The Ghent Altarpiece By Jan Van Ecyk
Portions of this image have been digitally restored for this exhibition.
Welcome to the exhibition of The Museion On Delos. Here we display one of the first great masterpieces of the northern renaissance. The altarpiece is in Belgium in the region of Flanders, in St. Bavo Cathedral, in The Joost Vijd Chapel. The main subject is the adoration of the lamb which can been seen in the bottom center panel. This is truely one of the greatest treasures of Western art.
The Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432 ) is a very large
and complex polyptych . It was created by Hubert and Jan van Eyck
.
The altarpiece consists of twelve panels, most of which are painted
on both sides allowing the work to be displayed both open and closed. The
upper row on the front shows Christ the King flanked by the Virgin Mary
and St John the Baptist. The insides of the wings represent Musician and
Singing Angels, and Adam and Eve. The central part of the lower row shows
the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
The following is a quotation from "The Complete Paintings Of The Van Eycks", by Robert Hughes.
"Few people have been so eclipsed by their younger
brother as Hubert was by Jan van Eyck. Today, Hubert is the merest phantom;
he is that part of the Ghent altarpiece of The Adoration of the Lamb which
is not by Jan - the curl of paper left by art historians when they have
finished cutting out Jan van Eyck's silhouette. His name, spelt variously
as Ubert, Lubert and Hubert, appears briefly four times in the city archives
on the Ghent altarpiece: "The painter Hubert van Eyck, than whom no
greater has been found ... and Jan, his brother, second in art.
"Posterity has reversed even this judgment, and apart from the five
documents, the stylistic evidence of the altarpiece, and the probability
that The Three Marys at the Sepulcher in the Van Beuningen Collection may,
on the grounds of what Panofsky called its "archaically overemphatic" linear
perspective, be attributed to him, we know next to nothing of Hubert van
Eyck, his life, his tastes, his peregrinations and jobs.
"Jan, of course, is a different matter. He was born somewhere around
1390 in the village of Maaseyck near Maastricht. Between 1422 and 1424,
he was employed as a painter by John of Bavaria, Bishop of Liège;
the next year, 1425, his famous relationship with Philip the Good, Duke
of Burgundy, began. As court artist and equerry, he moved to Philip's court
at Lille. Few such cases of mutual serendipity adorn the history of Renaissance
patronage: instead of treating his artist as something between a jongleur
and an artisan, as the Medici in their off moments were apt to do, Philip
was moved to declare that he "would never find a man so much to his
taste, or such a paragon of science and art." For eleven years, Jan
van Eyck worked in an atmosphere of gracefully reciprocated admiration.
He worked, not only for Philip, but for wealthy Italians resident in the
Netherlands, such as Giovanni Arnolfini; his fame spread rapidly to Italy,
whose humanists called him the "onore della pittura" and "il
più grande pittore del nostro tempo"; Vasari wrongly credited
him with the invention of oil painting. His intimacy with Philip the Good
is strikingly indicated by the diplomatic missions (whose object, insofar
as it can be discovered, was to negotiate marriages for the Duke) that
Jan van Eyck undertook on his behalf: to Spain in 1427, to Portugal and
England in 1428, and another, perhaps to Prague, in 1436. There was one
thing, apart from Jan's social position and professional contacts, which
this extensive travel must have benefited: his prodigious visual memory.
Jan van Eyck was almost unique among northern - or, for that matter, Italian
- artists of the early quattrocento for his virtuosity as a recorder of
historical style. When he paints a Romanesque capital (as in The Madonna
of Chancellor Rolin) he gets it right: it is not a Gothicization of Romanesque.
The stained glass window and niello pavement inlays in the Washington Annunciation
exactly preserve what must have struck him as their primitive crudeness.
It is typical of Van Eyck that this should have been so. No painter has
ever been more preoccupied with artifacts with the exact way a square cut
ruby is set in its flange to the rim of a crown or pearls are sewn to the
hem of a robe, with the joints in an arch, the dull sheen of pewter or
the luster of polished silver, the pin in an iron door hinge, the binding
of a missal or the angular wooden soles of a pair of discarded chopines.
In a lesser artist, this preoccupation might become fetishistic. In Jan
van Eyck, it does not. Each of the refined and sumptuous objects with which
his world was populated is both concrete and self transcending; or so we
instinctively feel. Why?
"We may look for the answer in the hypothesis that Jan van Eyck pushed
the problem of representation in art further than any artist had done before,
or has since. Put baldly, this problem is: how much exact information can
I load into a painting before suggestion takes over from fact? Total reality
is unpaintable, because it is infinite. One can make approximations in
paint which produce this or that illusion, but below a certain scale the
approximations turn into shorthand microscopic reality cannot be rendered
with a pasty, sloppy, granular substance like powdered minerals mixed in
oil. William Blake's "eternity in a grain of sand" was no visionary
fancy, but a sober fact about matter.
"I have before me a peach on a plate. For a Cézanne, a Bonnard
or a Velasquez, the reality of this peach is its volume, and in a generalized
way, its bloom and color: a yellow globular object flushed with crimson
patches, matte in surface, not shiny like an apple, its apparent texture
(guessed from memories of other peaches) firm but tending to pulpiness.
The illusions and sensations produced by a blob and half a dozen licks
of paint, from the hand of such masters, will suffice to give so much information
to the man who looks at that still life. But the peach is not exhausted,
as an object of scrutiny, by these properties. For instance, its "bloom" is
caused by a dense coating of short, fine hairs of vegetable fiber, growing
from the pigmented skin, which diffuse reflected light. Seen under a glass,
each of these fibers becomes a detailed form; under the microscope it may
disclose unimaginable complexities of structure. And so one could go on.
There is no limit to the describable properties of that fruit, or anything
else. But where? At what point does he choose to nip this stupendous ramification
of objecthood?
"We can see only a limited amount with the naked eye. Worse, we are
apt to scan inattentively. Most representational painters, in trying to
engage the attention, force one to complete the reading of clues which
they leave unfinished: they halt their process of literal description somewhere
short of the limit of information which an object normally renders up.
"Two feet from the canvas, the glint on Rembrandt's potato nose becomes
a blob of white paint and the puckers in Titian's sleeve turn into flat
slaps of umber on a blue ground. We turn these marks back into velvet and
sweaty skin by making the right guesses. The painters force us to.
"Jan van Eyck's extraordinary achievement rests on the fact that he
did the opposite. In his paintings, he extended detailed information about
things far past the ordinary limits of scrutiny; his eye acted "both
as a telescope and as a microscope", and it left us with too much,
not the suggestive too little of other realist art. Who, allowed to look
into the room where Arnolfini and his bride hold hands in their private
sacrament, would even notice what Van Eyck saw, or bring to it the obsessed
and simultaneous focus he imposed on every object, large or tiny, far or
near - the grain in those fractionally uneven floorboards, the differences
of texture and springiness between the lapdog's hairs and the fur of Arnolfini's
robe, the limp silk tassels of the beads hanging on the wall and the stiff
bristles of the twig broom - which repeats their shape on the other side
of the mirror? Only with great difficulty - one might almost say, only
by a strenuous act of the imagination - can you make the green and gold
brocade behind the Ince Hall Madonna become paint at all. A fifteenth century
writer praised Van Eyck for his landscapes, which seem to stretch "for
fifty miles." The point is that such a way of presenting the world
as a visual whole has no more to do with the way we see it than, say, Leonardo's
quick frozen notations of eddies in a mill race. Distance blues out the
colors of objects, alters their tones and fuzzes their contours. We do
not perceive everything within a given field with equal and perfect clarity;
we scan and select. Jan van Eyck's realism is not a metaphor of natural,
or human vision. He painted the world as if everything in it were both
knowable and perfectly known; his aim (to paraphrase Panofsky again) was
not representation, but reconstruction. His art is a harmony parallel to
nature: "Myself will I remake" and the world, too. Thus, Van
Eyck's realism was creative in an almost hubristic way, for its object
was to suggest God's perceptions in creating the universe: to see things
from the standpoint of absolute knowledge which is uniquely God's possession.
"Thus each object, each face and body in Jan van Eyck's work is spiritualized
by its almost total detail: his scrutiny goes beyond the concrete and waits
for our symbolic imagination to catch up with it. The objects themselves
are charged with symbolism; Jan van Eyck's attitude to nature was medieval
in that he seems to have regarded each created thing as a symbol of the
workings of God's mind, and the universe as an immense structure of metaphors.
The casual eye is apt to read the Arnolfini betrothal portrait as a piece
of genre, which looks forward to Vermeer and the Dutch intimists. But the
probability is that Van Eyck designed it as a web of disguised symbols,
intending to make a familiar comparison between the sacrament of marriage
and the ideal relationship of the Virgin Mary as bride of God. The mirror
on the wall, which is explicitly turned into a religious object by the
ten scenes of Christ's passion set in its frame, is a symbol of candor
and purity; the little dog, an image of marital faithfulness - and so on.
Spiritual states are externalized in objects. Even the fantastic splendors
of marble, gold, glass and brocade in The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin are
allegorized. The picture is one of the most aggressively confident celebrations
of the belief that riches are a proof of virtue that has ever been painted;
Chancellor Rolin has the wealth and contacts to arrange a private audience
with God and His mother, and the angel holds the crown over Mary's head
with the faint, obsequious smile of a salesman at Cartier's. Yet this image
is, quite obviously, a variation on a more ancient one, that of the Virgin
in her hortus conclusus, surrounded by attributes of purity and grace (the
lily, the aromatic shrubs, the peacocks), remote from the mundane life
of the city below the loggia.
"By such means of vision and symbolism, Jan van Eyck temporarily did
away with the division between secular and religious works of art. All
nature is sacramentalized by the sheer intensity of his gaze. To the realist's
modest claim that "This is the way it was," Jan van Eyck adds "is
now, and ever shall be, world without, end; Amen."
From Robert Hughes, introduction to "The Complete Paintings of the Van Eycks"
LINKS
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