Celebrating Western Civilization: Jan van Eyck
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b. before 1395, Maaseik, Bishopric of Ličge, Holy Roman Empire [now in
Belgium]
d. before July 9, 1441, Bruges
Flemish painter who perfected the newly developed technique of oil
painting. His naturalistic panel paintings, mostly portraits and
religious subjects, made extensive use of disguised religious symbols.
His masterpiece is the altarpiece in the cathedral at Ghent,
the "Adoration of the Lamb" (also called "Ghent Altarpiece," 1432 [see
photograph]). Hubert van Eyck is thought by some to have been Jan's
brother.
Jan van Eyck must have been born before 1395, for in October 1422 he is
recorded as the varlet de chambre et peintre ("honorary equerry and
painter") of John of Bavaria, count of Holland. He continued to work in
the palace of The Hague until the count's death in 1425 and then
settled briefly in Bruges before he was summoned, that summer, to Lille
to serve Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, the most powerful ruler and
foremost patron of the arts in Flanders. Jan remained in the duke's
employ until his death. On behalf of his sponsor he undertook a number
of secret missions during the next decade, of which the most notable
were two journeys to the Iberian Peninsula, the first in 1427 to try to
contract a marriage for Philip with Isabella of Spain and a more
successful trip in 1428-29 to seek the hand of Isabella of Portugal. As
a confidant of Philip, Jan may have participated directly in these
marriage negotiations, but he also was charged to present the duke with
a portrait of the intended.
In 1431 Jan purchased a house in Bruges and, about the same time,
married a woman named Margaret, about whom little more is known than
that she was born in 1406 and was to bear him at least two children.
Residing in Bruges, Jan continued to paint, and in 1436 he again made a
secret voyage for Philip. After his death in 1441 he was buried in the
Church of Saint-Donatian, in Bruges.
Securely attributed paintings survive only from the last decade of
Jan's career; therefore, his artistic origins and early development
must be deduced from his mature work. Traditionally, Jan has been
acclaimed the founder of Flemish painting, and scholars have sought his
artistic roots in the last great phase of medieval manuscript
illumination. It is clear that the naturalism and elegant composition
of Jan's later painting owe much to such early 15th-century
illuminators as the anonymous Boucicaut Master and Pol, Herman, and
Jehanequin de Limburg (the "Limburg Brothers"), who worked for the
Burgundian dukes. A document of 1439 reports that Jan van Eyck paid an
illuminator for preparing a book for the duke; but central to the
discussion of his ties to manuscript illustration has been the
attribution to Jan of several miniatures, identified as Hand G, in a
problematic prayer book known as the Turin-Milan Hours (Museo Civico,
Turin, Italy). So long as these "Eyckian" miniatures were dated in the
1420s or even earlier, Jan's authorship seemed indubitable; but recent
investigations strongly indicate that these miniatures were painted at
least 20 years later and, hence, that they are by an imitator. With the
elimination of the Turin-Milan Hours from Jan van Eyck's early oeuvre,
his connections with International Gothic style illumination appear to
have been less direct than had been thought.
Certainly as important for Jan's artistic formation were the panel
paintings of Robert Campin (c. 1378-1444), a Tournai painter whose
important role in the history of Flemish art has only recently been
reestablished. Jan must have met Campin at least once, when he was
feted by the Tournai painter's guild in 1427, and from Campin's art he
seems to have learned the bold realism, the method of disguised
symbolism, and perhaps the luminous oil technique that became so
characteristic of his own style. In contrast to Campin, who was a
Tournai burgher, Jan was a learned master at work in a busy court, and
he signed his paintings, the first Flemish artist to do so. The
majority of Jan's panels present the proud inscription "IOHANNES DE
EYCK," and several bear his aristocratic motto, "Als ich chan" ("As
best I can"). It is small wonder that Campin's reputation faded and his
influence on Jan was forgotten, and it is of little surprise that many
of Campin's achievements were credited to the younger master.
Despite Jan van Eyck's having signed 9 paintings and dated 10, the
establishment of his oeuvre and the reconstruction of its chronology
present problems. The major difficulty is that Jan's masterpiece,
the "Adoration of the Lamb" altarpiece, has a wholly questionable
inscription that introduces Hubert van Eyck as its principal master.
This has caused art historians to turn to less ambitious but more
secure works to plot Jan's development, including, most notably:
the "Portrait of a Young Man" ("Leal Souvenir") of 1432, "The Marriage
of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami (?)" of 1434, the "Madonna
with Canon van der Paele" of 1434-36, the triptych "Madonna and Child
with Saints" of 1437, and the panels of "St. Barbara" and the "Madonna
at the Fountain," dated, respectively, 1437 and 1439. Although they
fall within a brief span of seven years, these paintings present a
consistent development in which Jan moved from the heavy, sculptural
realism associated with Robert Campin to a more delicate, rather
precious, pictorial style.
On stylistic grounds there seems little difficulty in placing
the "Ghent Altarpiece" at the head of this development as indicated by
the date 1432 in the inscription, but the question of Hubert's
participation in this great work has yet to be resolved. The
inscription itself is definite about this point: "The painter Hubert
van Eyck, greater than whom no one was found, began [this work]; and
Jan, his brother, second in art [carried] through the task . . . " On
the basis of this claim, art historians have attempted to distinguish
Hubert's contribution to the "Ghent Altarpiece" and have even assigned
to him certain of the more archaic "Eyckian" paintings, including "The
Annunciation" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and "The
Three Marys at the Tomb" (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam). A
problem arises, however, because the inscription itself is a 16th-
century transcription, and earlier references make no mention of
Hubert. Albrecht Dürer, for instance, praised only Jan van Eyck during
his visit to Ghent in 1521; and as late as 1562 the Flemish historian
Marcus van Vaernewyck referred to Jan alone as the creator of the
altarpiece. Furthermore, a recent philological study casts serious
doubt on the dependability of the inscription. Thus, Hubert's
participation is highly suspect, and any knowledge of his art must
await new discoveries.
On the other hand, there is little doubt that Hubert did exist.
A "meester Hubrechte de scildere" (Master Hubert, the painter) is
mentioned three times in the City Archives of Ghent, and a
transcription of his epitaph reports that he died on Sept. 18, 1426.
Whether this Hubert van Eyck was related to Jan and why in the 16th
century he was credited with the major share of the "Ghent Altarpiece"
are questions that remain unanswered.
The confusion concerning his relationship to Hubert, the doubt about
his activities as an illuminator, and the reemergence of Robert Campin
as a preeminent master do not diminish the achievement and significance
of Jan van Eyck. He may not have invented painting with oils as early
writers asserted, but he perfected the technique to mirror the
textures, light, and spatial effects of nature. The realism of his
paintings--admired as early as 1449 by the Italian humanist Cyriacus
D'Ancona, who observed that the works seemed to have been produced "not
by the artifice of human hands but by all-bearing nature herself"--has
never been surpassed. For Jan, as for Campin, naturalism was not merely
a technical tour de force, however. For him, nature embodied God, and
so he filled his paintings with religious symbols disguised as everyday
objects. Even the light that so naturally illuminates Jan van Eyck's
landscapes and interiors is a metaphor of the Divine.
Because of the refinement of his technique and the abstruseness of his
symbolic programs, the successors of Jan van Eyck borrowed only
selectively from his art. Campin's foremost student, Rogier van der
Weyden, tempered his master's homey realism with Eyckian grace and
delicacy; in fact, at the end of his career, Campin himself succumbed
somewhat to Jan's courtly style. Even Petrus Christus, who may have
been apprenticed in Jan's atelier and who finished the "Virgin and
Child, with Saints and Donor" (Frick Collection, New York City) after
Jan's death, quickly abandoned the intricacies of Jan's style under the
influence of Rogier. During the last third of the century, the
Netherlandish painters Hugo van der Goes and Justus van Gent revived
the Eyckian heritage, but, when such early 16th-century Flemish masters
as Quentin Massys and Jan Mabuse turned to Jan's work, they produced
pious copies that had little impact on their original creations. In
Germany and France the influence of Jan van Eyck was overshadowed by
the more accessible styles of Campin and Rogier, and only in the
Iberian Peninsula--which Jan had visited twice--did his art dominate.
In Italy his greatness was recognized by Cyriacus and by the humanist
Bartolomeo Facio, who lists Jan--together with Rogier and the Italian
artists Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano--as one of the leading
painters of the period. But Renaissance artists, as painters elsewhere,
found him easier to admire than to imitate.
Interest in his painting and acknowledgment of his prodigious technical
accomplishment have remained high. Jan's works have been copied
frequently and have been avidly collected. He is referred to in the
Treaty of Versailles, which specifies the return of the "Ghent
Altarpiece" to Belgium before peace with Germany could be concluded
after the end of World War I.
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