Hubert and Jan van Eyck
Brothers, Flemish illuminators and painters, founders of the
school of Bruges and consequently of all the schools of painting
in the North of Europe. Hubert was born at Maeseyck (i.e. Eyck on
the Meuse) in the Diocese of Li�ge, about 1366, and his brother
Jan about twenty years later, 1385. They had a sister named
Margaret who won fame as a miniaturist.
A document of 1413 makes the earliest mention we have of a
painting by "Master Hubert". In 1424 he was living at Ghent, and
he died there on the 18th of September, 1426. We have no further
definite knowledge concerning the elder of the brothers. Of the
younger we know that in 1420 he presented a Madonna's head to the
Guild of Antwerp, that in 1422 he decorated a paschal candle for
the cathedral of Cambrai, and that in 1425 he was at The Hague in
the service of Jean Sans Merci. Afterwards he went to Bruges and
to Lille to the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, as
peintre et varlet de chambre. He was already a man of some
influence at court, and he travelled in the embassy charged to ask
the hand of Isabella of Portugal for Philip, and it was his
privilege to paint her portrait "true to life", thereby fixing
Philip's choice. This journey lasted from the 18th of October,
1428, to the end of December, 1429. In 1431 he went to Hesdin to
superintend, for the Duke, the work going on at the castle there:
and afterwards he returned to Bruges, which he seldom left again.
He married, and a child of his was baptized in 1434. In 1436 we
learn once more that he received 720 livres on account of "certain
secret matter", doubtless in connection with some new mission or
journey. He died towards the end of June, 1441.
The most important work of the brothers Van Eyck, and the one that
places their names among the great masters of painting for ever,
is the famous altarpiece, "The Adoration of the Lamb", of which
the central Portion is preserved in St-Bavons at Ghent, while the
wings have found their way to the Museums of Berlin and of
Brussels. It is one of the enigmas of art. All the questions
bearing on it may, however, be reduced to two: Who was its author?
and, What was its origin? As to its authorship, all we know
depends on an inscription obscure enough, which is to be read on
the edge of its frame:
Pictor Hubertus e Eyck major quo nemo repertus
Incepit pondus: quod Johannes arte secundus
Suscepit letus, Judoci Vyd prece fretus Vers-V seXta Ma-I: Vos
CoLLoCat a-Cta tVerI.
The faulty Latin of this cryptic inscription means: "Hubert van
Eyck, the greatest painter that ever lived, began this work
[pondus], which John, his brother, second only to him in skill,
had the happiness to continue at the request of Jodocus (Josse)
Vydt. By this line, on the 6th of May, you learn when the work was
completed, i.e., MCCCCXXXII." That it is their joint work is
certain, but it is impossible to distinguish which portion belongs
to each brother. Very soon Jan began to get all the credit for it.
D�rer mentions only Jan in his "Journal" of 1521. But the
inscription clearly states that Hubert began the work and asserts
that he was the greater artist, his brother being called in only
at his death, and in order to complete it. But how far had Hubert
progressed with it? How far back had he been commissioned to paint
it? In 1426 were portions of it finished, or was it merely a
sketch, a general outline when Jan took charge? Who suggested the
subject? Who planned its treatment? Can we believe that a painter
of any school living in a fifteenth century atmosphere could have
elaborated by himself from a few texts of the Apocalypse (v, 6-14)
such a wealth of detail, such symphony of symbolism and imagery?
Who was the theologian who inspired this mighty poem as others had
inspired the learned allegories of the Chapel of the Spaniards,
and of the Hall of the Segnatura? And again, in the history of
painting from the miniatures of the Irish Apocalypses (eleventh
century) to the Angers tapestries, what were the artistic sources
of this great work?
This moral encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, if we may call it
such, treats of all things in heaven and on earth (there was a
predella to it depicting hell, but it disappeared in the sixteenth
century); it portrays God and man in all their historical and
mystical relations; it tells us of the heavenly and the earthly
paradise, of the ages that have followed one another in the flight
of time, of the Dogma of the Fall, and that of the Redemption, of
Adam and Eve, and of the first sacrifices; of the death of Abel
(type of Christ); of the years of expectation of the patriarchs
and just men of the Old Law; of the mystery of the Incarnation; of
the Trinity; of the world subject to the law of Christ; of the
life of the Church in her saints, her hermits, her virgins, her
martyrs, her pontiffs, her confessors, her warrior princes; of all
Christendom in a landscape filled with cathedral spires (Rome,
Jerusalem, Utrecht, etc.). And can we in reason be asked to
believe that this wonderful pictorial epic reaching out from the
beginning to the consummation of the world and ending in a glimpse
of the eternal life to come as full in conception and as orderly
in arrangement as the "Divina Commedia" itself; summing up the Old
as well as the New Testament, drawing its inspiration from St.
Augustine's "Civitas Dei", and "Vincent of Beauvais' "Speculum
Majus", as well as Jacobus de Voragine's "Legenda Aurea", and
Dante's "De Monarchia"; a compendium of politics, history and
theology, and which crowns the representation man's life on earth
by a glimpse of the Infinite, can we in reason be asked to believe
that this lofty expression of the ideals of Christendom in the
Europe of the Middle Ages sprang Minerva-like, fully formed from
the brain of a single artist?
No one can adopt this supposition except for the purpose of
ascribing all the honour of having conceived this painting to the
elder of the brothers. As an assumption, however, it is altogether
gratuitous. There is not one of the scenes that can be attributed
to Hubert with any degree of certainty; and no work the brothers
Van Eyck have left us (with the exception of the "Fount of
Salvation" in the Prado Museum, Madrid, and this is the work of a
school) shows a similar dogmatic and theological character, a like
power of design and richness of thought that this "Lamb does.
Taken as a whole the work of the Van Eycks has a totally different
tendency. It is frankly naturalistic in face, as well as in
intention. So that when Hubert is labelled a thinker, it is for no
other reason than the wish to differentiate him, and to separate
him from Jan. How futile this distinction is, is made clear if we
look into the results obtained by applying it as a criterion to
the work of the two brothers. On not a single disputed painting
has agreement been reached; and every painting that has been
attributed to Hubert by one connoisseur, has been adjudged by
others for equally good reasons to Jan.
The catalogue of their work has been reconstructed more than
twenty times. The altar-piece of the Lamb" has been divided in a
hundred different ways, and each in turn has been given to first
one brother and then to the other over and over again. Each year
sees a new theory proposed. After Waagen came James Weale; after
Hymans, Dvorak, and after Stoerck, Wurzbach; and we are as far
from the solution as ever. The masterpiece keeps its secret, and
will probably never give it up. In any case, seeing that the whole
painting was retouched at least twice during the sixteenth
century, all evidence of individual technic must have been buried
beneath these restorations; and in all likelihood the little
points and peculiarities attributed to Hubert or to Jan, are
really the work of Michael Coxie. But there is a larger and a
wider question at issue than such idle wranglings that can never
be settled, the question as to the effect and the nature of the
artistic revolution to which the brothers Van Eyck have given
their name.
What constitutes the altar-piece of the "Lamb" a unique moment in
the history of art and gives it its supreme interest in our eyes,
is the fact that it unites in itself the styles and the genius of
two opposing epochs. Whereas its general plan belongs to the
Middle Ages, its execution, its manner of seeing things and
putting them on canvas, are truly modern. The masterpiece has a
double nature, so to speak. The genius of the Renaissance for what
was concrete and realistic is wedded to the majesty of the Gothic
and its love of the abstract. It shows us the wondrous blending of
two principles that would seem necessarily to exclude each other,
like the past and the future, and that we never meet with again
save in opposition. It is this that constitutes the supreme
interest of the work, that it contains the noblest expression of
the old mystical genius together with the most powerful example of
modem naturalism. In the sincerity, breadth, and naturalism, no
one at any time nor of any school has excelled the Van Eycks.
Nature, which, prior to their day, men had looked at as through a
veil of formulae and symbols, they seem suddenly to have unveiled.
They invented, so to speak, the world of realities. The happenings
of all sorts in the world of nature, the sylva rerum, with which
they have endowed the art of painting, are always true to life.
Landscapes, atmospheres, types, physiognomies, a wealth of studies
and sketches of all sorts, rich materials, cloths, cimars (robes),
copes, brilliancy of precious stones and works of the goldsmith's
art; all are copied to perfection, and the deftness of the work is
beyond compare. The masterpiece inaugurates a new era in painting.
If the object of the painter's art is to depict the visible world,
if his aim ought to be not so much the expression of a thought as
to hold up the mirror to life, then for the first time in its
history painting entered into its birthright in this altar-piece,
and gave proof of its legitimacy in this first attempt. Life under
all its sensible forms and aspects sweeps through this mighty
scene like a motif, life with all its myriad changes and variety
of moods, brushing aside the dry as dust ideograms and crumbling
hieroglyphics of the Middle Ages.
The absolute is abandoned, and the relative brought into fashion.
The eye is turned away from the vision of the ideal, but the feet
are more firmly planted on the real. The word nature undergoes a
change of meaning. Once it had been a vague Platonic idea, a
something like the nominals and universals of the schools, which
are understood by the intelligence rather than perceived by the
senses. In that lofty plane of thought in which art in the
thirteenth century loved to move, the universe existed really in
the intellect. Henceforth, however, nature changed her aspect for
the painter; he refrains from expressing any opinions as to the
essence of things, but delights in all their accidental qualities.
The actual, the fact, whether it be positive, complex, capricious,
or odd, becomes of more importance than the abstract and immutable
law. The absolute cause of all things is neglected in favour of
the rich and glowing vegetation of nature; principles have less
value than their consequences, less importance is given to types
than individuals. The vast harvest of phenomena from the ever
teeming field of reality and experience is henceforth open to art.
A painting becomes what the painter has actually seen; what he has
found in nature; the story of his feelings in the midst of things.
In this a new kind of idealism replaces the old. And art, thus
freed from the academism of the Gothic tradition, was not to
slavishly copy nature, but to serve as a vehicle for the
expression of the painter's personality, and to act as the safest
confidante of his emotional experiences.
The altar-piece at Ghent marks the triumph of this basic artistic
revolution from which all modern art has sprung. Never was a
richer shrine of nature and of life got together by a painter. In
two hundred figures of every size, sex, race, and costume we
behold a resume of the human race. We see before us all the beauty
of the physical world, the woods, the fields, the rocks, the
desert places, a geography of earth with its climates and its
flora, palms, cacti, and aloes (which foolishly has led some to
believe that Hubert must have traveled in the East). And the world
of art is not forgotten; styles of architecture, towers, cupolas,
statues, bas-reliefs, are all brought in. In a word, life out-of-
doors and within doors, with all its social activities and moral
colouring, is portrayed. There are interiors, such as the room of
the Blessed Virgin, a young Flemish maiden, with its prie-Dieu,
its nicely tiled floor, its washstand and basin, and its open
window looking out on to the pointed roofs of a row of brick
houses. There are portraits of a marvellous realism, such as those
of the donor and his wife; epic figures, such as God the Father
under the guise of Charlemagne crowned with a triple tiara, type
of the pontiff-king; and there are figures full of charm and
poetry, such as the singing angels (Berlin museum), symbolizing
the harmonies of paradise, under the form of entrancing
minstrelsy, or of the chanting of choir boys. Other figures are
fearful in their naturalism, such as the figures of our first
parents (Brussels museum) which would suffice alone to immortalize
their creator, because of their audacious nudity, their stiff and
awkward manner, and their eloquent ugliness.
Such a transformation, of course, exceeds the powers of any one
man, or even of two brothers. And like all great works, the altar-
piece of Ghent is but the result of the labours of more than one
generation. It was not a local movement; its influences were at
work up and down throughout Christendom.
In Italy the work of Jacopo della Quercia, of Ghiberti, the
frescoes of Masolino and of Masaccio (1428) are contemporary with
the labours of the Van Eycks: and bear traces of similar
tendencies. But the birthplace of the movement was not on Italian
soil. It is in France we find the earliest evidence of it, about
the of the fourteenth century. A few statues, like the Visitation
group in the great doorway at Reims (1310), the tombs of St.
Denis, the portraits of King Charles V and his wife Eleanor (in
the Louvre), mark the last stages in the victorious progress. The
same school which a century earlier had developed the Gothic
ideal, was about to produce by a natural evolution the new
principles and the new methods. An important factor in this
evolution was the creation of the Duchies of Berry and of
Burgundy, and the alliance of Flanders and Burgundy by marriage
(1384). At the Court of the Valois, the most brilliant in the
world, famous for its voluptuousness, its elegance, and its
worship of all the arts of life, and under the patronage of its
princes, no less famous for their dissolute lives than for their
artistic taste and love of luxury, there rapidly grew up a school
of painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and miniaturists,
cosmopolitans by birth, but Parisian by education, who were the
nucleus of the Renaissance.
The larger part of the paintings, frescoes, and stained glass of
this epoch have perished; but the miniatures supply all the proof
we need. Especially in the manuscripts made at the time for the
Duc de Berry do we find the links of this glorious history. Many
of the books collected by this incomparable Maecenas have come
down to us; some of them illustrated by Andre Beauneveu,
Jacquemart of Hesdin, or Jacques Cohn of Antwerp. But the most
important of all is the seignorial manuscript -- one of the
treasures of Chantilly -- known as the "Book of Hours of the Duc
de Berry . This wonderful book was adorned from 1413 to 1416 by
three artists; "the three illuminator-brothers" spoken of by
Guillebert of Metz, the brothers de Limbourg or simply the
Limbourgs. Nearly all the poetic fancy of the Van Eycks is already
outlined in this Book of Hours , especially on their landscape
side; And whereas the Limbourgs kept to the country around Li�ge,
the Van Eycks followed the same route, and doubtless experienced
the same influences. But there is something more. Another
manuscript, "The Hours of Turin , which was unfortunately
destroyed in the fire at the library of that town, 20 January,
1904, belonged successively to the Duc de Berry (d. 1416) and to
Duke William IV of Bavaria-Hainault. And it has been proved that
Hubert van Eyck spent some time in the latter's service. Paul
Durrieu has given very weighty reasons for attributing the
manuscript to him, and for believing that he began it for the Duc
de Berry. Thus the art of the Van Eycks would be but the
culminating point of the great Renaissance movement inaugurated at
the Court of the Valois in France, and which reached its apogee in
1400. Perhaps this was what the Italian Bishop Facius meant to
imply when in 1456 he spoke of Jan van Eyck as Johannes Gallicus.
This is a partial solution of the enigma of the altarpiece. Hubert
and Jan van Eyck are but continuators, masters indeed, of an art
that began before them and without them. But what was it they
added that caused the new style in art to date only from their
work? If we are to credit Vasari, Van Mander, and all the
historical writers, their great discovery was the art of painting
with oils. Painting with oil had been discovered long before; the
monk Theophilus gives a recipe for it in the eleventh century. And
as we have seen, the new aestheticism had been already formulated
in the miniatures of the Limbourgs and of the Van Eycks
themselves. Whatever importance in art its material and mechanical
methods may have, it would be too humiliating to make it depend
entirely on the particular fluid, water, gum, or albumen used in
mixing the colours. Moreover, on canvases 500 years old from which
all moisture has long since dried up he would be a daring critic
who would venture to assert the proportion of oil or distemper
used by the artist. To build one's criticism on such a doubtful
principle is like seeking the scent of the "Roses of Sadi." The
real merit of the Van Eycks is elsewhere. By a chain of
circumstances (The Battle of Agincourt, the madness of Charles VI,
and the minority of Charles VII), France was brought to the edge
of ruin, and suddenly lost control of the movement that it had
begun.
Comfort, art, luxury began to cluster around the new fortunes of
the Duchy of Burgundy, as the home of wealth in the North. Ghent,
Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp became the centres of the new school. In
these new towns of little culture and traditional refinement, and
lacking in reserve (Taine, "Philosophie de l'Art aux Pays-Bas" -
description of the festivals known as the Voeu du faisan),
Naturalism, freed from the restraints French taste would have
imposed on it, was enabled to grow at its ease and spread without
restriction. The Germanic element which had already shown itself
in such men as Beauneveu, Malouel, the Limbourgs, burst out, and
carried everything before it in the work of the Van Eycks. For the
first time the genius of the North shook off all those
cosmopolitan influences which had hitherto refined it, and gave
itself free scope.
It paused not to think of what had gone before, and it was not
concerned with such things as taste, nobility, or beauty. Such
preoccupations as these, as the antique began to have an
influence, became more and more the distinguishing characteristics
and limitation of Italian naturalism. It is enough to compare the
ugly yet touching figures of Adam and Eve by Jan van Eyck with
those by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel to be convinced of this.
On the one side there is realism, but the painter has scruples,
reserves, a sense of modesty: on the other there is absolute
crudity, what we might call naturalism pure and simple. What does
this mean, but that painting, which had hitherto been a universal,
international art, is beginning to localize itself; and that what
had hitherto been a European, or better still, Western, colour-
language is about to split up into many dialects and national
modes of speech? It is the real glory of the Van Eycks, that they
emancipated the genius of the races of the North and gave it its
first full expression. During a whole century (1430- 1530) the
school they founded at Bruges was always producing new works and
renewing its own strength. During a century, painters from Holland
and Germany - Petrus Cristus, Gerard de St-Jean, Ouwater, Hugo van
der Goes, Roger van der Weyden, Memlinck, Gerard David, Martin
Sch�ngauer, Lucas of Leyden -- never ceased their more or less
directly from their work. In 1445 the Catalonian Luis Dalmau made
a copy of the altar-piece of Ghent. In France, Jean Fouquet,
Nicolas Froment, on the banks of the Loire and of the Rhone, were
disciples of Jan van Eyck. Even Italy did not escape their
sovereign influence. As early as the middle of the fifteenth
century paintings by Jan van Eyck were being treasured at Naples
and at Urbino.
Antonello of Messina went to study art in Flanders. Ghirlandajo
imitated the famous Portinari altarpiece by H. van der Goes, and
whenever an Italian painter relaxed a moment his straining after
art to snatch a breath of gayety or a lesson in realism, it was
always to the Flemish school he turned; always, until the triumph
of the antique was assured, and Raphael and Michelangelo, by the
constraining revelation of its beauty, restored for a time the
reign of the ideal. Their triumph was, however, short-lived; the
pagan and aristocratic ideal of art and life, with all its
loftiness and rigidity, begin to give way from the beginning of
the seventeenth century, with its new schools at Antwerp and
Amsterdam, before the naturalism of the North, before the more
homely, hearty, and winning genius of the Van Eycks. It is
therefore impossible to exaggerate the importance of their work,
which, besides occupying a unique position throughout the
fifteenth century, led the way in the evolution which two
centuries later produced such painters as Rubens and Rembrandt.
The following is a list of the signed and dated works of Jan van
Eyck:
� The "Consecration of St. Thomas Becket" (1421-- Chatsworth);
� "The Madonna" (1432 -- Ince Hall); portraits of two men (1432-
1433 -- National Gallery);
� "Arnolfini and his Wife" (1434 -- National Gallery);
� "Portrait of Jan de Leewe" (1436 -- Vienna);
� "The Virgin", with kneeling figure of Canon van der Paele (1436
-- Bruges);
� "St. Barbara" (1437 - Antwerp);
� "Head of Christ" (1438 -- Berlin);
� "The Artist's Wife" (1439 -- Bruges);
� "The Virgin" (1439 -- Antwerp).
The principal works without date or signature that can be
certainly attributed to the brothers Van Eyck are
� "Portrait of an Old Man" (Vienna);
� "The Man with the Pinks" (Berlin);
� "The Madonna of Lucca" (Frankfort);
� "The Madonna" executed for Chancellor Rolin (Louvre);
� "The Virgin" (Burleigh House, Exeter);
� "The Virgin" (Paris, Rothschild); triptych, not completed (Van
Hellenpute collection, Mechlin).
LOUIS GILLET
Transcribed by Michael C. Tinkler
<Picture: New Advent Catholic Supersite>
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.
Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).
This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.
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