelre’; ‘Iohannes schildere’; Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, p. xxvii. 9 Fausto Nicolini, L’arte napoletana del Rinascimento e la lettera di Pietro Summonte a Marcantonio Michiel (Naples, 1925), pp. 161–3. 10 See, for example, Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago, il, 2015). 11 On relationships between early Netherlandish painting and spatial designs of pageantry at court, see Noa Turel, Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (New Haven, ct, and London, 2020), esp. pp. 97–121. 12 Jacques Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck selon les documents écrits’, Révue des archéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain, xxiii (1990), pp. 85–7. 13 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, pp. xxxi–xxxiii. 14 Ibid. 15 Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck’, p. 86. 16 Till-Holger Borchert, Jan van Eyck (Cologne, 2008), p. 8. 17 Likely routes for such a journey are discussed in Till-Holger Borchert, ‘The Mobility of Artists: Aspects of Cultural Transfer in Renaissance Europe’, in The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530, ed. Till-Holger Borchert (London, 2002), p. 38.

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18 Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck’, p. 86. 19 On a spectrum of contexts within which Van Eyck operated, see Jan Dumolyn and Frederik Buylaert, ‘Van Eyck’s World: Court Culture, Luxury Production, Elite Patronage and Social Distinction within an Urban Network’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Maximiliaan Martens et al. (London, 2020), pp. 85–121. 2 0 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, pp. 47–9. 21 Ibid., p. 51. 22 Toon De Meester et al., ‘“Meester Jans huus van Eicke”: Jan van Eyck’s House, Workshop and Milieu in Bruges: New Archival Data’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al., pp. 127–37. 23 Ibid., p. 131. 24 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, pp. xxxviii–xxxix. 25 ‘certain ouvrage fait par le dit Iohannes’. Ibid., p. xxxix. On dating the duke’s visit, see Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck’, pp. 88–9. 26 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De viris illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii/1 (1964), p. 102. 27 Sandra Hindriks, Jan van Eycks früher Ruhm und die niederländische ‘Renaissance’: der ‘vlaemsche Apelles’ (Petersberg, 2019). On connections between Van Eyck–Philip the Good and Apelles–Alexander the Great, see Maximiliaan Martens, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Optical Revolution’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al., pp. 141–76. 28 On evidence for the children, see Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, pp. xl, xliv; Jacques Paviot, ‘The Van Eyck Family’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al., pp. 74–9. 29 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, pp. xliii–xliv. 30 Ibid., pp. xlii–xliii. 31 Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck’, pp. 90, 93. 32 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, pp. xliv–xlv; Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 56. 33 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 56. 34 Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting’, pp. 102–3. 35 Questions discussed extensively by Marina Belozerskaya, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Lost Mappamundi: A Token of Fifteenth-Century Power Politics’, Journal of Early Modern History, iv/1 (2000), pp. 45–84.

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36 Jan Dumolyn, ‘The “Terrible Wednesday” of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and Princely Discourses in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436–1438’, History, xcii/1 (2007), pp. 3–20. 37 Ibid., p. 15. 38 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 39 Wim Blockmans, ‘The Social and Economic Effects of Plague in the Low Countries, 1349–1500’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, lviii/4 (1980), p. 856. 40 Paviot, ‘La Vie de Jan van Eyck’, pp. 90–91. 41 Ibid., p. 91. 42 Hendrik Callewier, ‘A New Document on Jan van Eyck: His Request for a Confessional Letter in the Vatican Archives’, Simiolus, xliii/1–2 (2021), pp. 16–25. I thank Dr Callewier for sharing his article with me as I was completing this book. 43 Ibid., p. 18. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 17. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 23. 48 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 49 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, p. xlvi. 50 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 57. 51 Paviot, ‘The Van Eyck Family’, pp. 60, 79. 52 J. K. Steppe, ‘Lambert van Eyck en het portret van Jacoba van Beieren’, Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Schone Kunsten, xliv (1983), pp. 53–86. 53 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, p. xlviii. 54 Sue Jones, ‘The Use of Patterns by Jan van Eyck’s Assistants and Followers’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Foister, Jones and Cool, p. 197. 55 Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck, p. lxxix; this trans. from Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1603–1604: preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1616–1618, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. i (Doornspijk, 1994), p. 63. 56 Paviot, ‘The Van Eyck Family’, p. 60. 57 Borchert, Jan van Eyck, p. 69. 58 Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 24.

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59 See most recently Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, ‘The Eyckian Miniatures in the Turin-Milan Hours’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al., pp. 297–315. 60 On this and other expansive pictorial devices in the illumination, see James H. Marrow, ‘History, Historiography, and Pictorial Invention in the Turin-Milan Hours’, in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 7–10. 61 Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel et al., ‘The Fishing Party by Jan van Eyck(?): A Technical Analysis’, in Van Eyck Studies: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 12–21 September 2012, ed. Christina Currie et al. (Paris, 2017), pp. 455–67. 62 See, for example, Frits Pieter van Oostrom, Court and Culture: Dutch Literature, 1350–1450, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Berkeley, ca, 1992), p. 117; Chavannes-Mazel et al., ‘Fishing Party’, pp. 455–6. 63 Stephan Kemperdick, ‘Jan van Eyck(?), The Crucifixion’, in The Road to Van Eyck, ed. Kemperdick and Lammertse, p. 292. 64 Stephan Kemperdick, ‘Painting around 1400 and Jan van Eyck’s Early Work’, in The Road to Van Eyck, ed. Kemperdick and Lammertse, p. 105. 65 Ibid.

2 The Painter at Work 1 For an overview see Kimberley Schenk, ‘Drawings under Scrutiny: The Materials and Techniques of Metalpoint’, in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, ed. Stacey Sell and Hugo Chapman, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art (Washington, dc, 2015), pp. 9–23. 2 Robert W. Scheller and Michael Hoyle, Exemplum: Model-Book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages, ca. 900–ca. 1470 (Amsterdam, 1995). 3 John Hunter, ‘Who Is Jan van Eyck’s “Cardinal Nicolo Albergati”?’, Art Bulletin, lxxv/2 (1993), pp. 207–18, p. 207. 4 Transcribed and translated in Alfons L. Dierick, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Handwriting’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister, Sue Jones and Delphine Cool (Turnhout, 2000), p. 79. 5 Ibid., p. 80. 6 Ibid.

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References

7 Thomas Ketelsen, Ina Reiche, Olaf Simon and Silke Merchel, ‘New Information on Jan van Eyck’s Portrait Drawing in Dresden’, Burlington Magazine, cxlvii/1224 (2005), p. 173. 8 Ibid. 9 An Van Camp, ‘The Use of Goldpoint and Silverpoint in the Fifteenth Century’, in An Eyckian Crucifixion Explored: Ten Essays on a Drawing, ed. Friso Lammertse and Albert J. Elen (Rotterdam, 2016), p. 45. 10 Arie Wallert, Birgit Reissland and Luc Megens, ‘Notes on the Material Aspects’, in An Eyckian Crucifixion, ed. Lammertse and Elen, p. 28. 11 Maryan W. Ainsworth, ‘The Relationship between the Rotterdam Drawing and the New York Painting’, in An Eyckian Crucifixion, ed. Lammertse and Elen, pp. 117–33. 12 Stephanie Buck, ‘Copying and Beyond: The Multiple Functions of Early Netherlandish Drawings’, in An Eyckian Crucifixion, ed. Lammertse and Elen, pp. 80–93. 13 Wallert et al., ‘Notes on the Material Aspects’, p. 33. 14 Paul B. Coremans, L’Agneau mystique au laboratoire: examen et traitement (Antwerp, 1953). 15 Rachel Billinge and Lorne Campbell, ‘The Infra-Red Reflectograms of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenami(?)’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xvi (1995), pp. 50–59. 16 On underdrawing as vidimus, see Molly Faries, ‘Technical Studies of Early Netherlandish Painting: A Critical Overview of Recent Developments’, in Recent Developments in the Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting: Methodology, Limitiations, and Perspectives, ed. Molly Faries and Ron Spronk (Turnhout, 2003), p. 23. 17 Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute, ‘Frames and Supports of Some Eyckian Paintings’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Foister, Jones and Cool, p. 107. 18 Ibid., p. 115. 19 Rachel Billinge and Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Remarks on Character and Functions in Jan van Eyck’s Underdrawing of Portraits: The Case of Margaret van Eyck’, in Van Eyck Studies: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 12–21 September 2012, ed. Christina Currie et al. (Paris, 2017), pp. 232–54. 20 Borchert in ‘Remarks on Character and Functions’, p. 244.

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21 Ibid., p. 251. 22 Melanie Gifford, Catherine A. Metger and John K. Delaney, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Painting Materials and Techniques’, in Facture, vol. i: Conservation, Science, Art History, ed. Melanie Gifford, Catherine A. Metzger and John K. Delaney (Washington, dc, 2013), pp. 133–7. 23 Ibid., p. 136. 24 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, 2008), p. 186. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 187. 27 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De viris illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii/1 (1964), p. 102. 28 See, for example, Catherine Reynolds, ‘“The King of Painters”’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Foister, Jones and Cool, pp. 2–3. 29 Marika Spring and Rachel Morrison, ‘Van Eyck’s Technique and Materials: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Contexts’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Currie et al., p. 202. Possible evidence that Van Eyck also used egg binder for some of his pigments has not been conclusively confirmed. 30 Ibid. 31 Melanie Gifford et al., ‘New Findings on the Painting Medium of the Washington Annunciation’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Christina Currie, Bart Fransen, Valentine Henderiks, Cyriel Stroo and Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, pp. 284–5. 32 Gifford et al., ‘Jan van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation’, p. 141. 33 Marika Spring, ‘Colourless Powdered Glass as an Additive in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century European Paintings’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xxiii (London, 2012), pp. 18, 22–3. 34 Abbie Vandivere, ‘Surface Effects in Van Eyck Paintings’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Currie et al., p. 423. 35 Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools (London, 1998), p. 184; Vandivere, ‘Surface Effects’, p. 420. Vandivere notes that most of these are in areas of brown paint. 36 Lorne Campbell, ‘The Speed of Illusion’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Currie et al., pp. 257–61. 37 Albrecht Dürer, Christ among the Doctors, 1506, oil on panel, 64.3 × 80.3 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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38 Marie Postec and Griet Steyaert, ‘The Van Eycks’ Creative Process and the Different Stages in the Execution of the Interior Lower Register of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in The Ghent Altarpiece: Research and Conservation of the Interior: The Lower Register, ed. Griet Steyaert et al. (Turnhout, 2021), pp. 33–109. 39 Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, p. 23. 40 See the chart in Maximiliaan Martens, ‘Some Aspects of the Origins of the Art Market in Fifteenth-Century Bruges’, in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North and David Ormrod (Aldershot, 1998), p. 25. 41 Lorne Campbell, ‘The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century’, Burlington Magazine, cxviii/877 (1976), pp. 190–91. 42 Till-Holger Borchert, ‘The Mobililty of Artists: Aspects of Cultural Transfer in Renaissance Europe’, in The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530, ed. Till-Holger Borchert (London, 2002), p. 33. 43 Martens, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 20. 44 Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 69–71. 45 Jozef Duverger, ‘Jan van Eyck as Court Painter’, The Connoisseur, cxciv (1977), p. 175.

3 Hubert, Jan and the Ghent Altarpiece 1 Stephan Kemperdick, ‘The History of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in The Ghent Altarpiece by the Brothers Van Eyck: History and Appraisal, ed. Stephan Kemperdick and Johannes Rössler (Berlin, 2014), pp. 8–69. 2 The earliest recorded payment to the church for this is 1530/31; Elisabeth Dhanens, Van Eyck: The Ghent Altarpiece (New York, 1973), p. 130. 3 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1603–1604: preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1616–1618, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. i (Doornspijk, 1994), p. 62. 4 Hugo van der Velden, ‘The Quatrain of the Ghent Altarpiece’, Simiolus, xxxv/1 (2011), p. 9. Doubts about whether the inscription

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was original to the work have been laid to rest by recent intensive examination: Susan Frances Jones, Anne-Sophie Augustyniak and Hélène Dubois, ‘The Authenticity of the Quatrain and the Other Frame Inscriptions’, in The Ghent Altarpiece: Research and Conservation of the Exterior, ed. Bart Fransen and Cyriel Stroo (Brussels, 2020), pp. 273–307. 5 Van der Velden, ‘The Quatrain’, p. 10. 6 A case for Jan van Eyck as the inviting voice is made by Christina Meckelnborg, ‘The Inscription of the Ghent Altarpiece: A Philological Investigation’, in The Ghent Altarpiece, ed. Kemperdick and Rössler, pp. 113–21. 7 Van der Velden, ‘The Quatrain’, pp. 37–8. 8 Marie Postec and Griet Steyaert, ‘The Van Eycks’ Creative Process and the Different Stages in the Execution of the Interior Lower Register of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in The Ghent Altarpiece: Research and Conservation of the Interior: The Lower Register, ed. Griet Steyaert et al. (Turnhout, 2021), pp. 33–109. 9 As argued, for example, by Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, pp. 217–22; and taken up from a new angle by Van der Velden, ‘The Quatrain’. 10 Frederik Buylaert and Erik Verroken, ‘A Noble Altarpiece: The Socio-Historical Context of the Painting’, in The Ghent Altarpiece – Van Eyck: Art, History, Science and Religion, ed. Danny Praet and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens (Ghent, 2019), pp. 50–91. 11 Ibid., p. 52. 12 Ibid., pp. 89–91. 13 See the essays and catalogue entries in Till-Holger Borchert, Jan van Eyck: Grisallas, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, 2009). 14 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. i, pp. 208–9. 15 John L. Ward, ‘Disguised Symbolism as Enactive Symbolism in Van Eyck’s Paintings’, Artibus et Historiae, xv/29 (1994), pp. 15–17. 16 Alfred Acres, ‘Rogier van der Weyden’s Painted Texts’, Artibus et Historiae, xxi/41 (2000), p. 102. 17 Alfred Acres, ‘Elsewhere in Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Tributes in Honor of James Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. Bodo Brinkmann et al. (London, 2006), p. 24. 18 Dhanens, The Ghent Altarpiece, p. 52.

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19 Discussed at length in Dana Goodgal, ‘The Iconography of the Ghent Altarpiece’, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1981, pp. 179–82. 20 Adam T. Foley, ‘Raphael’s Parnassus and Renaissance Afterlives of Homer’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxxiii/1 (2020), p. 15. 21 See, for example, Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 106. 22 hec est speciosor sole et super omnem stellarum disposicionem luci comparata invenitur prior. candor est enim lucis eterne et speculum sine macula dei. Dhanens, The Ghent Altarpiece, p. 80. 23 Maurice B. McNamee, Vested Angels: Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Paintings (Louvain, 1998). 24 Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, p. 58. 25 Ibid.; James Snyder, ‘Jan van Eyck and Adam’s Apple’, Art Bulletin, lviii/4 (1976), p. 512. 26 Snyder, ‘Adam’s Apple’, p. 513. 27 Hélène Dubois, ‘When, By Whom and Why? Decisive Material and Optical Alterations of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Maximiliaan Martens et al. (London, 2020), p. 250. 28 There remain questions about the stage at which the dove, which was not in the underdrawing, was introduced; see Postec and Steyaert, ‘The Van Eycks’ Creative Process’, pp. 98–102. 29 hic est fons aque vite procedens de sede dei + agni. 30 Postec and Steyaert, ‘The Van Eycks’ Creative Process’, pp. 46–54. 31 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. i, pp. 213–17. 32 Dhanens, The Ghent Altarpiece, p. 59. 33 See Kemperdick, ‘The History of the Ghent Altarpiece’, pp. 52–7. 34 Cited as a self-portrait during Rogier’s own lifetime in Nicolas of Cusa’s De visione Dei; Erwin Panofsky, ‘Facies illa Rogeri maximi pictoris’, in Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr., ed. Kurt Weitzmann (Princeton, nj, 1955), pp. 392–400. 35 Kemperdick, ‘The History of the Ghent Altarpiece’, p. 54. 36 Goodgal, ‘The Iconography of the Ghent Altarpiece’, pp. 200–233. 37 For example, see more recently Grantley McDonald, ‘A Further Source for the Ghent Altarpiece? The “Revelations” of Bridget of Sweden’, Oud Holland, cxxviii/1 (2015), pp. 1–16. 38 See Penny Howell Jolly, ‘More on the Van Eyck Question: Philip the Good of Burgundy, Isabelle of Portugal, and the Ghent Altarpiece’, Oud Holland, ci/4 (1987), pp. 247–8; and Hugo van der Velden,

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‘A Reply to Volker Herzner and a Note on the Putative Author of the Ghent Quatrain’, Simiolus, xxxv/3–4 (2011), pp. 140–41. A different view is taken by Bernhard Ridderbos, ‘Art and Compensation: Joos Vijd and the Programme of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Currie et al., pp. 137–42. 39 In the ode recorded by Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, p. 62.

4 Annunciations and Other Encounters 1 See for example John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, nj, 1992); James Marrow, ‘Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance’, Simiolus, xvi (1986), pp. 150–69. 2 John Oliver Hand and Martha Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, dc, 1986), p. 81. 3 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, pp. 138–9. 4 Melanie Gifford, ‘Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Technical Evidence for Iconographic Development’, Art Bulletin, lxxxi/1 (1999), pp. 110–11. 5 Ibid., pp. 112–13. 6 Carol J. Purtle, ‘Van Eyck’s Washington Annunciation: Narrative Time and Metaphoric Tradition’, Art Bulletin, lxxxi/1 (1999), pp. 117–18. 7 Maurice B. McNamee, Vested Angels: Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Paintings (Louvain, 1998). 8 Noted, for example, in The Road to Van Eyck, ed. Stephan Kemperdick and Friso Lammertse, exh. cat., Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2012), p. 296. 9 See John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art (Washington, dc, 2006). 10 Rudolf Preimesberger, ‘On Jan van Eyck’s Diptych in the ThyssenBornemisza Collection’, in Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini (Los Angeles, ca, 2011), pp. 23–51. 11 See now Maximiliaan Martens, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Optical Revolution’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al. (London, 2020), pp. 140–79.

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References

12 Giovanni Savoldo, A Man in Armour, c. 1530, oil on canvas, 91 × 123 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. 13 Molly Teasdale Smith, ‘The Use of Grisaille as a Lenten Observance’, Marsyas, viii (1957–9), pp. 43–54. On this and a range of other interpretations, see Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Color Lapidum: A Survey of Late Medieval Grisaille’, in Jan van Eyck: Grisallas, exh. cat., ed. Till-Holger Borchert (Madrid, 2009), pp. 239–53. 14 James Marrow, ‘Illusionism and Paradox in the Art of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden: Case Studies in the Shape of Meaning’, in Von Kunst und Temperament: Festschrift für Eberhard König, ed. Caroline Zöhl and Mara Hofmann (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 164–5. 15 See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436282, accessed 5 November 2021. 16 Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith W. Christiansen, From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1998), p. 86. 17 All inscriptions transcribed ibid., pp. 86–8. 18 Maryan W. Ainsworth, ‘Unlocking the Mysteries of Two Van Eyck Frames, Part Five: Mysteries Unlocked’, www.metmuseum.org, 19 March 2019; and Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed., Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment: Solving a Conundrum (Turnhout, 2022). Because this book appeared after the manuscript for mine was completed, I was unable to draw upon its full findings. I thank Dr Ainsworth for her response to queries on several specific points. 19 See Marc Smith, ‘Unlocking the Mysteries of Two Jan van Eyck Frames, Part Four: What Does the Text Mean?’, www.metmuseum. org, 12 March 2019. 20 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Horace Rackham, vol. ix: book 35 (Cambridge, ma, 1938), pp. 316–17. 21 Discussed in Hans Belting and Dagmar Eichberger, Jan van Eyck als Erzähler: frühe Tafelbilder im Umkreis der New Yorker Doppeltafel (Worms, 1983), pp. 61–75. 22 See Guido Corini, ‘From Rome to Florence and Bruges, and Back Again: Van Eyck’s Sancta Facies, between Transcendence and Naturalism’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Martens et al., pp. 284–95. 23 On the role of Van Eyck’s image among evolving conceptions of the Holy Face, see Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich, 2002), pp. 193–200.

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24 See, for example, Stijn Bussels, ‘The Diptych of the Lentulus Letter: Building Textual and Visual Evidence for Christ’s Appearance’, in Speaking to the Eye: Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150–1650), ed. Thérèse de Hemptinne, Veerle Fraeters and María Eugenia Góngora (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 241–58. 25 See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, il, 1993), pp. 99–109.

5 In the Company of the Virgin and Child 1 The same basic structure defines Rogier van der Weyden’s St Luke Drawing the Virgin, painted about the same time; see, for example, Alfred Acres, ‘Luke, Rolin, and Seeing Relationships’, in Rogier van der Weyden, St Luke Drawing the Virgin: Selected Essays in Context, ed. Carol Purtle (Turnhout, 1997), pp. 23–37. 2 Transcribed in Micheline Comblen-Sonkes and Philippe Lorentz, Musée du Louvre Paris, vol. ii (Brussels, 1995), pp. 41–2. 3 The Little Office of the Virgin is fully transcribed and translated in Carol J. Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, nj, 1982), pp. 177–85. 4 Philippe Lorentz, ‘The Virgin and Chancellor Rolin and the Office of Matins’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister, Sue Jones and Delphine Cool (Turnhout, 2000), p. 55. 5 Ibid. 6 See, for example, Laura Gelfand, ‘Piety, Nobility and Posterity: Wealth and the Ruin of Nicolas Rolin’s Reputation’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, i/1 (2009), esp. pp. 11–16, available at https://jhna.org. 7 Anne Hagopian van Buren, ‘The Canonical Office in Renaissance Painting, Part ii: More About the Rolin Madonna’, Art Bulletin, lx/4 (1978), pp. 631–2. 8 Comblen-Sonkes and Lorentz, Musée du Louvre, p. 50. 9 Douglas Brine, ‘Evidence for the Forms and Usage of Early Netherlandish Memorial Paintings’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxxi (2008), pp. 158–60. 10 Gelfand, ‘Piety, Nobility and Posterity’, p. 2. See also the chapter ‘The Devotional Image as Social Ornament’, in Bret Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 92–137. 11 Comblen-Sonkes and Lorentz, Musée du Louvre, p. 12, pl. xliv.

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References

12 James Snyder, ‘Jan van Eyck and the Madonna of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin’, Oud Holland, lxxxii/4 (1967), pp. 169–70. 13 Laura Gelfand, ‘Reading the Architecture in Jan van Eyck’s Rolin Madonna’, in In Detail: New Studies in Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 19–20. 14 See, for example, Purtle, The Marian Paintings, pp. 75–81. 15 Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck (New York, 1980), pp. 276–7. 16 See, for example, ibid., p. 276. 17 Matthias Depoorter, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Discovery of Nature’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Maximiliaan Martens et al. (London, 2020), pp. 219–26. 18 Two exceptions being the discussions in Scott L. Montgomery, The Moon and the Western Imagination (Tucson, az, 2001), pp. 86–95; and Depoorter, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Discovery of Nature’, p. 230. 19 Lorentz, ‘The Virgin and Chancellor Rolin’, p. 54. 20 Proposed identities are summarized in Comblen-Sonkes and Lorentz, Musée du Louvre, p. 32. 21 Alfred Acres, ‘Elsewhere in Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Tributes in Honor of James Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance’, ed. Bodo Brinkmann et al. (London, 2006), pp. 23–33. 22 These identities were suggested, for example, by Jean LeJeune, Les Van Eyck peintres de Liège et de sa cathédrale (Liège, 1956), pp. 200–205. 23 Hendrik Callewier, ‘Who Was Canon Joris van der Paele?’, Musea Brugge, 21 April 2020, available at www.youtube.com. 24 Douglas Brine, ‘Jan van Eyck, Canon Joris van der Paele, and the Art of Commemoration’, Art Bulletin, xcvi/3 (2014), p. 269. 25 Ibid., pp. 272–4. 26 Douglas Brine, ‘Reflection and Remembrance in Jan van Eyck’s Van der Paele Virgin’, Art History, xli/4 (2018), pp. 604–5. 27 Ibid., pp. 611–15. 28 Ibid., p. 620. 29 On verbal and other resonances in the choice of the shield, see Rudolf Preimesberger, ‘On Jan van Eyck’s Diptych in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection’, in Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini (Los Angeles, ca, 2011), pp. 44–7. 30 David G. Carter, ‘Reflections in Armor in the Canon van der Paele Madonna’, Art Bulletin, xxxvi/1 (1954), pp. 60–62.

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31 Brine, ‘Jan van Eyck, Canon Joris van der Paele, and the Art of Commemoration’, p. 268. 32 The Latin texts are transcribed in Aquilin Janssens de Bisthoven, Marguerite Baes-Dondeyne and Dirk de Vos, Musée Groeninge Bruges, vol. i (Brussels, 1983), pp. 201–2. 33 This trans. Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, p. 218. 34 Lawrence Naftulin, ‘A Note on the Iconography of the van der Paele Madonna’, Oud Holland, lxxxvi/1 (1971), pp. 7–8, n. 12. 35 Among numerous considerations of how to interpret his gaze, see Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, pp. 49–52. 36 Uta Neidhardt and Christoph Schölzel, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Foister, Jones and Cool, pp. 25–39. 37 See, for example, Elena Parma, ‘Genoa: Gateway to the South’, in The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530, ed. Till-Holger Borchert (London, 2002), pp. 98–9. 38 Discite a me quia mitis sum et humilis corde. 39 Those who accept the Ince Hall Madonna in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as a work by Jan van Eyck may object, but the cloth of honour behind her distinguishes this and comparable images of the floor-seated Virgin from the Madonna of Humility type. 40 The other accepted paintings to bear the motto are the portrait of Margaret van Eyck (1439) and Virgin at the Fountain (1439). It also appeared on the two Eyckian images of the Holy Face known in numerous echoes of presumed original paintings from 1438 and 1440; see Chapter Four. 41 Though there is evidence for one or two other triptychs, now lost. The Ghent Altarpiece, which opens like a triptych, stands alone as a two-tier polyptych. On the opening aspect of both works, see Lynn F. Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, pa, 2012), pp. 61–84. 42 While the bright pigments of the frame have been established as later overpaint (Neidhardt and Schölzel, ‘Dresden Triptych’, p. 27), they are likely to have covered comparable fictive marbling in the original paint layer. 43 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, pp. 131–40. 44 Ibid., p. 145. 45 John L. Ward, ‘Disguised Symbolism as Enactive Symbolism in Van Eyck’s Paintings’, Artibus et Historiae, xv (1994), pp. 9–53.

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46 Alfred Acres, ‘Small Physical History: The Trickling Past of Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, ed. Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 18–19. 47 Stephan Kemperdick, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church and Its Artistic Legacy’, in Van Eyck, ed. Martens et al., pp. 261–83. Kemperdick also suggests alternatives to a donor panel attached to the right. 48 On an iconic dimension in both of these images of the Virgin, see Craig Harbison, Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism, 2nd edn (London, 2012), pp. 169–83. 49 Larry Silver, ‘Fountain and Source: A Rediscovered Eyckian Icon’, Pantheon, xli (1983), pp. 95–104. 50 Compare another decoupling of the picture plane from the edges of a painting in an altarpiece installed a few years later in the Florentine church of Sta Lucia de’ Magnoli: Domenico Veneziano, Altarpiece of St Lucy, c. 1445–7, tempera on panel, 210 × 215 cm, Museo degli Uffizi, Florence.

6 Situating Saints 1 Rachel Billinge, Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute, ‘The Saint Barbara’, in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister, Sue Jones and Delphine Cool (Turnhout, 2000), p. 44. 2 Ibid., p. 45. 3 Ibid., pp. 41–3. 4 Robert Campin, St Barbara, from the Triptych of Heinrich von Werl (centre panel missing), 1438, oil on panel, 101 × 47 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. 5 Till-Holger Borchert, Jan van Eyck: Grisallas, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, 2009), p. 279. Borchert doubts, however, that the work is finished as Van Eyck originally intended. 6 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1603–1604: preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck, 1616–1618, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. i (Doornspijk, 1994), p. 69. 7 Barbara Heller and Leon P. Stodulski, ‘St Jerome in the Laboratory: Scientific Evidence and the Enigmas of an Eyckian Panel’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, lxxii/1–2 (1998), pp. 38–55.

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8 Ibid.; and Edwin Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome in Search of Its Painter’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, lxxii/1–2 (1998), pp. 10–37. 9 Richard Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492 (University Park, pa, 2013), p. 114. 10 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 11 Thus recognized since at least the time of Vasari, who described Ghirlandaio’s fresco as competing with Botticelli’s; Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, 1998), p. 213. 12 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, pp. 31–2. 13 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, p. 189. 14 Albergati’s role is discussed at length in Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’. 15 Ibid., p. 22. 16 W. H. James Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (London, 1908), pp. xliii–xliv. 17 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, p. 23. 18 Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Form and Function of Van Eyck’s Portraiture’, in Vision and Material: Interaction Between Art and Science in Van Eyck’s Time, ed. Marc de Mey, Maximiliaan P. J. Martens and Cyriel Stroo (Brussels, 2012), pp. 221–2. 19 John Hunter, ‘Who Is Jan van Eyck’s “Cardinal Nicolo Albergati”?’, Art Bulletin, lxxv/2 (1993), pp. 207–18. 20 Hendrik Callewier, ‘A New Document on Jan van Eyck: His Request for a Confessional Letter in the Vatican Archives’, Simiolus, xliii/1–2 (2021), pp. 16–25. Callewier wonders whether the painting might even have been made as thanks or payment for this deeply valuable service to the artist (p. 24). 21 Most famously Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, painted at least twice as St Jerome by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Another possible example in Van Eyck’s time is the hypothesized self-portrait of Rogier van der Weyden in his St Luke Drawing the Virgin, dated to the mid-1430s. More generally on such portraiture, see Friedrich Polleross, Das sakrale Identifikationsporträt: Ein höfischer Bildtypus vom 13. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Worms, 1988). 22 Edwin Hall, ‘More About the Detroit Van Eyck: The Astrolabe, the Congress of Arras and Cardinal Albergati’, Art Quarterly, xxxiv/2 (1971), pp. 186–7. 23 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, p. 21.

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References

24 Christiane Nockels Fabbri, ‘Treating Medieval Plague: The Wonderful Virtues of Theriac’, Early Science and Medicine, xii/3 (2007), pp. 252, 257. 25 Ibid. 26 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, p. 25, cites Avicenna on this recipe for compounding; see also Fabbri, ‘Treating Medieval Plague’, pp. 257, 263, 265. 27 Heller and Stodulski, ‘St Jerome in the Laboratory’, p. 44. 28 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, p. 25. 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 Heller and Stodulski, ‘St Jerome in the Laboratory’, p. 49. 31 Hall, ‘The Detroit St Jerome’, pp. 30–31. 32 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De viris illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii/1 (1964), p. 102; Maria Clelia Galassi, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Genoese Commissions: The Lost Triptych of Battista Lomellini’, in Van Eyck Studies: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 12–21 September 2012, ed. Christina Currie et al. (Paris, 2017), pp. 481–93. 33 Eugene F. Rice, St Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, md, 1985). 34 Extensive analysis and comparison in Marigene H. Butler, ‘An Investigation of the Philadelphia St Francis Receiving the Stigmata’, in Jan van Eyck: Two Paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ed. J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer et al. (Philadelphia, pa, 1997), pp. 28–46. 35 Joseph J. Rishel, ‘The Philadelphia and Turin Paintings: The Literature and Controversy over Attribution’, in Two Paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ed. Van Asperen de Boer et al., p. 4. 36 Ibid., p. 8. 37 James Snyder, ‘Observations on the Iconography of Jan van Eyck’s St Francis Receiving the Stigmata’, in Two Paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ed. Van Asperen de Boer et al., p. 75. 38 Ibid., pp. 82–4. 39 J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer, ‘Some Technical Observations on the Turin and Philadelphia Versions of Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata’, in Two Paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ed. Van Asperen de Boer et al., p. 54. 40 Matthew 26:36–56; Mark 14:32–52; and Luke 22:39–52. John 18:1 does not say who accompanied Christ in the garden. James Snyder associates the Van Eyck Stigmatization of St Francis

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with the Agony in the Garden in ‘Observations on the Iconography’, p. 84. 41 These and other scenes of sleep in moments of revelation were widely represented in Renaissance art; Alfred Acres, ‘What Happens When Christ Sleeps?’, in L’Allégorie dans l’art du Moyen Age: Formes et fonctions. Héritages, créations, mutations, ed. Christian Heck (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 125–37. 42 Scott L. Montgomery, ‘The Eye and the Rock: Art, Observation and the Naturalistic Drawing of Earth Strata’, Earth Sciences History, xv/1 (1996), pp. 9–10. 43 Kenneth Bé, ‘Geological Aspects of Jan van Eyck’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata’, in Two Paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ed. Van Asperen de Boer et al., pp. 88–91. 44 Ibid., p. 92. 45 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. i, p. 182.

7 Portraiture and Presence 1 ‘Avec ce, les dits ambaxadeurs, par ung nommé maistre Jehan de Eyk, varlet de chambre de mon dit seigneur de Bourgoinge et excellent maistre en art de painture, firent paindre bien au vif la figure de ma dite dame l’infante Elizabeth’; W. H. James Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck: Their Life and Work (London, 1908), p. lix. 2 Stephan Kemperdick, ‘Early Texts on Some Portraits by Jan van Eyck’, in Van Eyck Studies: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 12–21 September, ed. Christina Currie et al. (Paris, 2017), p. 311. 3 Jacques Paviot, ‘The Van Eyck Family’, in Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, ed. Maximiliaan Martens et al. (London, 2020), p. 72. 4 Hans Holbein, Christina of Denmark, 1538, oil on panel, 179.1 × 82.6 cm, National Gallery, London. 5 A. Janssens de Bisthoven, Musée Groeninge (Musée Communal des Beaux-Arts) Bruges (Brussels, 1983), p. 181. 6 An alternative, semi-public intention for the portrait is proposed by Till-Holger Borchert, ‘A New Hypothesis about the Portrait of Margareta van Eyck’, in Connoisseurship: Essays in Honour of Fred G. Meijer, ed. Charles Dumas, Rudi Ekkart and Carla van de Puttelaar (Leiden, 2020), pp. 46–50.

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References

7 Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Remarks on Character and Functions in Jan van Eyck’s Underdrawing of Portraits: The Case of Margaret van Eyck’, ii, in Van Eyck Studies 2012, ed. Currie et al., p. 241. 8 co(N)iv(N)x m(EU)s ioh(ANN)es me c(OM)plevit an(N)o. 1439. 17°ivnij. / etas mea triginta triv(m) an(n)orv(m). While the use of Latin could complicate assumptions about the private context of the portrait, few strong alternative theories of its ownership have emerged; Till-Holger Borchert, Jan van Eyck (Cologne, 2008), p. 42. 9 Till-Holger Borchert, ‘Form and Function of Van Eyck’s Portraiture’, in Vision and Material: Interaction Between Art and Science in Van Eyck’s Time, ed. Marc de Mey, Maximiliaan P. J. Martens and Cyriel Stroo (Brussels, 2012), p. 221. 10 Ibid. 11 Dirk de Vos, ‘Van Eycks vernuft: het opschrift van het Portret van Jan de Leeuw’, in Florissant: Bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (15e–17de eeuw). Liber Amicorum Carl Van de Velde, ed. Arnout Balis et al. (Brussels, 2005), p. 48. 12 See, for example, Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 65–77. 13 Borchert, ‘Form and Function’, p. 220. 14 Lorne Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools (London, 1998), p. 222; and Susan Frances Jones, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Greek, Hebrew, and Trilingual Inscriptions’, in Van Eyck Studies, ed. Currie et al., pp. 293–4. 15 Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, p. 222. 16 Rachel Billinge and Lorne Campbell, ‘The Infra-Red Reflectograms of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenami(?)’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xvi (1995), pp. 50–59. 17 On this and provenance more generally, see Campbell, The FifteenthCentury Netherlandish Schools, pp. 174–8. 18 Ibid., p. 192. 19 Ibid., p. 194. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., pp. 196–8, 201; and now Jan Verheyen, ‘Finalizing the Case for Giannino Arnolfini: New Information about the Sitter in the Arnolfini Portrait and His Relation to Van Eyck’, Simiolus, xliii/3 (2021), pp. 43–54.

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22 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, lxiv/132 (1934), p. 124. 23 Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, p. 195. 24 Ibid., p. 194. 25 Margaret L. Koster, ‘The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Simple Solution’, Apollo, clviii (2003), pp. 3–14. 26 In this respect the painting would anticipate important posthumous portraits of aristocratic Florentine women in decades to follow, such as Ghirlandaio’s portrait of Giovanna degli Abizzi (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). See Maria DePrano, ‘At Home with the Dead: The Posthumous Remembrance of Women in the Domestic Interior in Renaissance Florence’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, xxix/4 (2010), pp. 21–8. 27 Koster, ‘The Arnolfini Double Portrait’, pp. 11–12. 28 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1991), p. 60. 29 On revealing differences between Jan van Eyck’s two approaches to self-reflection in these paintings made for very different contexts and purposes, see Douglas Brine, ‘Reflection and Remembrance in Jan van Eyck’s Van der Paele Virgin’, Art History, xli/4 (2018), pp. 604–5. 30 Masaccio, Holy Trinity, c. 1425–7, fresco, 667 × 317 cm, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. 31 Campbell, The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, pp. 188–9.

Epilogue: Another Mirror 1 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A FifteenthCentury Manuscript of the De viris illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii/1 (1964), p. 102. 2 Ibid. 3 See, for example, Teri Hensick, ‘The Fogg Copy After a Lost Van Eyck: Conservation History, Recent Treatment, and Technical Examination of the Woman at Her Toilet’, in Recent Developments in the Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting: Methodology, Limitations, and Perspectives, ed. Molly Faries and Ron Spronk (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 83–95. For a magnified and perspectivally adjusted image of the Van Eyck painting in the Gallery see Ron Spronk, ‘More than Meets the Eye: An Introduction to Technical Examination of Early Netherlandish Paintings in the Fogg Art Museum’, Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, v/1 (1996), p. 13.

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References

4 Julius S. Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator: An Antwerp Art Patron and His Collection (1957); Postscript (1979)’, in Rubens and His Circle: Studies by Julius S. Held, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal, David Rosand and John Walsh Jr (Princeton, nj, 1982), pp. 43–51. 5 See, for example, a relatively recent approach with reference to several earlier ones in Bernhard Ridderbos, ‘Objects and Questions’, in Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception, and Research, ed. Bernhard Ridderbos, Anne van Buren and Henk van Veen (Los Angeles, ca, 2005), pp. 67–77. 6 ‘De Jean van Eyck, num. 3. Le Bain très renomé, en lequel van Eyck a depeint le Pourtraict de sa femme nue et vétue . . .’, in Held, ‘Artis Pictoriae Amator’, p. 50. 7 One exception is Dhanens, who associated it with comparable later images in the work of Titian, Rubens and Goya; Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert and Jan van Eyck (New York, 1980), pp. 206–11. See also TillHolger Borchert, ed., The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530 (London, 2002), p. 239. 8 On cataloguing collections in this period, see Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, ct, 1999), esp. p. 196. 9 Ibid., p. 190. 10 Compare an anonymous painting sometimes titled the Mirror of Love (Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste), dated somewhat later in the fifteenth century and seemingly adapting elements of the lost Van Eyck bathing pictures. 11 For example, Giovanni Bellini, Woman with a Mirror, 1515, oil on canvas, 783 × 629 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Van Eyck’s bathing pictures are noted as key precedents by Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Reflections of Pliny in Giovanni Bellini’s Woman with a Mirror’, Artibus et Historiae, xxviii/58 (2008), pp. 166–7.

bibliography

The vast literature on Jan van Eyck has grown more rapidly in recent years than ever before. Along with archival, contextual and various interpretive approaches that continue to illuminate his art and career, much of the newest work reflects exploration in light of evolving technology, conservation and exhibitions. The recent scholarship cited in relative abundance here represents not only a sample of latest findings but the deep engagement of current research with vital earlier work. Sources cited in the text that are not substantially concerned with Van Eyck or his milieu are not included in this bibliography. High-resolution images of the paintings and aspects revealed by sci­en­ tific examination have become widely available in print and online. An ex­ cep­tionally useful concentration of these images and related materials is freely available on Closer to Van Eyck, a resource provided by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (kik-irpa) in Belgium: http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be. One portion of the site documents ‘The Ghent Altarpiece Restored’, and the other presents ‘Further Work by Van Eyck’, under the auspices of Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access (verona).

Acres, Alfred, ‘Elsewhere in Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Tributes in Honor of James Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, ed. Bodo Brinkmann et al. (London, 2006), pp. 23–33 —, ‘Small Physical History: The Trickling Past of Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, ed. Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 7–25

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acknowledgements

One of the pleasures of writing about Jan van Eyck is the opportunity to marvel at the variety and depth of attention he attracts. Scholarly investi­ga­ t­­ ion is a relatively recent aspect, having joined a more public, wide-ranging fascination that has abided from his time to our own. This has allowed me to learn from countless conversations about the paintings with students, different audiences and friends who see so much and so well. Among col­­ leagues who have variously supported this project over the years (including invitations to speak and write, discussion of individual works and findings, access to materials and more), I thank Maryan Ainsworth, David Anfam, Till-Holger Borchert, Anne-Marie Bouché, Douglas Brine, Hendrik Calle­ w ­ ier, Arthur DiFuria, Bart Fransen, Melanie Gifford, John Oliver Hand, Maximiliaan Martens, James Marrow, Walter Melion, Cath­erine Metzger, Charles Minott, Carol Purtle, Bret Rothstein, Larry Silver, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Ron Spronk, Abbie Vandivere, Hugo van der Velden and Beth William­son. I am particularly grateful to Till-Holger Borchert, Douglas Brine, Melanie Gifford and Ron Spronk for having very gener­ously read and helped me improve chapters – with all remaining errors of course my own. At Reaktion Books, I am grateful to Michael Leaman and François Quiviger for the invitation to write this book, and to Alex Ciobanu and Amy Salter for their expert guidance in its preparation. At Georgetown University, my work on this project has especially benefited from the sup­­port of the Wright Family Associate Professorship in Art History, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, my students and colleagues in the Department of Art and Art History and library staff who have fulfilled many requests. Finally I thank Christine Tan, who makes all things pos­­sible, and our family far and near. The nearest are Audrey, James, and Lucy in loving memory. This book is dedicated to them.

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Alte Pinakothek, Munich: 38; Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon: 55; Château de Versailles: 8; Detroit Institute of Arts, mi: 51; Galleria Sab­ auda, Turin: 52, 54; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 11, 36, 47; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: 44, 45, 46; Groeningemuseum, Bruges (photos Hugo Maertens/www.artin flanders.be): 5, 20, 37, 42, 43, 56; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, ma (Francis H. Burr, Louise Haskell Daly, Alpheus Hyatt Purchasing and William M. Prichard Funds, 1969.83), photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College: 62; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, photos Hugo Maertens/www.artinflanders.be: 48, 49, 50; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 14, 58; Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: 13; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 33, 34, 35; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon: 7; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 6, 10, 39, 40, 41; Museo Civico d’Arte Antica, Turin: 9 (inv. no. 47, fol. 116r); Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid: 31, 32; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: 15; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 12; Muzeul Național Brukenthal, Sibiu: 58; The National Gallery, London: 1, 2, 4, 16, 59, 60, 61; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 18, 29, 30; Philadelphia Museum of Art, pa: 53; Rubenshuis, Antwerp, photo kik-irpa, Brussels: 63; Sint-Baafskathedraal, Ghent: 3, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.

index

Illustration numbers are shown in italics Adornes, Anselm 160–61 Adornes, Pieter 161 Albergati, Cardinal Niccolò 30, 31–2, 53, 117, 155–9, 13–14 Alberti, Leon Battista 102, 184 Alexander the Great 28 Apelles 28, 29, 110 Arnolfini, Giovanni di Arrigo 182 Arnolfini, Giovanni di Nicolao 182 see also Van Eyck, works by; Arnolfini Portrait Arras, Congress of 29–30, 32, 155 Autun 122, 125 Baerze, Jacques de 22 Beaumetz, Jean de 22 Bellechose, Henri 63 Bellini, Giovanni, St Francis in Ecstasy 162 Borluut, Elisabeth 70, 77 Botticelli, Sandro, St Augustine 154 Boulogne, Hue de 63 Boulogne, Jean de 63 Broederlam, Melchior 22, 95 Bruges 14–15, 16, 24 craft guild 62 plague 31 revolt 30–31

Town Hall 29 Van Eyck’s house 28, 32–3 Brussels 24, 25, 27, 89, 168 Campin, Robert 25, 69, 150 Charles v, king of France 22 Chastellain, Georges 123 Christina of Denmark 168 chronograms 10, 68, 90, 176 Closer to Van Eyck (online resource) 18, 221 Coremans, Paul 17 Creve, Jan 31 Cromwell, Thomas 168 Descamps, Jean-Baptiste 169 Devotio Moderna 88 Dijon 24, 95 drawings 43–8 underdrawings 50, 51–2, 53–4 Dürer, Albrecht 44, 60, 65, 157 Self-Portrait 118, 119, 38 Eugenius iv, Pope 31 Fazio, Bartolomeo 9, 28, 30, 55, 159, 187–9, 192, 193

235

Index

Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, The (Van Haecht) 189, 63 Ghent, ‘Van Eyck’ exhibition 18 Ghent Altarpiece see Van Eyck, Hubert and Jan, works by Ghirlandaio, Domenico, St Jerome 154 Giorgione 104, 193 Giotto 162 Golden Fleece, Order of the 89 grisaille use Annunciation (Madrid) diptych 102, 104 Ghent Altarpiece 72, 77, 102 see also trompe l’oeil use

inscriptions Arnolfini Portrait 69, 184–5, 186 Crucifixion and Last Judgment paired panels (New York) 107–8, 109 Ghent Altarpiece ambiguities 68–9, 91 Isabella of Portugal 167–8 Jan de Leeuw 175–7 Margaret Van Eyck 171–2, 176 Portrait of a Man (‘Léal Souvenir’) 177–8 St Barbara 149, 152 Virgin at the Fountain (Antwerp) 145 Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele 131–2 Virgin and Child with Saints (Dresden Triptych) 135–6, 137, 145 see also framing effects Isabella of Portugal (wife of Philip the Good) 27–8, 167–9, 55 Jacqueline of Bavaria 32 Jan de Leeuw 174, 175–7, 58 Jean, Duc de Berry 22, 34, 127 Jerusalem 25, 40, 110, 111–12, 155, 161 John of Bavaria 13, 21–2, 24 John the Fearless 22, 122 John ii, king of Castile 27

Hague, The 21–2, 60 ‘Hand G’ 34, 37, 110 Heere, Lucas de 20, 33, 90, 153 Holbein, Hans the Younger 44, 168 Honorius of Autun 127 Huizinga, Johan 16

Langhe, Olivier de 89 Lentulus letter, and Holy Face 115–17 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa 169 Liège 21, 31 Lille 19, 24, 29, 60 Limburg 21

Feast of the Pheasant 24 framing effects 7–8, 10, 11, 52–3, 69 Crucifixion and Last Judgment paired panels (New York) 107–8, 109 Ghent Altarpiece 53, 74, 76–7, 78, 86, 90, 93 Holy Face 115, 117, 119 St Barbara 149, 152, 153 Virgin at the Fountain (Antwerp) 165 Virgin and Child with Saints (Dresden Triptych) 145 Virgin in the Church 36–7 see also inscriptions

jan van eyck

Lisbon 27, 167 Lomellini, Battista 159 Lorenzo de’ Medici 154 Louis of Anjou 22 Maaseik 20 Malouel, Jean 22, 95 Masaccio, Holy Trinity 76, 185–6 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 154 metalpoint use, and drawings 43–4, 48, 53 Michelangelo 78, 102 mirror reflection Arnolfini Portrait 181 Woman Bathing 191–2 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) 169 Montefeltro, Federigo da 187 moon depiction 15 Crucifixion and Last Judgment paired panels (New York) 40, 111, 126 St Barbara 127 Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin 126–7 motto 21, 131, 186, 2 and Holy Face 117, 119 Man in a Red Turban 7–11, 152 Margaret Van Eyck 16 Virgin and Child with Saints (Dresden Triptych) 136–7, 145 Naples 22, 25, 159 nude depiction see Woman Bathing Old Testament imagery, Annunciation (Washington) 96–8, 99 Ottaviano della Carda 187

236

Panofsky, Erwin 17, 182 paragone tradition, Annunciation (Madrid) diptych 102–3, 104 Philip the Bold 22, 95 Philip the Good 9, 13–14, 20, 22–4, 29, 32 Arras mission 29–30, 32 Bruges revolt 30–31 court artists 13, 29–30, 62–3, 70, 155 crusades 24–5, 30, 40–41, 98 Feast of the Pheasant, Lille 24 Feast of St Luke, Tournai 25–7 Garden of Love . . . (Anon) 24, 6, 8 Lisbon mission on behalf of, with Van Eyck 27 Order of the Golden Fleece 89 portrait 22, 23, 7 son’s baptism 90 varlet de chambre, Van Eyck as 13–14, 22, 167 wife see Isabella of Portugal Plautus 10 Pliny the Elder 28, 29, 55, 102, 109–10 Pucelle, Jean 102 puns and punning 9–10, 133 Raphael 43, 78 rebus 10, 133 rederijkers 177 Rolin, Nicolas see Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin Savoldo, Girolamo 104 Shakespeare, William 10 Sluter, Claus 22, 95 Stevens, Peter 44, 189–90 Summonte, Pietro 22

237

Timanthes 109–10 Titian 102, 193 Tournai 25, 27 Trenta, Costanza 182 Turin-Milan Hours 34, 36, 9 underdrawings see drawings, underdrawings Van der Paele, Joris see Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele Van Eyck, Hubert (brother of Van Eyck) 16, 21, 32, 33, 36 and Ghent Altarpiece 33–4, 60–61, 70, 73, 86, 89, 91 in Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin 129 Van Eyck, Jan apprentices’ gratuities 28, 61 assistants’ roles 61–2 birth and early life 19, 20–21, 45 Bruges house 28, 32–3 as court artist 13, 29–30, 62–3, 70, 155 death 20, 32 drawings see drawings handwriting, only surviving 45–6 learned reputation 9, 28–9, 55, 159 motto see motto notes written by 20 painting style 54–60, 63–4 and Philip the Good see Philip the Good remuneration complaints 19–20 Vatican confessional letter 16, 31–2, 157

Index



wordplay 9–10 workshop 44, 48, 61, 69, 108, 160 Van Eyck, Hubert and Jan, works by Ghent Altarpiece, 10, 17, 18, 28, 32, 40, 63, 65–91, 3, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 Adoration of the Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece) 70, 79, 80–87, 90, 112, 142, 146, 165, 192, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28 Annunciation (Ghent Altarpiece) 72–5, 77–8, 80–81, 100, 23 Joos Vijd, patron 70–71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 87, 89, 90 Just Judges (Ghent Altarpiece) 11, 12, 88–90, 169, 3 Knights of Christ (Ghent Altarpiece) 88–9, 126–7, 130 Virgin Martyrs (Ghent Altarpiece) 87, 88, 28 Van Eyck, Jan, works by Annunciation (Dresden Triptych exterior) 94 Annunciation (Ghent) see Ghent Altarpiece Annunciation diptych (Madrid) 94, 100–106, 137, 141, 193, 31–2 Annunciation (Washington, dc) 53–4, 57, 58, 63, 73–4, 92, 94, 95–100, 152, 18, 29, 30 Arnolfini Portrait 11, 14, 29, 58, 109, 132, 151, 178–85, 190, 193, 4, 16, 60–62 Cardinal Niccolò Albergati 20, 30, 43, 44–5, 46–8, 53, 117, 13, 14

jan van eyck

Crucifixion (Berlin) 38–41, 126, 11 Crucifixion (silverpoint drawing) 48, 49, 15 Crucifixion and Last Judgment paired panels (New York) 40, 106–14, 126, 33, 34, 35 Fishing Party 10 Holy Face 115, 117–19, 36–7 Jan de Leeuw 175–7, 58 Man in a Red Turban (Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?)) 6–11, 60, 152, 171, 1 Man with a Blue Chaperon 172–5, 57 Margaret Van Eyck 17, 53, 59, 171–2, 176, 20, 56 Portrait of a Man (‘Léal Souvenir’) 177–8, 59 St Barbara 127, 147, 149–53, 49, 50 St Francis Receiving the Stigmata (Turin and Philadelphia panels) 147–9, 159–66, 192, 52–4 St Jerome in His Study 147–9, 153–9, 166, 51 Virgin and Child with Saints (Dresden Triptych) 98, 105, 134–7, 139, 145, 44–6 Virgin at the Fountain 142–6, 165, 192–3, 48 Virgin in the Church 36, 80, 96, 138, 150, 152, 192, 47 Virgin of Canon Joris van der Paele 11, 14, 31, 63, 98, 129–4, 162, 169, 185, 5, 42–3 Virgin of Chancellor Nicolas Rolin 30, 52, 123, 124, 125–9, 141, 151, 163, 169, 39, 40, 41

238

Woman Bathing 13, 104, 189, 190–93, 62 see also Turin-Milan Hours; ‘Hand G’ Van Eyck, Lambert (brother of Van Eyck) 32–3, 61 Van Eyck, Lievine (daughter of Van Eyck) 21, 29 Van Eyck, Margaret (sister of Van Eyck) 33 Van Eyck, Margaret (wife of Van Eyck) 16, 19, 29, 31–3, 145, 157 portrait see Margaret van Eyck and Woman Bathing see Woman Bathing Van Haecht, Willem, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest 189, 63 Van Mander, Karel 16, 81, 82, 153 Van Vaernewyck, Marcus 20–21, 33 Vasari, Giorgio 54–5 Vatican confessional letter 16, 31–2, 157 Venice 25, 30 Vera Icon, and Holy Face 114, 117–18 vidimus contract of approval 52, 53–4 Virgil 78, 87 Voleur, Colart le 63 Weyden, Rogier van der 25–7, 69, 86, 89, 112 Last Judgment (Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune) 112 St Luke Drawing the Virgin 25, 42, 44, 12 zodiacal symbols 98