by Noah Charney
In its depiction of the Virgin Mary (center left) and John the Baptist (center right), van Eyck’s altarpiece differs from the common use of these powerful saints. Usually they served in a role known as intercessio—that is to say, they were most often depicted vouching for the souls of the painting’s donors, interceding on their behalf and recommending them for entry into Heaven. Traditionally the saint who shares the first name with the donor would be shown interceding on his or her behalf, while the donor is knelt in pious prayer.
It was unusual at the time to present Mary and John the Baptist removed from an intercessio situation, although the grisaille John the Baptist painted beside Joos Vijd on the outside of the altarpiece might be interpreted as an intercessio. John the Baptist would normally be depicted in the midst of a moment from his life, the Baptism of Christ for instance, or interceding for a patron, rather than as a supplemental, monumental figure as he is here. Even more unusual, John is not accompanied by his hagiographic icon, a lamb, which indicates Christ. While John does carry a lamb in the grisaille version on the outside of the altarpiece, here his only identifying attribute is the hair shirt in which he is traditionally painted. Thus, with the Baptist pointing at a bearded, enthroned holy figure, the natural assumption, which van Eyck wanted us to consider, is that the central figure is Christ Enthroned. And yet, as we have discussed, the central figure is, in fact, God the Father, not Christ. In encouraging this confusion, van Eyck highlights the complex theological point that the Holy Trinity consists of three persons in one Godhead—at once distinct from one another and yet inextricably entwined. It makes theological sense, therefore, that we would be uncertain as to whether this figure is God or Christ. In theoretical essence, it is both. In practical iconographic terms, it is God the Father meant to evoke Christ.
Mary, as well as John, differs in van Eyck’s treatment of her from the traditional precedents. She would normally be shown with the Christ child or alone, enthroned at the center of a choir of angels, as in the Maesta paintings (of which Duccio and Giotto painted famous examples). Yet here Mary and John the Baptist, while glorious and colossal, play a subservient role, secondary to the overall theological theme. This tells neither Mary’s story nor the Baptist’s, and they do not intercede on behalf of the donors—van Eyck has presented them in a new way.
These three top-register central panels place their subjects on a perspectivally accurate tiled floor, the grout of the tiles indicating the orthogonal lines that lead our eyes back to the vanishing point, somewhere behind God’s head. This trick of perspective was new to artists and would not become commonplace until the Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a mathematical treatise on painting perspective in 1435, three years after the completion of The Ghent Altarpiece.
The Ghent Altarpiece represents a series of firsts in the known history of art, sparking trends that would be praised and embraced by future generations of artists and admirers. For most artists of the premodern period, as many as two-thirds of the known works that they painted during their lifetime are considered lost. Because of this, we can only say that, of the extant works of European art, and based on extant Renaissance documents, The Ghent Altarpiece was the first to implement a wide array of innovations.
In The Ghent Atlarpiece, Jan van Eyck was the first artist to paint monumental works with an intricate level of detail usually reserved for portrait miniatures and illuminated manuscripts. He was also the first to observe naturalistic details. He was the first to portray the unidealized human nude. His incorporation of a painted haze over the landscape as it stretches into the distance makes him the first to re-create the illusion of aerial perspective. He first rendered individually detailed faces in a large crowd. The bodies, too, were the first to be articulated beneath painted clothing, giving the impression of people wearing the clothes, rather than of the clothes floating around the people. From an iconographic standpoint, van Eyck was the first to imbue realistically realized and situated objects with a covert Christian symbolism—a technique that would come to be called “disguised symbolism” and that played a prominent role in European painting over the next two centuries.
In terms of his role in establishing or foreshadowing future artistic movements, van Eyck was second to none in influence. Although he did not invent oil painting, he brought it to an unprecedented level of excellence, turning the mere binding of pigments with oil into a masterful medium that would be preferred by every painter thereafter. Along with Giotto in Italy, Jan may be considered the first Renaissance painter. In his unparalleled realism, Jan may be considered a forefather of Realism as an artistic movement.
Who, then, was Jan van Eyck?
CHAPTER TWO
The Magician in the Red Turban
Jan van Eyck has been called the last painter of the Middle Ages—but also the first of the Renaissance. Scholarship over the last two centuries has labeled him a Realist, and therefore a prophet of the modern period, working four hundred years before the Realist movement. Called an alchemist and the inventor of oil painting, van Eyck was also a respected courtier, ambassador, and secret agent. He was a legend even in his own time.
Jan van Eyck was born sometime before 1395 and died sometime before 9 July 1441. His probable birth place was Maaseyck, in the Limbourg region of what is now Belgium. Little of his life story can be stated with certainty, including his place of birth. It was only in the late 1570s that a reference was made to van Eyck having been born in “Maesheyck” (spelling at the time was creative and flexible, so this is the same town as modern Maaseik), in records kept by Ghent scholars and artists Marcus van Vaernewyck and Lucas de Heere. A further clue to van Eyck’s birth region comes in the notes that he made on the only extant drawing attributed to him, his Portrait Drawing of Niccoló Albergati, which are written in a dialect unique to the Maasland region (now a part of the Netherlands but which once encompassed van Eyck’s birthplace), called Mosan.
Still, a great deal more is known about Jan than most fifteenth-century figures because he was an influential member of two princely courts. He had at least two brothers who were painters, Lambert and Hubert, and a sister, Margaret, who also seems to have painted. He lived and worked first in The Hague, in the service of John of Bavaria, the Count of Holland, from sometime before 24 October 1422 (when he is first mentioned in documents from the Holland treasury office) until 11 September 1424. These documents refer to a “Meyster Jan den maelre” (Master Jan the painter), whose primary task at this time, along with a bevy of assistants, was an extensive scheme for decorations and frescoes in the Binnehof palace in The Hague, the headquarters of the Counts of Holland, now lost. The Counts of Holland were, at this point, members of the German Wittelsbach family, the current head of which was John of Bavaria-Straubing, called “the Pitiless,” whose official title was “Count of Holland and Zeeland.”
Just how the young van Eyck entered the service of the Counts of Holland is unclear. John of Bavaria had been elected prince bishop of Liège, the largest city in the region of van Eyck’s hometown of Maaseyck. Geographic proximity aside, the path of van Eyck from young apprentice to young master to leading painter at the court of the Counts of Holland is unknown.
This lacuna is particularly striking, and intriguing, because there is no artistic precedent for van Eyck’s style of painting. For most artists in history, a clear path may be traced, from master to apprentice, with subtle new innovations, techniques, and improvements in each generation. But with van Eyck, as with the small handful of other revolutionary masters like Donatello, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, and Turner, an entirely new way of depicting the world exploded out of thin air, a blossoming tree with no evident roots linking it to past masters.
The best guess is that van Eyck applied miniaturist techniques, made more malleable and facile through the use of oil paints, and transposed them onto large-scale works. But this does not account for the level of observational realism. It is one thing to be physically able to paint the pores on a man’s skin
; it is another to choose to do so, when no other artists had thought to. Even the possibility that van Eyck developed his penchant for detail by training as a manuscript illuminator is a flawed hypothesis. Jan’s studio did produce illuminated manuscripts, including some attributed to his hand alone (as opposed to his studio in general, where it might have been painted by assistants under van Eyck’s supervision). But those pages attributed to van Eyck, such as the Birth of Saint John the Baptist/Baptism of Christ (circa 1440) are painted too thickly for a well-trained manuscript illuminator, suggesting that Jan did not have training in this medium, instead bringing his large-format talents to the microscopic medium, rather than the other way around.
The art that dominated the French and Burgundian courts at the cusp of the fifteenth century had an amalgam of influences ranging from imported Sienese painters who attended the papal court in Avignon (including Simone Martini), to Germanic sculptors (Claus Sluter), to portrait miniaturists and manuscript illuminators (Jacques Coene, Jacquemart de Hesdin, and the Limbourg brothers), and Burgundian proto-realists who best approximate a precursor to van Eyck (Melchior Broederlam and Robert Campin), although van Eyck went far beyond what they had achieved. But these stars do not form a cohesive constellation of van Eyck’s artistry, and no specific works survive that indicate a gradual development from the earlier court artists to Jan van Eyck.
Perhaps a clue as to van Eyck’s inspiration may be found in polychrome sculpture? We know that Jan polychromed (that is to say painted) sculptures while working for the Burgundian court; in 1432 he painted a series of statues of the Counts of Flanders to decorate the city of Bruges. The masterpiece of the great sculptor to the Dukes of Burgundy, Claus Sluter, called the Well of Moses (1395), also presented a level of realism not dissimilar to that in The Ghent Altarpiece, albeit in its own three-dimensional medium. The sandstone sculpture group, which incorporated a Calvary scene atop, supported by four life-size Old Testament prophets, was built above a well in the Charterhouse of Champmol, established by the Dukes of Burgundy in Dijon. The sculptures, which have a portrait-like realism to their faces and carved garments, were once painted and decorated with real human hair—one figure even wore a pair of real spectacles, to lend the work an almost eerie degree of realism: if you saw it out of the corner of your eye, you’d swear that you’d seen a group of real people.
The nearest approximation in painting is an anonymous altarpiece referred to as The Norfolk Triptych (circa 1415), once owned by the Duke of Norfolk. Like the work of van Eyck a decade after, this small household altarpiece has the same general panel design as The Ghent Altarpiece, albeit on a much smaller scale (it is 33 centimeters high by 58 centimeters across.) When closed, two raised portions of the wings meet each other at the center, and when opened, the altarpiece resembles a crenellated battlement, or perhaps a letter E turned on its side. Almost nothing is known about the creator of this altarpiece, a frustrating fact, since the creator is the most likely candidate to have been master to the young Jan van Eyck. We know that the painting came from the Maasland region, as did van Eyck. An analysis of the painting, which is currently in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, shows that the paint is a combination of egg tempera and oil—suggesting that this particular work may have introduced van Eyck to the possibilities of oil paint. Indeed, given the date (when Jan would have been approximately twenty-five years old), The Norfolk Triptych could plausibly be attributed to him, although no documentary evidence suggests this. Further, the jump in skill and detail from The Norfolk Triptych to The Ghent Altarpiece is substantial. Either van Eyck would have had to experience his own personal artistic revolution in the decade separating The Norfolk Triptych and The Ghent Altarpiece , or, more likely, van Eyck was not the anonymous painter of The Norfolk Triptych.
Two other major artists have been suggested as possible masters to the young van Eyck, guiding his apprenticeship. Robert Campin, also known as the Master of Flemalle, was born in Valenciennes and resided in Tournai, while he worked for the Dukes of Burgundy. His skill and realism, while not as dramatic as van Eyck’s, still provide a reasonable precedent for Jan, and his personal history might help to explain why no reference has been discovered linking young Jan to Campin. In 1429, Campin was convicted in court for having withheld evidence in a political scandal, and sentenced to go on pilgrimage. Then in 1432, the year The Ghent Altarpiece was completed, Campin was charged with adultery and banished from the duchy for a year. Only through political intervention was the sentence commuted to a fine. These scandals may have made it prudent for van Eyck to distance himself from Campin, if indeed Campin had once been van Eyck’s master.
The other candidate for master to the young Jan is Melchior Broederlam. Born in Ypres, he worked primarily for Duke Philip the Good’s grandfather, Duke Philip the Bold, first as valet de chambre and then as official court painter—both roles that van Eyck would fill two generations later. Broederlam used oil paints, and some works that have been attributed to an anonymous Mosan artist have also been attributed to him. His role in the Burgundian court, his age, and his use of oils make him a candidate to have been van Eyck’s master. But the styles of both Campin and Broederlam differ significantly enough from van Eyck’s that the connection cannot be made on stylistic points alone, and no documentation survives to inform us of Jan’s artistic mentors.
From the fall of 1424, Jan van Eyck entered the service of Philip the Good as official court painter, based primarily at the court in Lille. Records indicate that in this capacity van Eyck was required “to execute paintings whenever the duke wished him to.” The Burgundian court moved from city to city as the duke’s presence was required. Thus van Eyck’s existence was nomadic, albeit within a fixed region of sumptuous residences. He was also active as a political member of court, holding the coveted position of valet de chambre in the Duke’s personal retinue from 1425. The valet de chambre was like a personal secretary, with regular, direct access to the duke. This was an advantageous position, but because it required van Eyck to follow the duke constantly, he had little time to paint.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, the position was regularly given to artists and writers, whose advice and companionship were valued by the political elite in northern Europe long before artists would find acceptance in the aristocratic courts of the south. The desirable position came not only with a substantial salary of 1,200 livres per year (about $200,000 today), but also with benefits, including food, lodging, travel expenses, and even opulent clothing.
As valet de chambre, van Eyck had a strong political role by association, if not actively: with the ear of the duke, van Eyck was influential behind the scenes. His power and income also permitted him a financial independence that none of his fellow artists could boast. Free of the often Draconian restrictions of the local painters’ guild (in fact the court painter was not permitted to work on the open market and could only accept a commission with the duke’s blessing), van Eyck was as powerful an artist, politically, personally, and creatively, as any had ever been. Other painters held the coveted title of valet de chambre in France and Burgundy, including Melchior Broederlam, Francois Clouet, Paul Limbourg, Claus Sluter, and even a probable relative of Jan’s, by the name of Barthelemy d’Eyck. In Italy, Raphael would play a similar role, the first prominent Italian painter to act as courtier and political advisor, as well as an artist. Of the French and Burgundian valets de chambre, Jan van Eyck was the most famous, the best paid, the dearest to his master, and the most active politically.
Van Eyck worked for Philip the Good as an ambassador and as a secret agent. Though little concrete documentary evidence has come to light, it is known from contemporary sources that Jan traveled on secret missions on behalf of the duke. Such is the nature of secret activities—the more successful they are, the less trace they leave. Most likely these missions involved confidential dealings of a political or economic nature. References to these activities in contemporary documents describe them as “sec
ret” and “special,” and note his significant remuneration for them, yet say little more. For example, a document from the winter of 1440 states that van Eyck delivered “certain panels and other secret items” to the duke, and he was reimbursed for expenses incurred in the acquisition of these “secret items” in January 1441. As an artist who might be sent to paint at various rival courts, van Eyck was almost certainly also a spy.
There are a number of Renaissance artists for whom we have fleeting archival evidence of their employment as secret agents on behalf of the court for which they worked. Famous artists or writers tipped as spies include poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Raphael, Benvenuto Cellini, Gentile Bellini, Rosso Fiorentino, playwright Christopher Marlowe, Albrecht Dürer (who in 1521 made pilgrimage to see The Ghent Altarpiece and described it as a “very splendid, deeply reasoned painting”), the magician John Dee, and the philosopher Giordano Bruno. The fact that dukes and princes would loan artists to rival courts to pursue artistic commissions, an engagement portrait for instance, could be used as an excuse to place a trusted courtier deep inside an enemy’s headquarters. We know that the playwright Marlowe was sent to spy for England in Venice because of a document signed by Queen Elizabeth I preserved in Cambridge. The letter asks Marlowe’s Cambridge tutors to excuse his absence from classes, as he was abroad engaged in secret work for the queen. Gentile Bellini was sent by the Venetian Republic as a sort of diplomatic loan to the Turkish sultan Mehmet II. Bellini befriended the sultan, painting his portrait (which still exists) and a number of other works while in Istanbul. But Bellini was certainly acting as a spy as well, sent during the brief hiatus in the wars between Venice and the Ottomans.
So what was Jan van Eyck up to? We know that in 1425 he was sent to nearby Bruges and Lille on the first of his recorded secret missions. In July 1426 and again from August until 27 October of that same year, he was abroad engaged in secret activity, at an unknown location referred to in contemporary documents as “certain distant lands.” Court treasury records indicate that he was reimbursed for expenses incurred on a “secret and distant journey.” Some scholars believe that he was sent to the Holy Land, because of the uncanny accuracy of the landscape view of Jerusalem in Three Marys at the Tomb, attributed to van Eyck and his workshop. He was sent to Tournai on 18 October 1427 to attend a banquet in his honor, held by the local painter’s guild on the Feast of Saint Luke, patron saint of painters. The event was probably attended by famous contemporary Flemish artists, Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin. He returned from another unknown location in February 1428, for which he was reimbursed and received a bonus on top of his annual salary for “certain secret journeys.” He began his longest trip on 19 October 1428, when he was sent to Spain and Portugal as part of a Burgundian delegation, returning on Christmas day, 1429. This mission was undertaken to secure Princess Isabella of Portugal’s hand in marriage for his patron, ensuring an alliance between Burgundy and Portugal. It also involved a detour to visit the famed pilgrimage shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Although Jan’s official assignment in Portugal was to paint two portraits of Isabella (one sent by sea and one by land, to ensure that at least one would reach Burgundy), he was also active in the political arena, helping to negotiate the terms of the marital alliance.