And reality was trapped in a piece of wood. It was the first half of the 15th century and Jan van Eyck left his contemporaries speechless with some panels in which Gothic simplicity had disappeared at a stroke: people seemed to come to life and objects were captured with minimalist detail. The painter was considered little less than a magician and, with the passage of time, this aura of mystery has only grown.
He belonged to a world and a way of thinking that faded away centuries ago. The symbols with which she playfully marked his paintings are almost indecipherable today. Little is known about his life, much less about the origin of his prodigious way of working, which he was going to revolutionize painting forever. All kinds of theories and heated debates revolve around Van Eyck. Each of his paintings is a collection of secrets.
It is not known where or when he was born. The most widespread hypothesis is that he was originally from Maaseik (near Liège, present-day Belgium) and that he was born around 1390. The first news of his existence dates back to 1422, when he was in the service of John of Bavaria, count of Hainaut. Holland. Two or three years later he had risen to the top: he was the court painter of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
This was then a very powerful territory (it encompassed what is now Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and a portion of northern France) and, without a doubt, the most refined court in Europe, the one that imposed fashions and attracted the best artists. Their sovereigns, the Valois, with their love of luxury, splendor and originality, turned Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, the great cities in which they had palaces, into unique escape settings for painters to free themselves from the strict canons of the Gothic art. The big break came with Jan van Eyck.
His culture and intelligence were marvelous. This is evidenced by some testimonies and the multiple scholarly references that he reflected in his works, in which he placed strange inscriptions in French and Latin (sometimes he also used Greek spelling). For Philip the Good he not only worked as a painter – curiously, no painting of his patron saint has survived – but he supervised the construction of castles and carried out diplomatic missions, as well as the occasional commission that the chroniclers described as “secret”.
He made official trips on behalf of the duke to Spain, England and perhaps also to Prague. Wherever he went, his memory prodigiously recorded a multitude of details of buildings and landscapes that he then mixed at his will into his paintings.
The mission about which we have the most information is the one that took him to Portugal between 1428 and 1429. He was part of the delegation that asked for the hand of Isabella of Portugal and painted a portrait of her “faithful to reality” so that, Returning to Burgundy, Philip could contemplate his future wife (a portrait unfortunately lost today).
The duke, who was full of praise for Van Eyck, did not, however, take up all of his time. He knew that the prosperity of his country was due to the incipient bourgeoisie of merchants and weavers and, therefore, he let Van Eyck attend to numerous commissions for portraits and devotional panels of that social class, which longed to acquire the same luxuries as the nobility.
Part of the mystery that emanates from a Van Eyck is found in a strange mixture, baptized as symbolic realism. He painted scenes with surprising verism whose meaning went beyond the simple representation of reality. The Arnolfini portrait, for example, is at the same time an evident catalog of luxuries (rich clothing, solid furniture, an exquisite candelabra...) and a cluster of symbols, most of them religious in nature.
The winks, however, are not evident: in the stylistic simplicity of the Gothic, without superfluous ornaments, the symbols were obvious; In Van Eyck's emphatically veristic environments, however, the symbology was masked. Are the clogs that appear in the Arnolfini room a coincidental motif or a biblical metaphor?
Van Eyck's technical virtuosity is a milestone in the history of art. The Italian writers of the Renaissance mistakenly attributed the invention of oil painting to him, but in reality this technique had already been known in northern Europe since the 12th century. It was the wizard of Bruges, however, who gave it a masterful use, a use that placed oil definitively above the egg tempera used at the time: brighter colors, nuances of light and shadow...
Van Eyck was not limited, furthermore, to a conventional use of the possibilities of oil painting, but used it to fill his works with illusionist tricks. Sometimes he painted frames around his paintings that perfectly imitated wood and filled them with inscriptions that simulated being engraved.
In the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb, for example, some figures are perfect imitations of stone statues, and many of the shadows seen on the panels are false: Van Eyck painted them in the same direction as the light entered the wall! church where the polyptych was to be placed!
Van Eyck's fame crossed Europe. Everyone with money and position wanted his face to be faithfully immortalized on a board. And that's just what Van Eyck offered: fidelity. He did not embellish or idealize, as would be customary among the Italian Renaissance: the mark he left forever on the Flemish school, of which he is one of the founders, was crude verismo. He painted the faces with the harshest objectivity, almost without mercy: he did not give in even when it came to portraying his wife Margareta, with whom, at least, he had one child.
He achieved wealth and a high social status, as demonstrated by his own coat of arms, and the volume of work that came to him was such that he established a workshop in which his original prayer books and saints were copied. However, of the extensive work that he must have created, only around twenty pieces reliably attributable to him have survived. Only half are signed, since the custom of the artist's name being immortalized in his work was just beginning to spread at the time.
He died in 1441. A little more than thirty years later the Burgundian court where he found his ideal space to create disappeared (the southern part of Burgundy passed to France and the northern part, the Netherlands, to the Habsburgs). Since then, the fascination with Van Eyck has grown exponentially; The more distant the world in which he lived became and the more his works have been studied, the more numerous the questions have become. Pages and pages researchers write about a man whose motto was a modest Als ich kan: “The [best] I can.”
This text is part of an article published in number 430 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
