by Noah Charney
It is estimated that Elisabeth Borluut and Joos Vijd commissioned The Ghent Altarpiece in 1426, although no document confirming its date of commission survives. Elisabeth came from a wealthy Ghent family; her relatives had been abbots of the nearby Saint Bavo’s Abbey. Joos was the son of Nikolaas Vijd, a knight whose family was raised in rank through military service. Nikolaas served honorably for decades under the last Count of Flanders, Louis de Male. When Louis de Male died in 1390, his daughter Margaret of Dampierre inherited the county of Flanders, including Ghent. She married Philip II (Philip the Bold), Duke of Burgundy. The territory would pass on to their son, John the Fearless, the father of van Eyck’s patron, Philip III (the Good).
When the county of Flanders passed into the hands of the Dukes of Burgundy, a scandal unfolded. Account books from the city of Ghent were newly examined by Burgundian ministers, and Nikolaas Vijd was found guilty of embezzlement. This charge may or may not have been legitimate—perhaps it was an excuse to humble the right-hand man of the last, vanquished Count of Flanders. But Nikolaas was impelled to pay a large fine, and was stripped of his offices.
There is no record of how the Vijd children, Joos and Christoffel, took their father’s disgrace. But in Joos’s grandiose donation and patronage of an artistic masterpiece, there may have been a desire to erase the humiliation of his father’s guilt.
Joos Vijd was a politician and a philanthropist. He served on the Ghent city council on four different occasions and was the city’s principal alderman, the equivalent of its mayor, in 1433-1434. He traveled with Duke Philip the Good through Holland and Zeeland. He also worked as special emissary for Duke Philip in Utrecht. It was in these capacities, involved with the Burgundian court, that he met Jan van Eyck.
Joos founded a charitable hospice run by Trinitarian monks, with the twofold agenda of lodging poor pilgrims and arranging to pay ransom for Christian slaves taken during the Crusades and on pilgrimage. This charity may have been inspired by some of Joos’s relations, who in 1395 had participated in a failed rescue mission under Duke John the Fearless to aid King Sigismond of Hungary and free Christian slaves held by Sultan Bayezid I. While Duke John’s fighting prowess earned him the nickname “the Fearless,” the mission was a disaster; it led to the imprisonment of the duke and his knights by the sultan until 1397, when, ironically enough, their own freedom had to be ransomed.
Joos Vijd’s coat of arms may still be seen in the keystone of the vaulting of the chapel ceiling. The chapel was established for the celebration of a daily Mass in honor of the donors, in a deed dated 13 May 1435. There was a widespread Catholic belief at the time that once someone died, the deceased would ascend out of Limbo into Heaven more quickly if the living prayed for their souls. The more people who prayed, particularly monks (and the more frequently the better), the faster their souls would rise to Heaven. As a result, aside from the charitable support of a beloved religious institution, and the creation of a memorial, donors were essentially paying their way into the fast lane to Heaven.
To this end, part of the contract that Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut drew up, when they paid for the chapel and the altarpiece, included provisions for the celebration of Mass on specific feast days and the prayer for their souls by a specific number of monks, a certain number of times per year. Joos and Elisabeth had no children, another potential reason to endow a chapel and the celebration of Masses. Without children to pray for their souls, they needed the monks to pray for them.
How do we explain the grandiosity of Vijd’s commission? Why did he choose to work with the most prominent artist of the age on such a colossal scale? To underscore one’s piety, to speed one’s soul out of Purgatory, to demonstrate one’s wealth—these are all legitimate rationales for commissioning an altarpiece. But there is no precedent for any painting of this scale, with this number of figures, this degree of realism, this combination of microscopic detail with a macroscopic vantage, in any previous work of northern European panel painting. In order to secure Jan van Eyck as an artist, services that were first and foremost promised to the duke, Vijd would have had to have serious connections—or the duke a rationale for permitting a local aristocrat, rather than himself, to bask in the glory of having commissioned the greatest painting of the age. Such questions have not been definitively answered, and the lack of closure has prompted a variety of theories, several rather more conspiratorial than sober, about why this masterpiece should rise like a leviathan out of the sea: miraculous, without precedent, and provoking more questions than answers.
A possible answer to the question of why such a work was created may present itself if we recall that 6 May 1432 was the date of both the first presentation of the altarpiece to the public and the baptism of Duke Philip’s son, also named Joos, who had been born April 24. The two events took place in the same church, in the same chapel. Therefore the altarpiece may represent not only the commission of the Vijd family but also a literal backdrop for the baptism of the son of Duke Philip the Good, a son on whom rested the hopes of the Burgundian dynasty. Of course Philip could not know that the timing of the completion of the altarpiece would coincide with the birth of his son, so this rationale would only explain the date of the presentation of the altarpiece, not why its commission was approved in the first place, years before. Alas, young Joos of Burgundy was not to be the future duke, as he died just weeks after the ceremony in which he was formally named.
It is noteworthy too that the duke’s infant son and the patriarch of the Vijd family shared the same first name. While there is no reason to think that the infant was named after him, the coincidence would likely have been seen as fortuitous to the local aristocrat Joos Vijd, who would have been both honored and proud. The fact of the baptism coinciding with the completion of the altarpiece would explain why Duke Philip permitted his personal courtier to paint such a monumental work on behalf of a local aristocrat. Philip might have imagined that the altarpiece would serve as a backdrop for some major event, the birth of a son, or perhaps even his third marriage (to Isabella of Portugal), as he could not have predicted, in the late 1420s, which events in his personal life would coincide with the completion of the altarpiece. Van Eyck, like so many great Renaissance artists, was engaged frequently in the mounting of temporary decorations to celebrate one-time events, from weddings to royal visits—decorations that would be dismantled soon after the event took place. As a result, a large chunk of the time and effort of Renaissance court artists was focused on temporary artistic installations never intended to outlive the events themselves—precious time that might otherwise have been directed towards the creation of more masterpieces for the ages. This is a frustrating fact for art lovers, who would welcome a few more extant van Eycks in today’s museums, and was perhaps likewise so for the Renaissance artists themselves. With this in mind, we might consider that, while for van Eyck and for Joos Vijd, The Ghent Altarpiece was a monument for the ages, for Duke Philip the Good, the altarpiece served merely as a most elaborate and intricate stage set, a backdrop that would be used for the baptism of his son, born just as the altarpiece was completed.
It has generally been assumed that a learned theologian advised van Eyck on the iconography of The Ghent Altarpiece, designing an elaborate symbolic scheme, one that would require extensive knowledge of theological sources in a variety of languages. Most Renaissance artist contracts specified what the painter was to paint, which allegories might be represented, for example, and the biblical or literary scenes therein. The interpretation, or invenzione, as the Italians called it—what to do with the specifications—was up to the artist. But the scenes were, in the main, dictated ahead of time by the commissioners and their advisors.
What is particularly astonishing in the case of The Ghent Altarpiece is that no evidence has been found to suggest that elaborate predesigned schemes for religious artwork played a role in Flemish or Netherlandish art of this period. That is to say, in terms of theological complexity, The Ghent Altarpiece is withou
t precedent. That does not necessarily mean a theologian did not design the concept of the work, but it does mean, if one did, it was a first in the art of the time. It is only one generation later that documents have been found that attest to another Flemish master, Dirk Bouts, having been advised on his iconography by a theologian.
One scholar, Dana Goodgal, not only believes that a theologian was responsible for the altarpiece’s iconographic scheme but has named an entirely plausible candidate for the role. Olivier de Langhe was the prior of the Church of Saint John (later renamed Saint Bavo) while the altarpiece was being painted. De Langhe’s most notable known accomplishment was a treatise on the Eucharist—a subject that resonates with the Christ-as-sacrificial-lamb theme of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Van Eyck scholar Craig Harbison draws parallels between De Langhe’s text and The Ghent Altarpiece:De Langhe’s thought also corresponds with the image in the way it presents a traditional view of the nature and necessity of Church ritual. As visualized by van Eyck, the saints, martyrs, prophets and highly-placed ecclesiastics, both bishops and confessors, lead the strictly regulated religious and social groups that adore the sacrificial Lamb of God. A mystical vision of the Godhead—Paradise—is only accessible through the carefully mapped paths of traditional Church leaders and theologians . . . [reiterating] in a many-layered form the centuries’ old claim of the Church hierarchy to absolute authority.
In this way, The Ghent Altarpiece could be seen as a collective affirmation of traditional Catholic values as the only way to access the Godhead. Although no documentary evidence confirms this, Olivier de Langhe was in the right place, at the right time, possessed the right knowledge, and wrote about relevant topics, all suggesting that he might well have been the theologian who developed the iconographic scheme for The Ghent Altarpiece.
Van Eyck’s role as court painter required his participation in a wide variety of painting and design-related enterprises beyond wall and panel painting. In fact, panel paintings were very low on the priority list for court painters, whose primary tasks involved wall painting to decorate official residences, manuscript illumination, and the design of events. There are strikingly few references to panel paintings in Flemish court inventories, indicating the low importance given to them. In the main, only portraits, kept for historical record, would be assigned to court painters. These artists would more likely be tasked with painting temporary installations for a ducal festival or banquet. In the mid-1430s Duke Philip held a banquet at which a huge pie was rolled out of the kitchen: A man dressed as an eagle leapt out of it, followed by a flurry of doves, which then landed on the tables of the guests. It is almost certain that designing banquets such as that one, and the decoration of foodstuffs, occupied van Eyck’s time.
After the January 1430 wedding of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, with his political and ambassadorial work well done, Jan finally settled in Bruges. He married a woman described in contemporary documents as “damoiselle Marguerite,” suggesting that she may have had aristocratic lineage. Their first child was born in 1434 and christened Philippot, named after his godfather, Duke Philip the Good. A portrait of Mrs. van Eyck, painted by her husband in 1439, shows her clothed in garments associated with the nobility. It is the only extant stand-alone portrait of a girl or woman by van Eyck. Jan painted a self-portrait, a pendant to accompany the portrait of his wife, both of which hung in the Bruges painters’ guild in the eighteenth century. The Portrait of Marguerite was lashed onto the guild wall with heavy iron chains, because the Self-Portrait of Jan had been stolen at an unknown date from the guildhall. Some scholars have guessed that the Man in a Red Turban, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, is the stolen self-portrait, as its size is nearly identical to that of the Portrait of Marguerite, as would be the case for matching pendant portraits.
From 1432 until his death, Bruges town records indicate that van Eyck made annual mortgage payments on a house and workshop, which was owned by the church of Saint Donatian, in which he would ultimately be buried. That same year, records note that the councilors of the city of Bruges visited van Eyck’s studio in an official capacity, welcoming the great master to the city and lavishly handing out tips to Jan’s twelve studio assistants. His career as a secret agent appears to have ended when domestic duties called, although he would undertake two more missions to “foreign lands” in order to conduct “secret business” on behalf of the duke in 1436, to an undisclosed location, for which he received double his normal pay. He undertook a final mission, to pick up “certain panels and other secret items” and deliver them to the duke, in the winter of 1440. There is a record of Jan having been repaid for the expenses related to this last mission in January 1441, just six months before he passed away.
Van Eyck’s various travels certainly interrupted the painting of The Ghent Altarpiece. It was completed only after he had moved from Ghent to nearby Bruges. But Jan still kept in contact with the city of Ghent and its patrons—his Saint Barbara (1437) was commissioned by a man from Ghent.
Jan was close to Duke Philip, a confidante as well as an employee of the Burgundian leader and by some accounts his friend. The duke ultimately became godfather to one of Jan’s children, Philippot (the Duke presented the van Eycks with six silver goblets as a birthday present). Through the end of his life, Jan retained the position of painter to the duke, along with the accompanying salary of 720 livres per year (around $120,000 today). The duke took pains to continue to pay van Eyck’s widow even after the painter’s death, granting “damoiselle Marguerite . . . 360 livres en 40 gros,” the artist’s pension (half of his annual income while he was active), as a condolence and a sign of his affection for the great painter and compassion for his family. As late as 1449, the duke paid for most of the entrance fee required for one of Jan’s children, “Lyevine van der Eecke,” to enter the convent of Saint Agnes in Maaseyck.
Once in Bruges, when he wasn’t creating wall paintings for the duke’s residence in Hesdin, Jan worked primarily for private patrons, whose portraits comprise the majority of his known paintings. The most renowned of these is The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, also called The Marriage Contract (1434), now in the National Gallery in London. Only twenty-five extant paintings have been definitively attributed to Jan’s hand—a tiny number, making them all the more precious. Records indicate many others, all of them lost. Another twenty or so paintings are tentatively thought to be by van Eyck, or at least by his studio, though all of these have been disputed at some point, making the attribution uncertain.
After a long, illustrious career, Jan died and was buried in Bruges on 9 July 1441, in the graveyard of the cathedral of Saint Donatian. Nine months later, his brother Lambert arranged for Jan’s body to be exhumed and entombed in an honorable location inside the church. This same church would be looted and destroyed by French troops in 1799, a few years after they had stolen most of the panels of The Ghent Altarpiece and brought them to the Louvre. Lambert, a fine painter in his own right, took over Jan’s studio, supervising the apprentices and the incomplete commissions, while Jan’s widow, Marguerite, ran the business side of the workshop until 1450—the year in which van Eyck’s home in Bruges was finally sold to a new family.
Jan was one of the rare early Renaissance artists to achieve renown and wealth during his lifetime. He was paid a bonus of six hundred gold coins upon the completion of The Ghent Altarpiece in 1432 and was in constant demand thereafter. This bonus alone was the equivalent of the annual salary of twenty skilled workers.
Duke Philip the Good placed extraordinary value on the service of his court painter. In a 13 March 1435 document, Philip berated his treasurers in Lille for paying Jan’s wages late, stating that should Jan ever leave his court, Philip would never be able to find Jan’s equal in his “art and science.” That same year Philip summoned van Eyck to Arras, where the artist accompanied his master during the delicate negotiations for a peace treaty between France, England, and Burgundy. It is tempting to wonder what might
have been the “science” to which Philip referred. Painting was an art, and perhaps politics was the “science.” Or was Jan engaged in alchemy, as sources one generation later would suspect?
Giorgio Vasari thought as much. The sixteenth-century Mannerist painter and biographer of Renaissance artists wrote glowingly about Jan van Eyck in his canonical Lives of the Artists (1550). His discussion of van Eyck in a chapter on the earliest great Italian oil painter, Antonello da Messina, represents a rare inclusion of praise for a non-Italian in a work dedicated to the glorification of Tuscan art, Michelangelo’s in particular.