(Roughly) Daily

A reminder that your correspondent is traveling– to wit, more occasional posts. Regular service should resume on or about September 20…

Jan van Eyck (/væn ˈaɪk/ van EYEK; Dutch: [ˈjɑɱ vɑn ˈɛik]; c. before 1390 – 9 July 1441) was a Flemish painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting…

Source

Gregory T. Clark with an appreciation of van Eyck and of the recent Louvre exhibition of his work…

Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure. I wanted my students to share in my wonderment at Jan’s seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it, right down to the most infinitesimal details, without compromising the integrity of the whole, his powers of observation complemented by an uncanny ability to capture light, texture, and atmosphere.

The earliest surviving works of Jan—who is thought to have been born around 1390 in Maaseyck, modern-day Belgium—date to the first lustrum of the 1420s. In 1425, he was appointed court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose empire then comprised almost the entirety of the Low Countries and a large wedge of northeastern France together with his home duchy of Burgundy and the contiguous Franche-Comté (Free County) to the east. Moving to Bruges in 1430, Jan produced paintings for the Burgundian court, nobility, and haute bourgeoisie right up until his death there in 1441…

… A like visual mastery characterizes the much larger Rolin Madonna itself. Measuring some twenty-six by twenty-five inches, the work shows the kneeling chancellor in prayer immediately before the enthroned Virgin and Child in a loggia that gives onto a sprawling landscape divided by a meandering river.

On Nicolas’s sinister side is a small town and beyond it a hillside with vineyards; the Rolin family drew much of its wealth from viticulture. On the holy figures’ dexter side rises a city composed almost entirely of churches, the two agglomerations linked by a single bridge across the river. Perhaps Jan is subtly warning the chancellor and all of us not to succumb to the blandishments of this mortal world, but rather to hew to the Christian faith and thereby cross the figurative River Jordan to the eternal City of God on the river’s other side.

The removal of centuries of grime and darkened varnish means that we can truly see Jan’s handiwork as he would have wished it. But what to marvel at first: Nicolas’ fur-edged brocade woven of chocolate-brown wool and silk and threads of gold? The gemstones that stud the hem of the Madonna’s red robe, the gold crown held by an angel over her head, and the cross of gold that surmounts the crystal orb in the baby Jesus’s left hand? The sprawling landscape beyond the three arches behind the chancellor and holy figures? Everywhere one looks there are details that astonish and enchant the eye but never compromise the unity of Jan’s vision.

Reproductions can only do partial justice to the paintings of Jan van Eyck; they beg to be seen face to face, and the Louvre exhibition offers the opportunity to see five of them together with fifty-nine objects that complement and widen our understanding of both his extraordinary art and his milieu…

An early master: “I like Eyck,” from @newcriterion.

* van Eyck’s motto, inscribed on the frame of the painting atop this post

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As we look closely, we might spare a thought for Andrea Mantegna; he died on this date in 1506. An artist and printmaker, he was a key figure in Italian Renaissance painting (and the son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini).