Is Van Eyck the greatest?

Van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, Annunciation

The Van Eyck exhibition in Ghent is the biggest exhibition ever devoted to the painter. Any exhibition about an artist will attempt to make a case for that artist’s greatness, so I’m not surprised that several claims are made about Jan Van Eyck in this exhibition, including:

• He was responsible for an “Optical Revolution” in art
• He was highly learned in literature and theology
• He was up to date in geometry and optics
• He was one of the first artists to use oil paints (compared to tempera, widely used in Italy).
• His paintings are very highly detailed and “true to life”. 
• He was the first to use the three-quarters view for portraits

Now, while I think Van Eyck is a great artist, I don’t think the above criteria are the best way to judge his work. But in the exhibition, the captions and the audio guide pushed these points to the extent of repetitiveness, as if we visitors were a school party, and we weren’t allowed to leave without being told several times over what makes Van Eyck great. Either the insistence of the audio guide, or the claims they made, or both together, became rather annoying - annoying enough to consider their claims in more detail.

Optical Revolution

What exactly is the claimed “optical revolution”? I assumed this was an attempt to do something similar to Svetlana Alpers in her work on C17 Netherlandish art, linking developments in optics by Huygens and others to painting of the time.

In the exhibition guide (the full catalogue cost around €60 and I couldn’t afford that) the optical revolution is described as Van Eyck’s use of “the medium of oil paint, which allowed him to paint in refined details and to reproduce virtually tangible materials” [p11]. So, the “optical revolution” was the use of oil paint, and the result was Van Eyck’s startling attention to detail, because you can paint in more detail with oil than with tempera. Now, if being true to life was the criterion of greatness, then all art would have been eliminated by photography. If attention to detail were the criterion for a great artist, then every artist who painted portrait miniatures would be ranked alongside, even above, Michelangelo and Leonardo. But they are not.

The preface states “His knowledge of physics allowed him to be able to imitate optical light phenomena that are necessary to optimally evoke the spatial experience of his work … the way in which light moves through space”. Is this the optical revolution? “The meticulous observation of the world and the regard Van Eyck gave to it was not seen previously”. This doesn’t mean very much, apart from the paintings being at times full of detail.

Better than the Italians?

Masaccio, Madonna and Child, detail, c1426, Uffizi

In an attempt to demonstrate Van Eyck’s stature, the exhibition very sensibly includes other contemporary works that illustrate what was happening elsewhere, mainly in Italy. The Italian works are then shown to be inferior to Van Eyck, which is perhaps less sensible. To suggest, as the audio guide does, that Masaccio is inferior to Van Eyck is to confuse a fundamentally different artistic tradition. Masaccio was born into a classicizing culture in which objects from antiquity were still widely visible. Masaccio is in a direct line from Giotto; his figures have a solidity and classical quality utterly lacking in Van Eyck. If you compare Masaccio’s Madonna and Child of 1426 in the Uffizi, the infant Christ has a feeling of weight lacking in, say, Van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church (c1426). Incidentally, it would help if the audio guide pronounced Italian names such as “Masaccio” correctly.

 

Domenico Veneziano, Annunciation, c1442-48 (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge)

The exhibition contrasts Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation with Van Eyck’s view of space. The contrast is apt, but the conclusions they draw are wrong:

Perhaps there exists no more adequate manner to test the Eyckian idiom and the new art from Florence from around 1440 than to compare Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation with Van Eyck’s version of the theme from the Ghent Altarpiece … although not overly large in size, [Domenico Veneziano’s] painting has a certain monumentality. […] [p60]

Domenico, like many Italian painters, uses blank space as a positive attribute; there is no attempt to follow Van Eyck in filling every tiny portion of the canvas with detail. In this respect, Van Eyck is closer to International Gothic (with its mania for patterns and filling every possible space) than Domenico, Masaccio, and other classicizing Italian painters. Yet the curators seem to present this as a positive attribute:

In the altarpiece … [Domenico Veneziano] did his utmost best to paint a brocaded cope a la Van Eyck. Technically it is perfectly executed, but with respect to colour range, tempera cannot compete with oil paint … Van Eyck’s use of light and shadow is expressed in such a way that his figures are very physically present. [p60]

This strikes me as almost like a football supporter praising their local team in contrast to their international counterparts. Terms like "his utmost best", "cannot compete", are not the kind of objective terms I would expect in a comparison of painters in such a different tradition.

True to life

Van Eyck is great because he can imitate reality. “Formerly, the standard technique for giving objects a golden sheen was to use gold leaf. Van Eyck, on the contrary, can faultlessly imitate gold and – by extension – every material and every texture” [p15]. “Portraits were previously never so life-like than those from Van Eyck”. This isn’t the sort of language you expect from academics, who usually qualify any statement.

Van Eyck, Madonna in a Church (Berlin)

Van Eyck’s pictures are not true to life (as in like a photograph), nor to they set out to be. The figure of the Madonna in a church is way too big for the architectural detail behind her. Van Eyck, like many of his contemporaries, loved to show off his skill at drawing the fall and creases of clothes. However, this doesn’t mean the creases are true to life. The Virgin of Chancellor Rollin has exquisite folds in her dress, but they correspond to no real dress that could be photographed. Nor do the folds in Giovanni di Arnolfini's hat (below) resemble real folds.

Three-quarter view for portraits

Van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni di Arnolfini, c1438 (Berlin)

Undoubtedly Van Eyck is one of the great portraitists. It certainly looks to me as though Van Eyck pioneered the presentation of figures not in profile, but half turned towards the viewer. The effect is dramatic. This combined with Van Eyck’s gift for capturing facial expressions, makes many of his portraits among his finest works, for example, the portrait of Giovanni di Arnolfini (unfortunately not in the exhibition).

Don’t mention the missing pictures

Only around 30 paintings are by or attributed to Van Eyck in existence. This means the visitors to the Van Eyck show could reasonably be expected to see every work by the artist, Obviously, for a pre-1500 painter, many of these works will not travel to the exhibition. But instead of showing reproductions, this exhibition demonstrates a strange kind of amnesia towards the missing works – they are simply not mentioned. Does it make any sense not to mention major works such as the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait or the Madonna of Chancellor Rollin? They aren’t even mentioned in the exhibition guide.

A suggestion

Ghent is one of the most vibrant and exciting cities I have visited in the last few years. From the first room of this exhibition, it was clear that the Ghent where Van Eyck painted the famous Altarpiece was one of the most highly populated and successful merchant cities of Europe. Van Eyck was the painter of this mercantile success story. Could not more be made of this remarkable story? Could we not link Van Eyck more to his contemporary environment, and then fast forward to the present day? Today, Ghent is re-establishing its former success and, with such initiatives as extensive climate control of emissions in the city centre, again pioneering, just as Van Eyck was pioneering in the 15th century.