JAN VAN EYCK
Jan Van Eyck made paintings that for the first time resembled most perfectly the real world. His work launched an artistic renaissance in northern Europe “ A TRUE IMAGE REVOLUTION “. He made painting into an ultimate art, Van Eyck’s artworks themselves speak about the artist unlike the anonymous paintings which preceded them, his paintings include signatures, dates, personal moto, even self-portraits. They celebrate the person who made them.
St Bavo’s cathedral in Ghent still holds the painting, a great altarpiece that started that revolution- “ THE GHENT ALTARPIECE “. Eleven and a half feet high, its made up of many panels(polyptych), and those panels are connected by hinges so they can open and close.
At the top, we have prophets and Sybil’s, who predicted the coming of Christ, and the moment that they predicted is unfolding right below them, that is, the scene of the annunciation.
The altarpiece was donated to St Bavo’s cathedral by one of van Eyck’s clients, a merchant and the mayor of Ghent. With its shutters closed the altarpieces commemorate the donor’s plight, it shows the donor and his wife praying to sculpted effigies of saints.
Angel Gabriel is announcing to Mary that she is about to conceive Christ, she holds lilies which are a symbol of Mary’s purity, her sinlessness, virginity. We can see words coming out of the angel’s mouth in Latin, and Mary on the other side with the dove above her head which resents the holy spirit and words coming out of her mouth, her reply to angel Gabriel but backward cause she’s speaking back to the angel, and upside down.
Above them is a view of the upper room of the actual church. Between them is space, not empty but having a fabulous cityscape where we can see figures, shadows, buildings, birds, and a kind of still life in the right, an unoccupied set of spaces. We are seeing a kind of awkward linear perspective.
The Ghent alter was designed and painted for the chapel, every painted object in the altarpiece is shown reacting to light as if its a real object here in space, and we can see this immediately in the closed form of the altar, in which all the statues and the two donors are all lit exactly from a part of the chapel where the sun streams in and would if these were real statues and cast shadows and highlights in the same way they do in van Eyck’s picture.
There’s an explosion of rich colors as we open it.
In the open state, again everything in the picture reacts to the light and the space exactly as real figures would in such a situation, but here because of the nature of the subject and because he’s added the stupendous element of color because he’s multiplied the details, the level of relations between the world outside and the world in the picture becomes almost infinite.
Every one of the jewel’s, every part of this picture is carefully programmed to react to the light that’s in the room.
For example, the figure of Adam who comes from the left has highlight in his eyes, whereas the figure of eve who is shaded in this real space has no highlights in her eyes. There are even certain jewels, ones on the angels on the left which reflect the actual shape and position of the window which lights them.
Paint captures the minute subtleties of flesh, blood seems to pulse beneath the flesh, the skin of Adams’s face and hands is visibly tanned by the sun. Adam raises his big toe so that you can see its underside, the toe seems even to stick out of where the figure stands, allowing Adam to step into our world.
The painting is dominated by a vision of God, throned at the center looking straight out, the deity subordinates everything to himself including the viewer, constantly in his gaze. God the father dressed like a king with a crown on his head and one at his feet to show that he is the king of kings, holding a scepter a symbol of power. On either side of god we have Mary, also wearing a crown, the crown has roses and lilies in it, and on the right st John the Baptist.
In the gold embroidery in the tapestry behind god, there is the image of a pelican, in the medieval tradition the pelican if starving is believed to pick at his own flesh to feed its young ones, god making an extraordinary sacrifice is rendered here.
On the left, we have angels singing in heaven and on the right, angels playing music in heaven. Each of the angels wears a different crown, all singing different notes which can be seen in the expressions of each one.
The Adoration of The Lamb, in the lower panels of the painting, is the landscape of heavenly paradise, we see four group s of people coming towards a scene at the center which is an altar with a lamb and the lamb has a wound in its side and its bleeding into a chalice. The men in these four large groups come to pay homage. And then we have prophets and saints and popes making their way towards christ. The saved worship eternally on an alters the lamb of god, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for humanity.
Surrounding that altar we have angels carrying elements of Christ’s suffering which are the cross, the crown of thorns, the column, so there’s a sense of sacrifice for man’s redemption.
And below that, we have the fountain of life from which flows a stream that flows out and down towards us. And from that altar, the water of the fountain of life flows into our space along a small ditch to Paradise’s flowery lawn.
Drawing close we notice amazingly, the earth is filled with jewels, makes sense, paradise will be paved with precious stone, it stills the essence of the painter’s craft. In its transformation to jewels, the paint itself performs the kind of miracle the scene depicted celebrates. This is all played out in this glorious and Devine landscape through sheer artistry, the base matter of paint has been transformed into precious jewels, the earth itself has the become the image of heaven.
How did he make paint, mere pigments resemble transparent reflective gemstones?
It’s about recreating the object itself by simulating in paint the inner structure of its materials, the effect is a remarkable illusion that what we see is real and not painted, yet it is all just paint. He didn’t use gold leaf to represent gold objects instead he painted objects in gold, he never placed upon an actual jewel which was common in the period before van Eyck, he creates a consistent surface so to the viewer the illusion of his paintings, the depiction of the painted world as real as ever breaks.
